That’s Right

Could this be a consolidation of a New Europe? Germany has had its economy turned around after Chancellor Angela Merkel pulled it out of the long clasp of the left. In Britain, Tony Blair reconfigured the left anyway, taking Labour out of trade unions. France, however, has become just about the slowest growing of EU economies. To gauge the opportunity France gains from conservative Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory this weekend as France’s new president, consider the vote he mopped up in an election of record turnouts. The centrist Francois Bayrou, who took 18 per cent of the vote in the first round of polling, backed the Socialist Segolene Royal; and the far right, Jean-Marie Le Pen, with more than 10 per cent of the vote, asked his supporters to abstain from polling. The final tally makes it clear Sarkozy got much from both blocs. This is what makes Sarkozy’s promise of change so exciting. He goes to the presidential palace in Paris with a new idea — to break the stranglehold of the 1968 consensus, and thereby snap the power of the trade unions and stop pitting France constantly against the Anglo-Saxon global worldview.

However, Sarkozy appears in danger of cheating himself and his country of the full extent of the promise of the moment by refusing to renounce statist intervention in industry. Perhaps after the heat of electoral campaign ebbs — especially after the scheduled legislative elections next month — he may yet optimise his reformist agenda. This is because not only has Sarkozy got an extraordinary mandate, but he has also already done all the hard work in publicly separating himself from the Gaullist status-quoists. By distancing himself from Jacques Chirac — indeed, from the past, having lost no opportunity to deride the political correctness of the French politics — he has won himself a chance to use his honeymoon to usher in radical change. Radical, that is, by French standards. So he will presumably chip away at the 35-hour work week and unions’ powers to strike. His also likely to win businesses some flexibility in hiring workers.

He will, alas, gain paltry confidence from international business for his promised “economic revolution” as long as he continues to rue, to take just one example, Laxmi Mittal’s takeover of steel major Arcelor.