13 jours avant le 2e tour

As France waits on unlikely kingmaker François Bayrou, George Walden reflects on the candidates and France herself.

FRANCE VOTES FOR THE APPEARANCE OF CHANGE

April 24, 2007 (Telegraph) - I'm afraid I am inclined to share Le Pen's analysis. A nasty piece of work, but a smart fellow, he was on good, rancorous form after his drubbing. "The French prefer the appearance of change to real change" was his parting shot at his countrymen, who had failed to live up to his elevated chauvinistic standards. Applied to French politics in general, I suspect his remark is true.

If it's Royal, her programme defies economic reality to the point where it would be postponed or moderated in practice, and the country will just bumble on. Sarkozy, the more likely winner, could find himself even more constrained, notably by the distressing tendency of the French, not just to take to the streets, but also to be tacitly supported by other interest groups when they do. He would not be the first French president to be exasperated with his countryman, but more likely than others to show it.

Earlier at the Times, Mr. Walden mulled just what the new French president -- any new French president -- could impossibly accomplish in France.

FRANCE IS A ‘VEGETATING CATASTROPHE’
France’s Economy And Culture Is ‘Blocked’

April 21, 2007 (Times Online) - Yet what could [Sarko] do, if elected? The country’s problems can be summed up in one dispiriting phrase: les droits acquis — acquired rights. Handing them out is electorally sweet, taking them back virtually impossible. Think of our own NHS: a Stalinist bureaucracy promising everyone everything free, which many politicians and professionals know can never work, but which popular sentiment makes untouchable. Apply that immobilisme to whole swaths of French life and you can see the new President’s predicament.

With typical chutzpah Jacques Attali, former head of the Bank for Reconstruction and Development, disagrees, claiming that we are all simply jealous of the French quality of life. "A kind of communism that works," was how a French sociologist once described his country. Anyone who has landed at a stylish, efficient airport, driven on an exquisitely cambered motorway, taken the TGV, or pondered how high taxes, better services and a relatively small income span can go together, knows what he meant. But it was a French author, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who once described Russia as "a vegetating catastrophe", and for all its charms and successes vaunted by Attali, that is how France sometimes feels.

... The French are not only financially but also philosophically opposed to changes they believe would impoverish France humanly and culturally. Jacques Chirac proclaimed Anglo-Saxon liberalism the enemy not just of France, but of Europe, and millions on the Left and Right would agree. A highly educated French friend, who tells me he has “barricaded himself in a vigorous abstentionism” for the elections, thinks protectionism is the only choice, and he is far from alone.

... A Frenchman once described America as having no identity, though wonderful teeth. But what happens when France’s own identity fades, and its teeth are still not the best?

God knows the French can be provoking, and their chumminess with Saddam Hussein, whose payroll included senior French diplomats, tainted whatever moral authority they aspired to over Iraq. Yet to take pleasure in what a Frenchman once called their société bloquée — blocked society — would be stupid. Who but a political primitive would want to see the most beautiful country in Europe, with huge reserves of culture and intelligence, fall into decline, or social mayhem?

So I look forward to being confounded, and to seeing a victorious Mr Sarkozy take on his country’s acquired rights and win, while preserving French difference.

Why won't the next French president do any better than earlier presidents? Dear reader, because the next French president wants very much to be re-elected -- even if re-elected to a more dismal, more fractious, more cheerless France.

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