“OK” is French for “okay.”

It’s been a busy couple of months for the straight-talking, hard-nosed, pint-sized French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. He hasn’t missed a beat (much to many a Frenchman’s dismay) in laying out some of his new policies. Lately he’s been taking a little criticism from the media for some slightly off-color remarks in a speech given in late July in Senegal:

“The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history … They have never really launched themselves into the future.”

Yikes, Sarko, yikes. Maybe you could have recovered if you had just stopped, but you didn’t:

“The African peasant only knew the eternal renewal of time, marked by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words,” he said. “In this realm of fancy … there is neither room for human endeavor nor the idea of progress.”

Sarkozy’s also trying to beef up the waning French economy. A report commissioned by the president stated that they will, in fact, finally begin trying to participate in a globalized economy. There’s talk of strengthening ties with Germany and more strict EU observation on trade deals and blah blah blah – all I know is that, if you’re ever hungry in France, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything other than a cold cheese sandwich or a dinky Nutella crepe under 8 euros, which is just ridiculous.

But it looks like the most ambitious, idealistic bit of Sarkozy’s vision will be a long time in coming. We wish you luck, cher monsieur.

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Sources:
Africans still seething over Sarkozy speech Reuters
France maps path through globalisation MSNBC
French looking to shake ‘arrogant’ tag Washington Times