Nicolas Sarkozy, the front runner for the French presidency, has suggested that pedophilia is an incurable genetic disposition, that rioting Arab youths are scum and that an Orwellian sounding ministry for immigration and national identity is a good idea.
Segolene Royal, his socialist challenger, wants the French to celebrate family, work and the flag. And on Friday, a suppressed official poll suggested that the racist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who once described the Holocaust as a detail of history, will come second in next week's presidential ballot. He will be entitled to a run-off against Sarkozy, a repeat of the election he fought five years ago against Jacques Chirac and a sign that liberal and left forces in France are being routed.
It is an unhappy panorama. But there is little doubt that 30 years of sky-high unemployment, urban decay and a mounting sense that France is in incurable decline have begun to move this great Enlightenment country emphatically to the right. Even if the meltdown scenario of Le Pen coming second in the first round of voting is avoided, its clear that a sullen, truculent mood has descended on France, the country above any other in Europe that has a track record of airing European-wide trends.
Which is why the first round of France's presidential elections this Sunday is so important. The vicious circle in which France is trapped -- unemployment spreading, poor morale begetting more poor morale -- clearly needs to be broken. Nobody disagrees that there must be a break with the old ways of doing things.
And that, in turn, means looking to an outsider to lead the change. Just what that change might be is less clear.
So it is that the two candidates from right and left, Sarkozy and Royal, and the surprise success in the center, Francois Bayrou, have all presented themselves as outsiders independent of their political tradition and the state.
One is the son of a Hungarian immigrant, one a woman in a still very sexist society, and the other a provincial farmer. All three stories are, of course, fiction: Sarkozy has been a minister in the outgoing government for five years; Royal's partner is the chair of the Socialist Party; and Bayrou has been a feature of French political life since whenever. But that's not the point. The symbolism of outsiderdom is vital to be a credible advocate of change.
After all, Le Pen has been successfully exploiting his outsider status in more than 50 years of extreme right-wing politics.
The drive to outsiderdom and the right will have profound implications for Europe. France is the European country that takes European values to an irrational, almost surreal, degree. Most Europeans are committed to a European-style welfare state, but it is France which elevates welfarism and solidarite to a religion. Again, most Europeans have uncertainties about US-style free markets. It is the French who have turned the uncertainty into a cult. And there is a general European doubt about the racial, ethnic other, Muslims especially, but it is the French who have created the phenomenon that is Le Pen.
Any French president has simultaneously to reform the system, but respect those surreal extremes, a task that increasingly looks like being settled by coming down on the right. If so, no corner of Europe will be unaffected. Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, says privately that his biggest discovery since taking over the commission is that nothing substantive can happen without France.
The French may not propose or even dispose, but they can block. And for at least a decade, they have been Europe's blockers, culminating in the vote against the EU constitution two years ago. If France becomes more protectionist, more anti-foreigner, more anti-immigrant as the next president struggles to appease France's growing right-wing tendencies, the very foundations of the EU will shake.
For that is the danger. "Sarko" and "Sego," for all their differences, share an intriguing amount of common ground. Both think that to solve its economic and social problems, France must turn its back on top-down, statist government by intellectuals and experts animated by plans, theories and grands projets.
Both declare France must become fiercely practical and return to the verities of hard work, risk-taking and supporting wealth creation. Yet both say France must retain its commitment to high social protection.
And both say France should not open its doors to foreign competition and ownership. The true France must be defended to the last. And both make concessions to Le Pen. Sarkozy's statements are so alarmingly Le Penist that the 78-year-old claims he has won the argument. Royale wants the left to be as proud of the Tricolor as the right and insists every worker should meet tough residency requirements.
Nor does the likeness stop there. Both have well publicised problems with their partners. Sarkozy's wife, Cecilia, had a typically French affair, only for Sarkozy to save his marriage with the energy with which he says he will save France. Meanwhile, Royal's partner, Francois Hollande, pronounced on the need to raise taxes in the early weeks of the campaign, only to be completely and publicly cold-shouldered by the candidate. If these are outsiders, they have very insider partners, a paradox that has not gone unnoticed.
Both have the same political problem. They have to borrow from the other's tradition to build both their political story and a governing majority. Right-of-center Sarkozy is the surprising advocate of industrial intervention, trade protection and social solidarity. Left-of-center Royal talks the language of wealth-creation, entrepreneurship and incentives. Centrist Bayrou has emerged from almost nowhere because he can be even more unapologetically a political magpie by genuflecting to right or left. All three have had to acknowledge their admiration for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, however reluctantly, the master of political triangulation and running an economy the French envy.
But neither Sarkozy nor Royal is especially convincing. Royal has depicted herself as the politician who listens to the people rather than the Parisian elite and says her 100-point plan is fashioned from what she has heard. It won't survive five minutes before the withering scorn of the insider enarques (graduates of the Ecole Nationale d'Adminstration, the elite academy that trains top civil servants) and most people know it. Sarkozy's proposals to reshape the French state to make it more democratic and representative are window-dressing. The latest polls show that as many as 60 percent of 18-to 24-year-olds are still undecided, with the average running at some 30 percent. Who can blame them?
France's problem is that if it is to address its problems, it needs a more honest description of them.
And that needs more honest politicians, who, in turn, depend upon a more honest wider culture. France's extreme sense of what Frenchness means (ultra-welfarism, ultra-protectionism and the ultra-purity of la France) has to be tempered. The country has to shake itself free of the Napoleonic legacy of the glorious state, become more genuinely pluralist and find a way, like the Scandinavians, of combining openness with social justice.
This should be the left's project. Sometimes, it seems that Royal thinks so too, but with scant ammunition from either the left's thinkers or her political base, that message has got lost as she trims to the right. Bayrou's problem is that France, where the great clash is between left and right, offers little succour for centrists.
The force is with the right. Sarkozy will clearly win on Sunday, with the growing danger that his opponent in the run-off will be the unspeakable Le Pen. Yet for all Sarkozy's bombast, a French politician of the right can never be the apostle of openness and pluralism. It's not in the French right's DNA, as Le Pen, with whom Sarkozy flirts, proves. France's reform, when it comes, will come from a revived left.
I hope I am wrong but as matters stand, things are going to get worse in France before they get better.
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