Need for reform drives France’s election
PARIS – French politicians are masters of nuance who choose their words carefully, so it is striking that both candidates in today’s presidential runoff election have talked a lot about a country in crisis.
“France is undergoing an unprecedented identity crisis,” warns Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right candidate who is considered the front-runner. “Her model of integration has broken down, her social model is failing, her cohesion withers. A terrible doubt overcomes her. She has doubts about her values, her future, her identity, her vocation.”
Both Sarkozy and his rival, Segolene Royal of the Socialist Party, cite a long list of specific woes: Low economic growth. High unemployment. A burdened public sector that spends almost half its budget on salaries and pensions. Youth riots that revealed rage and alienation in the Muslim immigrant community. Declining French influence in Europe and beyond.
Nonetheless, the crises do not add up to catastrophe. France still has the world’s sixth-biggest economy, a nuclear arsenal, a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and a muscular diplomatic corps. The transportation, health, education and cultural infrastructures are hard to beat. Most French families enjoy generous job security, vacations and retirement benefits.
The problem is that society has slid into what the French call “immobilisme,” or paralysis. Voters see Sarkozy and Royal as strong, youthful leaders who will finally confront it. They expect the new president to reassert French power abroad and find a way to make structural reforms at home while preserving the system’s comforts.
“I think this is a moment of truth for France, and the reforms that it needs, based on the model of what is being done in Germany by (Chancellor Angela) Merkel and was done in Britain by (Prime Minister Tony) Blair,” said Michel Barnier, an adviser to Sarkozy. “France is historically, economically, geographically, culturally a central nation, but we have not known how to take advantage of that centrality. Our world has changed a lot and our diplomacy must adapt to the world.”
As the campaign ended, it seemed likely that Sarkozy would lead the way into that changing world. Voters felt he performed better than Royal in a televised debate Wednesday, according to the latest polls. He has never trailed Royal in the polls, which showed his lead stable or widening going into today’s runoff.
Royal’s chances for an upset rest partly on hopes that overconfidence, combined with a long holiday weekend, could reduce turnout for Sarkozy. And she needs last-minute support from voters who backed centrist Francois Bayrou in last month’s first-round election. Bayrou, who finished third, said Thursday that he would not vote for Sarkozy. But he did not endorse Royal, and most of his party’s two dozen legislators in the National Assembly support Sarkozy.
No matter who wins, analysts predict a new direction for foreign policy.
Incumbent Jacques Chirac of the center-right Gaullist Party and his predecessor, Socialist Francois Mitterrand, concentrated primarily on foreign affairs. They both asserted independence from the United States, cultivated strong alliances in the Arab world and did not let rhetoric about the sanctity of international law stop them from doing business with unsavory regimes.
Sarkozy and Royal are likely to break with that tradition, said political analyst Francois Heisbourg.
“The fact that this is a generational change is overriding,” Heisbourg said. “They do not feel beholden to the Gaullist-Socialist consensus on foreign policy.”
Both leaders have taken interventionist, moralist stands on issues such as human rights abuses in Sudan, Chechnya and China. They are “equally tough” in opposing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Heisbourg said, though neither has indicated support for military action.
Relations with the United States, which reached a nadir in 2003 when Chirac led opposition to the invasion of Iraq, are expected to improve. Although close cooperation persists in areas such as anti-terrorism efforts, Chirac’s ideological instincts and personal tension with President Bush prevented a full rapprochement, officials say.
Sarkozy is regarded as France’s most pro-U.S. presidential candidate in a long time.
Sarkozy is also regarded as friendlier to Israel and less pro-Palestinian than previous leaders, though he says his Middle East policy will be “balanced.” Overall, Sarkozy’s discussion of foreign affairs is frank and pragmatic.
Royal, meanwhile, does not share the loud anti-Americanism of other French Socialists. But she remains closer “to the footsteps of Mitterrand and Chirac,” according to Pascal Boniface, a foreign affairs analyst.
The urgent test on the home front is economics. Sarkozy and Royal both vow to cut unemployment and stoke economic growth. Sarkozy’s lead in the polls makes it likely that he will get a chance to execute a plan based on cutting taxes and bureaucracy, encouraging overtime and entrepreneurship, and enacting a Marshall Plan for unemployed youths.