Two entirely unrelated events have caught my attention this week outside of unfolding dramas in the Middle East. The first was the farce, also known as the election, of the President of France's largest political party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire or UMP, the party that brought Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy to power. It was in fact to find a replacement for Sarkozy that this election was held. There were two contenders: François Fillon, Sarkozy's prime minister, and Jean-François Copé, a hardliner famous – among other things - for claiming that Muslim thugs swipe pains au chocolat from nice Christian boys and girls during Ramadan. The “pain au chocolate” story caused much controversy in the press and elsewhere and I only retell it here to give an indication of quite how far on the right Mr. Copé's views place him, it is but a step away from Marine Le Pen and the National Front. Incidentally, Copé was also the man who proposed the law banning face veils in France. And so this election could be seen as a litmus test not of French voters as a whole but of members of the UMP party for they are after all the ones with the power to vote. The good news is that they went out in force and voted. The bad news is that Copé won, or at least he thought he did. The vote took place on Sunday. Both Fillon and Copé initially claimed victory, and then on Monday, after counts and recounts, accusations of vote-rigging and counter-accusations, Copé was officially declared the winner, with a margin of only 98 votes, out of a total of 176,608 counted. But lo and behold, the following day it was found that votes from two French overseas territories had not been included, and without this omission, Fillon would have won. And so the farce continued, with Copé saying it was too late and he had won fair and square, and Fillon saying rather bizarrely that he no longer wished to be president of the party but that he would contest the results to the bitter end, in the courts if need be. By Thursday it looked like stalemate, and then Alain Juppé, one of the founders of the party, came in as a caretaker and adjudicator. We still don't know how it will all end, but rather fittingly, perhaps, I noticed that November 19, the day the UMP fiasco started to unravel, was also World Toilet Day. No, it's not a joke, quite the opposite. World Toilet Day is now in its 12th year and is there to remind us that this most basic of human needs: a clean, safe, private place to attend to our bodily needs, is a luxury, as 2.5 billion people in the world do not have access to a toilet. Not only is that an attack on human dignity, particularly for women, but it also puts lives at risks and causes millions of deaths. Some 2.2 million people die every year of diarrhea, most of them young children. In fact, www.worldtoilet.org tells us rather poignantly that every 20 seconds a child dies of a diarrhea-related disease. Some progress has been made. In the last 20 years, the percentage of people without access to the most basic toilet has gone down from 51 percent to 37 percent of the world's population, but that is still very high. However, large regional discrepancies exist. The Indian Subcontinent in particular lags behind: 626 million people there are said to live without access to basic clean sanitation; it is a serious problem. What is interesting too is that rather than just focus on providing sanitation, there has been a switch toward coming up with innovative solutions that are not only cost-effective but also use human waste to produce energy or fertilizer. As worldtoiletday.org point out, $1 invested in sanitation generates a return of $5; that's quite a rate of return! And yet investment in sanitation remains too low to achieve the progress needed to reach the UN's Millennium development goals. Monday November 19 was World Toilet Day. Perhaps like me, it passed you by. Instead I found myself reading of the intrigues in the UMP, with people who might one day lead one of the world's greatest countries – yes, I am a Francophile – behaving in an undignified tit for tat. Moreover, if a country with such a rich democratic history as France, cannot hold a simple election to choose between two candidates to lead a political party, or rather if even in a country such as France, a simple election can degenerate into farce because basic safeguards were not in place to ensure a fair and transparent election result, what hope for aspiring democracies with a penchant for chaos and clientelism? — Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
