Je vous mets ici les differents posts publies depuis hier soir sur The Corner… Ils se repondent entre eux. Si leur « conversation » continue, je rajouterai les differents posts.

Results of the French Presidential Election — First Round   [Mario Loyola]

Breakdown of the first round:

• Nicolas Sarkozy (conservative)    30%
• Ségolène Royal (socialist)           26%
• François Bayrou (center-right)      18%
• Jean-Marie Le Pen (far right)        12%

At 30% Nicolas Sarkozy did much better than the most favorable polls had predicted.  The Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal came in second at 26%.  These two facts make a Sarkozy victory in the second round face-off against Royal almost inevitable.  The 12% who voted for Le Pen will likely go to Sarkozy after Sarkozy shrewdly positioned himself as an anti-immigrant law-and-order candidate.  The Bayrou vote is more difficult to predict—it will be courted by the two remaining contenders as energetically as the remaining days permit—but is quite likely to break mostly for Sarkozy.  Two different polls predict that Sarkozy will beat Royal 54% to 46% in the second round, scheduled for two weeks from now — May 6.

These results are important for America—and very good news.  They demonstrate a rightward shift in French public opinion—and a shift towards a vociferously Atlanticist and pro-American candidate.

The two remaining contenders will face-off in a presidential debate May 2.

04/22 07:44 PM

Sarkozy (Been There, Done That)   [Andrew Stuttaford]

Mario, like you, I was pleased by Sarkozy’s win in the first round of the French election, but as to the idea that he is going to be a staunch free marketeer, friend of America, and so on, I don’t really buy it, not least because we’ve heard this all before: in the run-up to Chirac’s presidency. Look closely enough at what Sarkozy has been saying and you can find plenty that is (a) both sceptical of globalization and (b) cautious about transatlantic partnership. Electioneeering? Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. My best guess is that, if he wins, Sarkozy will prove to be a French president in the usual Gaullist mode, fiercely assertive of the national interest (nothing wrong with that, that’s what any president of any country should aim to be), but with a less reflexively anti-American definition of what that national interest amounts to.

As to the economy, there ought to be no doubt that he is a statist on traditionally French lines. Helen over at EU Referendum puts it best when she writes:

Neither [Sarkozy nor Royal] is a liberal free-marketeer and both believe in the benign influence of the state. But, it would appear, that Sarkozy wants to use the state to push France into some sort of reform while Royal wants to use the state to promote more distributionist socialist policies. In practical terms neither will be able to achieve what they purport to want but when the voters go to the booths on May 6 these will be the choices they face.

That’s about right, I think.

Superman?   [Stanley Kurtz]

If you’re interested in the French elections and Europe’s prospects, the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs has a couple of articles worth reading. (The issue hasn’t yet been mounted on the web, and most of it will be subscriber restricted.) Sophie Pedder reviews Nicolas Sarkozy’s new book, Testimony, and in an important piece called « Healthy Old Europe, » Nicholas Eberstadt and Hans Groth advance our ongoing debate over the West’s changing demographics. (Here’s the Op-Ed version of the longer Eberstadt-Groth article.)

Although Jonah’s been less hard on the French of late, Sarkozy’s Testimony is liable to deliver a shock to any Cornerite’s system. Sarkozy sounds almost too good to be true. That’s partly because Testimony extracts Sarkozy’s most pro-American writings, and so is not entirely representative. Despite his free market talk, Sarkozy is more statist than American conservatives, he favors affirmative action for immigrants, and the campaign has forced him to backtrack on some of his pro-American foreign policy rhetoric. For all that, Sarkozy is still a new kind of French politician: openly pro-American, viscerally anti-leftist (Sarkozy’s father was a refugee from communist Hungary), a critic of the welfare state, and unwilling to tolerate lawlessness by France’s rebellious suburban immigrants.

The question is whether even a Sarkozy win will be enough to spark real reform. Sarkozy’s hopes for paring back France’s bloated welfare state likely outrun the expectations of even his own supporters. And disaffected immigrants in France’s suburbs are already claiming that « if Sarko wins, there’ll be riots. » So a Sarkozy victory is less likely to signal quick reform than it is to initiate a difficult and conflicted period of testing, which may or may not ultimately result in significant change. The huge turnout for the first round of voting portends a sharp left/right debate to come. Both sides understand that the fate of Europe’s social model could hang in the balance.

Given the likely electoral polarization, even a Sarkozy victory followed by moves at reform may set up a confrontation with the left, which could pour onto the streets early in Sarkozy’s term in an effort to block serious change. Will Sarkozy hold back and avoid confrontation by pushing reform only gradually? Will he boldly take on his opponents? Or will even baby-steps toward change spark massive protests, as did mild attempts at labor market reform did only recently?

Here is where the « Healthy Old Europe » article comes in. Eberstadt and Groth argue that, despite it’s rapidly declining fertility rate, Europe can avoid demographic disaster only by putting its notably healthy oldsters to work. Rather than import still more Muslim immigrants, Europe might avoid, or at least mitigate, its economic and cultural troubles by asking its large and physically robust cohort of 50 and 60 year-olds to keep working.

The trouble is that Europeans, although healthier and more long-lived, are working less and less. (You’ve got to believe that shorter work weeks and all those vacations help explain the relative health of Europe’s oldsters.) Between the 1960’s and 2000, the life expectancy of French men rose by eight years, while the retirement age fell by seven years. Check out this article on « The Paradoxical French Electorate, » which features a train engineer scheduled to retire at age 56. Eberstadt and Groth explain that the only way for Europe to avert demographic and/or cultural disaster is to get folks like this engineer to retire later. This may be exactly what Sarkozy has in mind. But try telling that to this engineer, who I bet would join his fellow state employees in a huge public protest against anything that would seriously delay his retirement.

Victory for Royal means the French economic freight train will remain on track toward a precipitous fall off a cliff. Victory for Sarkozy will send a super-hero flying to the front of the runaway train. Will Super-Sarko manage to stop that train before it falls into the English Channel? Will he even seriously try? Stay tuned for the next episode.

04/23 10:06 AM

Re: Sarkozy (Been There, Done That)   [Stanley Kurtz]

Andrew, you may well be right that even a Sarkozy victory won’t amount to much in the way of change. I say something similar in my post on the French elections, although I think significant conflict over real reform proposals from Sarkozy remains a live possibility. But as I argue in my Superman post, this issue takes us back to the controversy over Europe’s demographics. You’ve argued for some time that Europe’s demographic crisis is an illusion. Just upping the retirement age is enough to solve it. The Eberstadt-Groth article I refer to essentially confirms your point. But there’s a catch. Europe has to actually follow through, by substantially pushing up a retirement age that for years has been going down. And this will require political courage in the face of what is likely to be serious opposition. So if you’re right that Sarkozy’s election won’t mean very much in the way of real reform, then Europe may in fact soon be facing a serious demographic crisis.

04/23 10:09 AM

Nicolas Sarkozy and Charles de Gaulle   [Mario Loyola]

Andrew, you point to Sarkzoy’s avowed skepticism of globalization and the transatlantic partnership. I think these are defensive positions—definitely “electioneering.” The fashionable bunk of the moment in Europe consists of (a) doomsday environmentalism, (b) anti-globalization, and (c) anti-Americanism. No candidate in western Europe is viable without genuflecting before each of these idols. Even the Tories in Britain are running to the left of Labour in their “greenery” and anti-Americanism.

Days before the election, Sarkozy visited the tomb of Charles de Gaulle—and recently cited de Gaulle and Pope John Paul II as his most important influences. A key question in France is the extent to which Gaullism – the real kind – survives as an integral political philosophy. Jacques Chirac was seen by many old-school Gaullists in his own party as an unprincipled opportunist who didn’t even have the I.Q. necessary to be a real Gaullist.

Of course, de Gaulle was a statist, and he charted a course of independence from the United States in France’s Cold War position. But the essence of Gaullism to my mind consisted in the belief that (a) in domestic affairs, the only way to conserve institutions is to constantly renew them; and (b) in foreign affairs, the democratic state must be free to act in its defense. By failing to reform France’s social model, despite its obvious failure, and by insisting that states need the permission of the United Nations to use force preventively, Chirac betrayed the core principles of Gaullism. And while de Gaulle insisted on independence from American control, he never tried to triangulate between America and its enemies, as Chirac has so shamefully done. De Gaulle was unambiguously a friend of the United States—despite his reputation to the contrary in some quarters.

Sarkozy has struck some commentators as superficial. But he has staked out some pretty bold positions. For example, he does not think that the anger of angry Muslims is the fault of the West — so he doesn’t suffer from that paralyzing self-doubt that nearly destroyed Europe in the first half of the 20th century and is crippling Europe’s ability to fend off Muslim extremists today. He has been so vocally pro-American that he has had to defend himself from the “Bush’s lapdog” charge constantly leveled against Tony Blair. He thinks that France must liberalize its labor laws, and has campaigned on tax cuts. Depending on the results of the coming parliamentary elections, he could indeed by the man to reform France’s social model. And whatever he says publicly in the interest of personal popularity, expect France to become much more helpful to America in discrete and practical ways. And not a moment too soon.

P.S. In my last post, I put Sarkozy at 30%. In fact, his tally was closer to 31% and now the latest reporting puts him above 31%. Le Pen, by contrast, came in closer to 10%.

04/23 10:13 AM