Guy Millière on hope Tuesday, May 1 2007

I found this piece in several places, but for reference, the translation is based on the one at the Metula News Agency:

Hope

Despite ever-omnipresent sluggishness and inflexibility, despite the incomplete analyses and the difficulty of thinking of the world as it has become without resorting to notions that have become obsolete, it is clear that a solid portion of the French people is trying to turn a page. And it is also clear that the election, as of now very likely, of Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency of the Republic on May 6 will symbolize a metamorphosis in progress.

During the twelve years that have just gone by, the “Chirac years,” what I in other places called a “syndrome” has become stronger, to the point of coming to resemble a deadly illness. The French economy passed from breathlessness to a lack of energy and strength that could not be concealed by massaging a few numbers. The “French social model,” already wobbly, has become a hindrance for anyone with a spirit of enterprise and a powerful magnet for those who want to live like parasites. The outlaw zones at the periphery of the big cities have increased, as has the ghettoization of immigrant populations that France knew neither how to assimilate nor even how to integrate.

The creeping rot also affected justice, which became always more politicized, more destructive of liberty, and more sullied with errors and attacks, both as to the presumption of innocence and to the right of the common people and intellectuals to be protected from criminals. It affected research and education, expressed by an ever-accelerating brain drain. It affected information and knowledge, and the fact that France is the developed country where the spirit of globalization, the virtues of a market economy, and the underpinnings of international terrorism are least well understood constitutes, in itself, a statement of an appalling failure. It affected foreign policy, of course, where the leaders of the country made the choice to turn their back on the alliance of democracies faced with totalitarian dangers that threaten them, so as to suck up to the leaders of third-world dictatorships.

The basic essentials of these features had already been drafted or drawn during previous years, without saying anything or hardly anything about what was left to anticipate. It resulted in the conjoint rise of anti-Semitism, a hatred of the United States and Israel, a stale and Pétainist extreme right, and a resentful and potentially violent extreme left. Some works, those of Nicolas Baverez (La France qui tombe [France is Falling Over]) or mine (Un goût de cendres [A Taste of Ashes], Pourquoi la France ne fait plus rêver [Why France Doesn’t Dream Any More]), have attempted to explain what was taking shape. Neither the polls, nor the electoral results, nor the majority of the books available in bookstores, nor the commentaries distilled in the big media gave an indication of an emerging profound evolution. It would seem, despite all the makeup, that it is yet the case.

The message to take away from the first round of the French presidential election is not unequivocal or lacking in ambiguity, of course. The unprecedented result of Nicolas Sarkozy went together with a relatively high result of Ségolène Royal, despite the mediocre vacuity of her speeches, and despite an incompetence, which she demonstrated several times, and a deep archaism of a program that no open-minded Social Democrat would have wanted, elsewhere in Europe, twenty years ago. The death, in full view, of the Communist party came with the support of a left broken up among six candidates, but still very present. The erosion of the National Front had, as a corollary, the reemergence of an opportunistic and inconsistent centrism that united all those that would like to have immobility and motion, economic dynamism and the status quo, at the same. This centrism has, for that matter, come to pollute the essentials of the debates between the two rounds to this day, pushing the leader of the UMP toward a softened sugar-coating of his intentions, and the madonna of the PS toward agitation and maneuvering, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the end of the Fourth Republic.

Nevertheless, there are some signs that don’t mislead and which could prove to be encouraging. Among the leftists, it is, visibly, panic and the sour, disillusioned rallying cry of “anyone but Sarkozy.” Among the rightists, it is, often, a bilious bitterness, or even a call to vote for Royal, in the name of rejecting “globalization”, “Americanization,” and the “Zionist plot” that these people believe they have uncovered. According to them, the new Joan of Arc of the one-eyed or the poor is, by default, better.

As for the socialist party, it is engaged in distilling spiteful words, as if hatred of your opponent could take the place of a program, and it is taking classes in classic dance, feverishly and improvising, to practice its balancing act. It is the only figure that would unite those for whom, as the Marshal said, “the land does not lie,” and those for whom the damned of the earth would be transformed into the dictators of the proletariat. In passing by the fans of tractors and the lovers of Béarn who would like, for their part, to help themselves, a little later, to French-style socialism and have it become the PD, the Democratic Party.

Some signs don’t mislead, assuredly. And they could prove to be revealing, incontestably. I haven’t, these past few days, met anyone who doubts the election of Nicolas Sarkozy. I’ve met almost nobody who doubts that this election was going to result in profound changes.

At the least, the election of Sarkozy will mean a rehabilitation of work and of liberty to undertake, a reduction of the weight of the State on French society, a return toward some of the most fertile values among those originating in open societies. Also at the least, the election of Sarkozy will open, on an international level, healthier and more fruitful relations between France, Israel, and the United States.

To go beyond the minimum, to have France fully link up with with global economic dynamism and recover the full-fledged rank of an ally of open and free societies, would be desirable, but would constitute a change so radical in relation to the present state of affairs that it is, for now, hardly foreseeable.

Seeing the shortcomings of Sarkozy, but also his huge merits, I don’t think, this having been said, that this is a man ready to adopt a wait-and-see policy and to let the country slip down the slope along which it has been sliding for some time. I think, on the contrary, that this is a man of audacity, of will, and of courage, and I think that he won’t hesitate before the obstacles.

Maybe he will disappoint me and cause me to be wrong. Maybe he will prove that “sick France” is in such a state of despair that nothing can save it from now on. Maybe Nicolas Sarkozy will bog himself down in a lukewarm and sleazy fix of scheming politics, once he is installed in the Elysée Palace. Maybe he will let his Bonapartist tendencies take over. In this case, the only remaining choice will be to leave. One will return to France to look at the old stones and some museums.

I am not able, in any case, to resign myself to see the country of my birth governed by a scornful, authoritative, opportunist, technophobe, anti-American curlew¹ , able to assimilate itself into Saint Blandine, Léon Blum, or Hassan Nasrallah according to the day of the week and the place where it finds itself.

Maybe Sarkozy will disappoint me and his coach will prove, in use, to be empty and inane like a big pumpkin, but Ségolène, by her political behavior, her program, and her attitude, is already beyond all risk of disappointment. A candidate for the presidency that is delighted with the support of Arlette Laguillier, Olivier Besancenot, José Bové, Marie-Georges Buffet, and Dominique Voynet, and who could applaud and approve the idea of a “deputy” belonging to a terrorist movement at the time of a trip to Lebanon, is already disqualified a hundred times over in my eyes and has proven one thousand times her lack of ability to assume the function to which she aspires.

Note:

1. Curlew: a migratory shorebird with a long downcurved bill.

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Guy Millière on the French election Wednesday, Apr 25 2007

From Les 4 Vérités:

The election of Ségolène Royal would be a disaster

On this evening of April 22 where I write these lines, the French political landscape has become clear, as could be predicted. The center attempt to make a comeback with some combination of eating one’s cake and having it, along with the rolling pin, the flour, and the hot stove was relegated to the storeroom of ephemeral props, along with the narrow schemes – in the style of the Fourth Republic – of alternative “liberals” who are “liberal” only in name.

In spite of the attempts of the National Front to appeal to xenophobia and to Pétain-era nationalism, and to flirt with anti-Semitism, the Le Pen effect has waned, even though it remains at an elevated level, which is very revealing of the “French malaise.”

Villiers didn’t find a space to affirm the values of a France that has withered despite ambient nostalgia. Arlette was no more successful on the extreme left.

The confrontation of the second round of elections will be in keeping, globally, with the classic confrontation between the right, embodied by the UMP, and the left, embodied by the Socialist Party. Later, one will be able to think about what could comfortably be done to avoid the somewhat ludicrous pantomime that was the first round of elections, from the frantic race to gather five hundred signatures to the moronic rule that affords rigorously equal speaking time to both a representative of a large movement and to one of a small fringe group or to a gathering of fishermen: why not have a single election preceded by primaries of the left and right?

For the time being, one must think of the immediate future. We have Ségolène, the incompetent, half-witted, and arrogant representative of a party that, along with the entire French Left, has not known how to shift with modern times and remains stuck in a mode of reasoning that seems a throwback to the time of oil lamps. Opposite, we have Sarkozy, a man whose virtues and shortcomings I have already described in these columns.

Among his virtues is an understanding of the extent of the disaster on the brink of which this country finds itself. Among his shortcomings are the elements of interventionism, of state control, and of Bonapartism, which are, alas, very French.

Ségolène’s election would be a disaster that I do not want to think about, not even for an instant. This would not be a repetition of 1981 twenty-six years later. This would be a lot more serious. The economic suicide that we have been committing already seems irreversible; another five years of destruction will cause it to be not only irreversible, but even more destructive. To entrust a 20th century economy that suffers from lack of vigor and from exhaustion to someone that believes in terms of 19th century solutions would fall under what I would call an absolute, but slow, downfall. There would be a soporific sweetness in the air, of kind intentions, of intentions that are like those of a nurse that hasn’t anything more to offer than end-of-life care, until that moment when the soft, sweet, and ultimate sting of euthanasia must come.

The election of Sarkozy will open a new era. There will, perhaps, be some riots or, at the very least, tensions in suburbs. There will be hate and electricity in the air, and intellectual “anti-Sarko” terrorism will leave some traces. Sarkozy must choose very quickly between two options. Appeasement or confrontation. And I doubt that appeasement is truly an option. If Sarkozy intends to put France right, if he intends to truly reconcile the population of this old country, exhausted with the new century, it will come to pass after a very difficult initial period.

On the evening of May 6, if Sarkozy’s face is displayed on the television, I expect to see torched cars in Courneuve or in Nanterre, at the very least, or even more intense acts of violence. In previous writing, I said that France had an urgent need for a Reaganite or Thatcherite revolution. I think it’s true now more than ever. I also think that this revolution will be difficult: Thatcher had to deal with long strikes. Sarkozy should expect, at a minimum, the same kind of treatment.

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