34 Europe
2 Civic Platform (po), which ran the country
from 2007 to 2015. Shortly before the elec-
tions, pis released a video accusing po of
wanting to take in refugees and urging
Poles to choose “safe local government”. In
fictional news clips, it imagined Poland in
2020 with “enclaves of Muslim refugees”.
“Sexual assault and acts of aggression have
become part of residents’ everyday life,”
said the voice-over. The video was much
condemned, but it had an effect.
At 54%, the turnout was the highest for
local elections in Poland since commu-
nism collapsed in 1989. According to exit
polls, pis came first with 32% of the coun-
trywide vote, more than five points higher
than it scored in the previous local elec-
tions in 2014, and well ahead of the po-led
coalition’s 25%. It will have a majority in at
least six of the country’s 16 regional assem-
blies, up from just one before. Yet it has
failed to win over voters in big cities. As
well as in Warsaw, po mayors won outright
France
The fear of accents
France discovers a new word—glottophobie
I t took an outburst that went viral to
introduce the French to a new word:
glottophobie. Derived from the Greek
words for tongue and fear, it refers to
discrimination against those who speak
the language of Molière and Proust with
non-standard pronunciation. Regional
accents are hardly unique to France. But a
history of imposing homogeneity means
that, even today, those whose French
does not sound Parisian face derision.
The episode emerged last week when
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left firebrand,
mocked a reporter with an accent from
south-west France. “What does that
mean?” he snapped, imitating the jour-
nalist’s Occitan twang; “Has anyone got a
question phrased in French, and which is
more or less comprehensible?” His put-
down was as bizarre as it was offensive.
The Paris-based Mr Mélenchon is a mem-
ber of parliament for Marseille, a city
known for its Provençal lilt.
After the filmed exchange went viral,
Mr Mélenchon back-pedalled. “I thought
she was mocking me,” he pleaded, dis-
missing the fuss as “ridiculous”. Glot-
tophobia, though, says Philippe Blan-
chet, a linguist at the University of
Rennes who coined the term, is far from
absurd. Just as France forged a modern
nation by progressively imposing a
common language after the revolution,
so the state in the 1950s and 1960s en-
forced standard pronunciation. Today,
says Mr Blanchet, those discriminated
in Lodz and Poznan. Run-offs in other cit-
ies will be held on November 4th.
Meanwhile, the government is under
fresh pressure from the eu, which accuses
it of undermining the rule of law by trying
to pack the courts. This summer, a new law
lowering the retirement age for Supreme
Court judges from 70 to 65 forced around
one-third of them out. On October 19th the
European Court of Justice ordered the tem-
porary suspension of the law. (A final judg-
ment will be issued later.) This week, the
judges returned to work.
A former Europe minister, Mr Trzas-
kowski embodies the legacy of Donald
Tusk, who led po until he moved to Brus-
sels in 2014. His victory in Warsaw, which
has had a po mayor since 2006, was expect-
ed, even if its scale was not. But to defeat
pis in 2019, the party will need to reach be-
yond urban centres, perhaps working with
the agrarian Polish People’s Party, which
came third. The countdown has begun. 7
against most are from the north, whose
intonation is known as “Ch’ti”.
Deputies have denounced such snob-
bery. Bruno Studer, from the east, adopt-
ed an Alsatian accent in parliament this
week to make a point. Laetitia Avia, a
deputy who grew up in Seine-Saint-
Denis, a tough banlieue of Paris, even
proposed legislating against glotto-
phobie. She had learned the hard way, she
said, by ditching her accent when she
first studied on the Left Bank. But the
prejudice seems likely to persist in a
centralised country whose public broad-
casters make little effort to buck it.
Things have not moved on all that far
from the days when Georges Pompidou,
an ex-president, advised Charles Pasqua,
a southern politician, to take diction
classes to overcome his “handicap”.
The Economist October 27th 2018
The Schengen area
They shall not pass
B RU S S E LS
Some internal borders will remain
subject to control, despite the rules
B order checks within the Schengen
area are meant to be a thing of the past.
For a generation, passport-free travel was
the norm across much of Europe (22 of the
28 members of the European Union belong
to Schengen, along with four non-eu
states). Border controls were rarely used
and, when they were, they lasted only the
length of a political summit or a football
tournament. But since the refugee crisis of
2015, “temporary” border controls have be-
come more or less permanent in six Euro-
pean countries. Existing checks are now
likely to be extended for another six
months, after co-ordinated announce-
ments this month from France, Germany,
Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
The French authorities cite terrorism,
after two fatal attacks in 2018. Others ex-
plain their decision on the basis that too
many people are still entering, living in or
moving round Europe illegally. Between
January and August 2018, 7,467 illegal en-
tries into Germany were detected at the
Austrian border alone. Of those, 3,818 were
turned away; the rest followed asylum pro-
cedures. In light of this, the German interi-
or minister, Horst Seehofer, said that in his
country “the requirements for lifting the
internal controls are currently not met.”
However, some disagree. “There are no
objective justifications for internal border
controls,” says Marie De Somer, an analyst
at the European Policy Centre, a think-tank
in Brussels. Migrant flows on all routes
have decreased by 95% since the crisis, and
the number of secondary movements
(when migrants move on from where they
originally entered the eu) has gone down,
too. But for Germany and its neighbour,
Austria, the figures remain too high.
Extending the controls comes at a price.
The European Parliament estimates that
reintroducing border controls in the
Schengen area could cost up to €20bn in
one-off expenses and €2bn in annual oper-
ating expenses. There are also knock-on ef-
fects, as id checks delay commuters, tour-
ists and truckers. The European
Parliament, possibly exaggerating a little,
has criticised the controls for having “crip-
pling effects on the economies of the mem-
ber states”. More concretely, a spokesman
for the Slovenian government explains
that, as a small country, Slovenia’s busi-
ness was hurt by the uncertainty that inter-
nal border controls create. “We are closing
countries in, but we need to trade,” she in- 1
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