Issues & Opinions

As of this writing, it’s semi-official: Nicolas Sarkozy will be the new president of France (WSJ). France certainly seems to need a government different than what it’s had over the past dozen years or so, and was presented with two legitimate competing visions of the future. The more hard-headed and realistic seems to have come out the victor. (Addendum - @1:30 CST now official - Royal has conceded defeat)

Mr. Sarkozy started his campaign claiming a need for “rupture with the past“:

Mr. Sarkozy has vowed to break with the inertia of his predecessors, including Mr. Chirac, who during his 12 years in office was unable to tackle the country’s high jobless rate, high public debt, and simmering social unrest among its growing immigrant population.

With blunt slogans such as “Work more to earn more,” the 52-year-old son of a Hungarian immigrant has promised to reduce red tape and rigid labor laws so companies can be more productive. His vision for France includes more respect for elders and public authorities. Above all, Mr. Sarkozy has vowed to help French people embrace, rather than resist, globalization.

Attempts to implement the changes needed in France seem likely to result in strikes, as have all significant attempts at change over the past 5 years. The country has allowed itself to travel so far down the “fuzzy socialist” path that reversing course is bound to disenfranchise some segment of the population who’d thought their state benefits were permanently secured. Sarkozy has decried the 35 hour work week (with 40 hours’ pay) enshrined in French law in 2000, and while he uses the “Work more to earn more” slogan, he hasn’t proposed abolishing it. He’ll probably have to, given the law’s failure to increase employment (its stated goal), its obvious detriment to productivity (the actual source of wealth), and the continued stagnation of the French economy.

The problem Mr. Sarkozy faces, similar to the problems of Chirac and his several prime ministers, is the attitude the French have been encouraged, or at least allowed, to foster: the assumption that the state exists to make all their lives idyllic, even in the absence of rational support for such comfort. Dominique de Villepin, Chirac’s prime minister, tried last year to implement a new employment contract for younger workers, with the sole aim of reducing the reticence of employers to take on inexperienced workers. To an American, the proposal made complete sense, unlike most other employment law in France. To the French youth and unions, it made less sense:

France could be shut down by a general strike this week if the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, does not move to withdraw a controversial new employment law today, trade unionists threatened yesterday.

“The prime minister is like a pyromaniac who has set fire to the valley and then withdraws to the hill to watch,” Jean-Claude Mailly, secretary general of the Workers Force union, told the Journal du Dimanche yesterday after some 1.5 million protesters took to French streets in mass demonstrations on Saturday. “We’ve got to continue our mobilisation,” he said.

The problem? The jobs contracts were less restrictive, and allowed employers more latitude to fire employees when they needed to do so. The unions and young people failed to see this as a way to encourage employment, instead seeing it as a reduction in their state-guaranteed benefits, including right to permanent employment.

Permanent employment, 5-week minimum vacations and 35-hour work weeks at 40-hour pay are all decisions that a society can make for itself. Each of those decisions has costs associated with it, and society can’t simply decide that the costs don’t exist.

Sarkozy seems to understand this, and is not the first of the French political class to do so. He is, however, the first to campaign on a platform committing to change the system for the better, and will need to make headway fast enough to outrun the seemingly inevitable street protests and general strikes. In other words, it’s politics writ large - this is no longer a state to simply be run by the expert bureaucrats churned out by ÉNA.

The question could be whether his campaign contained enough information about what he plans to ensure that the electorate will remember they chose the man and his ideas. From the closing paragraph of a leader in last week’s Economist:

One bright French politician summed up this awkward dilemma neatly in a recent book. “Lies during the campaign”, he averred, “come at the price of immobility in government.” The book is called “Témoignage”; and the man who wrote it is Nicolas Sarkozy.

If he moves quickly to break from the past, Sarkozy could do France, Europe, and the world a great service. If not, however, the French democracy, to say nothing of its economy, could follow the path predicted by Lord Thomas MacCauley in 1857:

A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can last only until its citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority (who vote) will vote for the candidates promising the greatest benefits from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship.

He’s got another issue, of course - the poor, unassimilated immigrants in the suburbs. They could turn out to be as intractable as the French middle class is with its entitlement issues. From a Friday Washington Post article about suburban views of the election:

Tony Essono, 32, an unemployed economist whose parents emigrated from Cameroon before he was born, said that despite years of anger and discrimination, people in La Courneuve were willing to put their faith in the ballot box “because they understand they can change something” by voting. But, he added, “if Sarkozy is elected, it means we haven’t been heard, and we’ll trash everything.”

Sorry, but that doesn’t sound like putting one’s faith in the ballot box to me. Good luck, Mr. Sarkozy.

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