I will announce my intentions in the first quarter of next year and in the meantime I refuse to get involved in any speculation, which seems to me quite useless.

Jack,
playing coy about a third term at 18%
September 18, 2006 (Scotsman)

We imagine even Jack's enormous ego is not ignorant of the political arithmetic. There are some twenty candidates running for president of France. Everyone of them is running against the status quo. That is to say, Jack.

The French are ready for change. They want change. They just don't want to be personally put out or forsake their government candy or ever have a blue day. In short, each Frenchie is ready for change at the expense of some other Frenchie.

LIBERTE, EGALITE, MEDIOCRITE
Unsure Which Way To Turn,
France Risks Being Left Behind
By The Globalised Economy

September 2, 2006 (SMH) - What is [France's] place in the world? Can it keep its character and difference, or will it be overwhelmed by globalisation? These days the national conversation turns on such questions.

But [does rayonnement français] still stir the French soul? Jacques Reland, co-director of the European Research Forum at London's Metropolitan University, doubts it.

"I don't think there is a huge appetite for grandeur any more," the Frenchman says. "People have begun to accept that we are just a medium power.* All the events of the past few years have reconciled us to this."

... The [2007 presidential] election "is the most important in the history of the Fifth Republic (established in 1958)," Christophe Barbier, editor of the weekly magazine, L'Express, wrote this week.

"It is one of France's last chances to stay among the really big countries," says Emmanuel Lechypre of the Centre for Economic Forecasting at L'Expansion business magazine.

... In a poll of 1000 people published in L'Expansion this week, 75 per cent accepted that France needed to make sacrifices to save its social model.

However, it seems sacrifices are best borne by others. Asked if they would accept allowing companies to fire staff more easily if retrenched employees were guaranteed good income support and retraining - similar to the Scandinavian model that France has examined closely - 58 per cent of people said no.

Similarly, asked if they would accept a rise in taxes to pay for their generous pension schemes, 63 per cent said no. Majorities also opposed paying more to fund health and higher education. "It shows there is a problem of maturity in the French mind," says Lechypre. "And it's a problem for the election."

... Lechypre thinks [recent] economic gains are cosmetic and, as interest rates rise, are already sputtering out. Even so, he says the former centre-right prime minister Roland Barre told him recently he thought the French had not really been touched by decline and there would be five more years of stagnation before the crisis was so acute they realised things had to change.

To Barbier, that will be too late. The election is a moment of truth, he wrote this week. If France faces the truth it can leap, with all its talents, into the new century.

If it continues to lie to itself, "it will wither bit by bit, becoming a museum country, a 20th-century fossil, offering its charms - countryside, monuments, gastronomy - for the enjoyment of the warriors of globalisation".

Unreformed France as a big museum has its appeal. Better a museum than, say, a trusted ally, or an honest administrator, or an impartial broker, or a bulwark against nuclear proliferation or terrorism.

* There are still a few hold-outs, right and left.

PFFT (What is this?): Leaping into the 21st century 1¾ | Quite comfortable in the 19th century 3⅞ | Rayonnement français 0