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‘It was amazing! Just wild!’
‘But let me tell you, I am sore all over.’
‘Oh I know, this morning was so hard.’
‘You should have seen me when I finally got home last night… I was absolutely disgusting.’
‘Me too, I took one look at my hair and was shocked.’
No, this isn’t dialogue taken from Math 101 the night after the big party on campus, this is quotes from my colleagues on Monday morning after they covered the two big campaign rallies of the day before.
Some had spent the day at the château de Vincennes with François Hollande and more than 100,000 other Socialists. Other journalists had been at the place de la Concorde with Nicolas Sarkozy and 100,000 UMP fans. One tired but elated journalist had run back and forth between the two.
Coffee in hand, they were excitedly swapping stories.
‘I felt like a war reporter.’
‘Yeah, there was no cell phone service so I just had to dive into a crowd of 100,000 to try and find my interviewee.’
‘I know! I lost the cameraman, so I had to film with my iPhone, you know, covering the microphone with my hand so we wouldn’t get the sound of the wind.’
‘Would you believe it? I lost my camera man and then ran into him at the press check-in. Amazing.’
‘I got a prime view of Sarko when this awesome security guy let me in.’
‘Oh, I think I met him, too. You know, at a UMP rally… anything for the Figaro.’
‘People saw my badge and came running to talk to me!’
‘And at a Socialist rally, you hide it… you say, like, oh, I work for… a paper.’
Laughs all around before the journalists went off to work on their individual articles.
And this was how election week started in our newsroom. We are now three days from the first round of the presidential and people aren’t really talking about anything else (besides occasional news flashes on Syria, the Breivik trial and Cannes.)
This week, all of the French candidates—from trendy, lefty Jean-Luc Mélenchon to Green Party Eva Joly to far-right Marine Le Pen to goofy Philippe Poutou— have been holding their biggest campaign meetings. Newspapers have been putting their war machines in action printing enormous inserts and full-page spreads on the candidate’s varying programs.
The polls are predicting that Hollande will sail into the French presidency in the second round. Thus, the UMP and Nicolas Sarkozy are also in warrior mode, desperately trying to seduce Marine Le Pen’s far-right sympathizers on one end of the political pole and François Bayrou’s centrists on the other.
According to the newsroom chatter of Le Fig’s ‘war reporters,’ the Hollande rally on Sunday reflected his ups in the polls. There was a lot more wind, a lot more dust and, from the looks of it, a lot more support.