French elections—Olivier Besancenot: “I was never a Trotskyist”

Besancenot speaks at a rapid pace, with rushed staccato and without a script. He adopts a chummy tone, sprinkles his remarks with all sorts of trivialities and rhetorical questions, and underlines his message with exaggerated gestures of his hands and body—non-stop agitation for over an hour without drawing breath or allowing any time to reflect.

And reflection is precisely what he tries to prevent. Besancenot has not come to think and analyse, he has come to agitate. His purpose is not to inform and educate, but rather to encourage certain sentiments. He has nothing to say about the bitter experiences of the French working class in recent years, and is silent on international developments and experiences. For Besancenot there is no world outside of France—if one excludes the fleeting references and praise for a handful of politicians such as Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, who are currently en vogue in radical circles.

Another taboo theme is the politics of his own organization. Besancenot has adopted the principle of the conservative German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who once said: “I do not give a hoot about what I said yesterday!”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/besa-m17.shtml