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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 22-Apr-07
France heads for chaos in Sunday's first round election for President

Web Log - April, 2007

France heads for chaos in Sunday's first round election for President

Nicolas Sarkozy is leading in the polls, and he may even not hate America. Mon dieu!

The four major candidates <font size=-2>(Source: CNN)</font>

The four major candidates (Source: CNN)

As the French head for the polls on Sunday, nobody really has any idea who'll win. The polls indicate that almost half of French voters are undecided, and won't decide until they're in the voting booth.

But one thing is certain: A major generational change will take place in the new few weeks, as lame duck President Jacques Chirac, born in 1932, disappears from the political stage, most likely to be replaced by someone born after World War II.

Chirac lived through World War II. He remembers how quickly German tanks broke through French lines of defense and occupied the country, and how the country wasn't freed until tens of thousands of British and American soldiers lost their lives on the beaches of Normandy. And he remembers how humiliating all of that was to France.

The French remember, with enormous pride, the French Revolution of 1789, considered by many historians to be the greatest revolution in the history of humanity; and they remember, with equal pride, the glory days of Napoleon Bonaparte I, who made France the leading power in Europe in the early 1800s.

Since then, France hasn't done so well, having lost to Germany in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, having destroyed itself in the Paris Commune civil war that followed the Franco-Prussian war, and having been saved -- twice -- by the British and Americans in two world wars.

The French military hero of World War II was Charles de Gaulle, and he and his vision have dominated French politics ever since. His view was of renewed French grandeur, as in the days of Napoleon. This meant, in particular, a rejection of the "Anglo-Saxon model," and a resulting anti-British and anti-American brand of politics. I've mentioned several times on this web site that I used to travel to Europe on business in the 1970s, and it was always very clear to me that the Germans like Americans and the French hate Americans.

Since de Gaulle launched France's Fifth Republic in 1958, and became its first President (1958-1969), every subsequent French President, even those from the Socialist party, has been a "Gaullist" in philosophy, and a "Napoleonist." These include Georges Pompidou (1969-74), Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (1974-81), François Mitterrand (1981-95), and Jacques Chirac (1995-present).

But now that will change enormously, and that's probably why almost half of the population says that they haven't decided whom to vote for on Sunday.

Nicolas Sarkozy

The candidate currently leading in the polls, is Nicolas Sarkozy. Chirac recently gave grudging support to Sarkozy, even though he said that Sarkozy is too much of an "Atlanticist," meaning that he doesn't hate America enough.

Sarkozy is a prolific writer, and he's not afraid to talk about France's grandeur in his new book, Ensemble (in English: Together). Here's how Sarkozy introduces this book:

"Near the end of this campaign, where so many subjects have been broached, and so many words have been spoken, I wanted to tell you why and how we could one again dream of a better future for our children, why and how everything is once again possible for all of us, and for France, which is the name that we give to our common destiny. I didn't want to describe a government program, but rather to paint a great collective ambition. I want to share this ambition with you. Together, we can do what the preceding generations have already done. We can return France to its former grandeur. We can, once again, find the pride in being French. If we are united, if we want it, if we decide it. I know that, beyond all our differences, we have in common the same idea of France and the Republic. Through the strength of this bond that links all of us -- French people born anywhere, of all cultures and every generation -- we can find again the capacity to live together, to act together, to hope together."

This is political fluff, of course, but I wanted to quote it because what it says about Sarkozy himself. Like America, France is in a generational Crisis era, and in any Crisis era, the needs of the nation as a whole -- the survival of the nation and its way of life -- become more important than individual rights.

Unlike other French politicians, he doesn't hope to "return France to its former grandeur" by returning to Napoleonic values, and by being contemptuous of American values. This is clear from a a recent review of an older Sarkozy book, Testimony. Here are some of the passages that the review quotes:

"America came to aid and defend us twice in our recent history… You don’t have to be a grand strategist to understand that our interest is to have the best possible relations with this country... Where our strategic interests are concerned, systematically opposing the United States is a double mistake.... If I had to choose, I feel closer to American society than to a lot of others around the world. ...

France is going through a fundamental crisis of confidence… I’m convinced that no country in the world can get by without effort, and that France—notwithstanding its undeniable merits and prestigious past—will become a thing of the past if it doesn’t take the steps necessary to adapt to the changes taking place in the world. ...

[In France,] success is not really seen or accepted as a positive value... All the hard work done by those who are eventually successful is rarely acknowledged. This attitude is explained by the French desire for egalitarianism, the fascination with leveling out, and, frankly, jealousy... Success is more often criticized than presented as a model. ...

[In discussing the 35-hour work week, that he wishes to abolish:] Great Britain,... it will be remembered, in the late 1970s seemed to be completely left behind, with a GDP 25 percent less than that of France. [Today,] London is becoming the seventh-largest French city. It has attracted, practically to the point of saturation, thousands of young French people who go to live there, including my daughter.... It seems that success has become so shameful in France that a young person who wants to succeed must leave.... A million French people have gone to live abroad over the past few years, a loss almost equivalent in absolute terms to the losses of World War I (1.3 million French deaths)."

Sarkozy himself is the son of an immigrant -- a Hungarian who married a French woman of Greek-Jewish origin. This mixture of east and west European attitudes is undoubtedly what makes him different.

This is all very new for the French, and troubling to many of them, and not just because he's not anti-American.

Many Frenchmen refer to Sarkozy as a "right winger" and a "racist," because of his strong views of illegal immigration.

In fact, many people blamed Sarkozy for the violent racial rioting that lasted for two weeks in Paris's Muslim ghetto suburbs in November 2005. At the initial outbreak of violence, Sarkozy responded by saying he had a "zero tolerance policy" for violence, and he referred to the troublemakers as "scum" and "riffraff," and vowed to "clean out" the suburbs.

These views make Sarkozy anathema to the vocal "politically correct" segment of French society.

And yet, there's a strong visceral xenophobia among the French people, as we've previously discussed on this web site:

When the French rejected the EU Constitution in 2005, exit polls indicated that those who voted against it did so out of fear of East Europeans coming to France and taking French jobs.

When Jacques Chirac supported a law that would permit French employers to fire an employee under 26 years of age, provided that he's worked less than 2 years, a million people, mostly students, took to the streets to protest in April 2006, and Chirac backed down.
As this web site's analysis pointed out, these street protests were a reaction to the November 2005 riots by Muslim youth. Muslims had demanded jobs, and the April rioters knew that jobs for Muslims meant fewer jobs for them.

What Sarkozy has done is to tap into that visceral xenophobia. We'll see on Sunday whether it worked for him.

Ségolène Royal

There are twelve candidates running for President in the first round of voting on Sunday. The top two or three vote-getters will go on the next round, on May 6, where the President is finally chosen. Nikolas Sarkozy is almost guaranteed to be in that top two or three. Ségolène Royal is in second place, and considered likely to make it as well.

Ségolène Royal is the Socialist Party candidate with a fairly standard, classic Socialist economic platform of strong protections for workers while stressing traditional social and family values.

Like Sarkozy, Royal also benefits from the immigration issue. Young voters have registered to vote in record numbers, and many of these new voters are French-born children of North African immigrants living in the suburbs -- the same suburbs where Muslim youth were rioting and demonstrating in November, 2005. This generation is expected to vote to the left, and Ségolène Royal is expected to benefit.

Royal is unique, of course, because she's a woman. But she's even more unique (if that's possible) by playing the "woman card."

She says that Sarkozy is just interested in himself, while she is a woman and a mother who is interested in "all of you," the people. "I am a woman, a mother of four children," she says. "I have my feet on the ground. I'm a practical person. I am a free woman."

"I want to address myself to the women," she said. "I need the women's vote. ... I'm told that for certain women, it's too revolutionary to see the state and the nation personified by a woman. But I say to them as well that it is time to put an end to centuries of injustice, of marginalization. It is time to put an end to prejudices that make no sense."

She has also made it clear that she doesn't share Sarkozy's Atlanticism; she tells supporters, "We will not genuflect before George Bush."

Royal has made a number of gaffes, especially in the area of foreign affairs, giving the impression that she's not very competent. Thus her main appeal is that she's a woman. Whether that's enough remains to be seen.

Jean-Marie Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen has been called a fascist because of his nationalist, anti-immigrant, and perhaps even anti-Jewish views.

Although he's in fourth place in the polls, and given little chance of winning, his candidacy casts a shadow over the entire election because of what happened in the last Presidential elections on April 21, 2002: To everyone's shock and surprise, Le Pen and Chirac were the only two to win the first round of the elections, because the leftist vote was split among Chirac's opponents. In the second round runoff, Chirac won.

The 78-year-old Le Pen has been in politics for 50 years, and according to news reports, he appears to be greatly enjoying what will probably be his last run for President.

Commenting on the fact that his candidacy has forced the other candidates to respond, he said "They have all moved right except me." He predicts an "enormous double surprise" on Sunday when the voters select him and eliminate Sarkozy.

Still, there's a great fear hanging over many French voters that Le Pen will do it again -- that he'll come in second because undecided voters, afraid to admit to pollsters that they support him, will vote for him in the privacy of the voting booth.

François Bayrou

François Bayrou positions himself clearly in the center, between right-wing Sarkozy and left-wing Royal, and he's been trying to benefit from any distaste for either extreme. He claims to be a French Bill Clinton.

His candidacy has given rise to a special concept: The vote utile, or "useful vote."

Here's the pitch: If you vote for Ségolène Royal, then the runoff will be between Sarkozy and Royal, and Royal will lose, and so your vote will be wasted; instead, vote for Bayrou, the only candidate who can beat Sarkozy.

This approach has given Bayrou an unexpected boost in the polls, much to everyone's surprise, and he's even surpassing Royal in some polls.

Bayrou, a former sheep farmer, has promised to unify France's left and right by mixing policies from both sides. As in the case of the other candidates, no one really knows whether voters will be drawn by the proposal, or whether they'll decide that it's just wishful fantasy.

Chaos versus a right turn

From this side of the Atlantic, France looks a great deal like Israel -- and even like the Palestinian territories.

Since Ariel Sharon became disabled, the only word that can be used to accurately describe Israel's government is "chaos." Ariel Sharon was a survivor of the last crisis war, the genocidal war between Arabs and Jews in the late 1940s. His lifelong goal has been to prevent any such war from occurring again, and his experiences as a youth trained him to do that. With his disappearance, Israel is almost ungovernable, with no clear vision or direction.

On the Palestinian side, Yasser Arafat was a survivor of the same war. Although Arafat and Sharon hated each other, they cooperated, perhaps unconsciously, to achieve the same goal: To prevent a major genocidal war between Arabs and Jews from occurring again. In 2003, when the world was euphoric about the new "Roadmap to Peace," I predicted that the Roadmap would never succeed, and that the disappearance of Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat would be part of a generational change that would lead to exactly that kind of genocidal war between Arabs and Jews. The Palestinian government today is just as chaotic as the Israeli government; the Palestinian territories are ungovernable, with no clear vision or direction, and the Gaza strip particularly is completely lawless.

The same kind of thing is now happening in France. All the French presidents since Charles de Gaulle, even when they were from different parties, shared a common vision and determination to avoid a new European war that would devastate France as much as World War II had.

But now the last of them, Jacques Chirac, is leaving, and with him goes that common vision and determination.

In his emotional farewell address, Chirac said: "Never compromise with extremism, racism, anti-Semitism or the rejection of others. In our history, extremism has already almost ruined us. It's a poison. It divides. It perverts. It destroys."

These are words that could only have come out the mouth of someone who had lived them, as he has, but as none of his likely successors have.

The voters of France are extremely anxious and worried about two things: the economy and immigration. And these two issues are far more deeply intertwined than most French journalists or politicians would care to admit, because the two issues intersect at one point: Jobs.

The children of immigrants are living in poverty in the suburbs because they have no jobs. The ethnic French, even the ones with jobs, are unhappy about the economy because of its poor record and unemployment. They blame each other for their problems, and as economic problems get worse, the means of expressing that blame will become more violent.

We've already seen the first major sign that France is becoming ungovernable: Chirac's attempt to reform the economy by permitting French employers to fire an employee under 26 years of age, provided that he's worked less than two years, was defeated by massive street riots.

Under this analysis, it really doesn't matter which of the candidates wins. Sarkozy's plans to put France back to work by eliminating such things as the enforced 35-hour work week cannot succeed because the powerful labor unions will oppose it, as will the same people who rioted against the firing law. Royal's socialist agenda will fail because it would be opposed by the strong conservative French parties, who will point out that France doesn't have any more money to spend. So nothing will get done.

In the past couple of years I've written frequently about how countries that fought in World War II are all becoming increasingly paralyzed and dysfunctional, as the generations that lived through and survived that war all disappear and are replaced by generations born after the war. This list includes the U.S., UK, Israel, all of the EU, China, South Korea, Japan, and others. With this new election, France is joining the list.

These countries, all paralyzed and dysfunctional, are just waiting for something to happen. History tells us that, sooner or later, one of them will end the chaos by panicking and taking a sharp political turn to the right. This will then lead us into the Clash of Civilizations world war. (22-Apr-07) Permanent Link
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