Every country does things differently. In February 2011 I was working near Dublin during a parliamentary election. I was amazed at the posters; they were everywhere. Each roundabout must have had 50 or 60; lampposts were covered from ground all the way up; bus stops were submerged in a sea of propaganda. France does things differently. Posters only go up in the week before the election, and they are posted on boards provided by the town hall, one per party. Most parties conform to these rules, except the revolutionary left, who seem to have a preference for posting on electrical sub-stations. These posters are for "La France Insoumise" (France Unbowed), a far left vehicle for the ego of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a lefty blowhard who got 6% in the last presidential election. Perhaps it is a revolutionary act not to obey the election laws. Or maybe Karl Marx included a chapter in "Das Kapital" on where to stick your posters. I could probably give M.Mélenchon some advice on that myself.
I've got a little story about the 2011 Irish election. The project I was working on had quite a few engineers working away from home. We usually ate together on Thursday night in a pub called the Merrion Inn in Ballsbridge, before returning home for the weekend. Irish elections are held on a Friday. That night, the eve of the election, there were four of us eating, one from the North, two from the Republic and me. Suddenly my friend Joe from Cork said, "Hey, there's Enda". And it was, Enda Kenny, the leader of the opposition party Fine Gael. Now, in 2011 the current government was bound to be defeated. They had presided over a speculative boom called the "Celtic Tiger" that had gone spectacularly bust in 2008, leaving the country in recession and many people with financial losses and debts. It was stone cold certain that the following evening Enda Kenny would be Prime Minister of Ireland. Yet he had walked into what was presumably his local pub, with one friend, received a few " how are you's" and sat down to eat. No glad-handing, no security, no minders. Can you imagine Macron or Blair or Obama doing that ?
