Foreign Perspectives

The margin was relatively slim (53/47) but France has, much to my surprise, chosen the president that it needs at this time.

His first hundred days are likely to be turbulent ones and I suspect that last nights riots across France are merely a taster of things to come. Many of his policies seem to run against the deep socialist grain of French thought and practices.

The 35 hour week is to be reviewed. That was one of the planks of job creation from the socialist era. Reduce the time that anyone is allowed to work and everyone will have more work, won’t they? Well, perhaps in theory if you drop the permitted working hours by 10% you might think that employers will need 10% more people to get through the work but that’s only going to work with cuts much larger than 10%. As is clear everywhere else in the world, semi-parttime workers get through just as much work as full-time workers do.

Immigration rules are to be tightened up. This one seems pretty strange coming from the son of immigrants. The counterpart to this is that he seems likely to work with the countries in northern Africa to form a kind of African Union to help improve the economies of those countries.

France is to become a little bit more capitalist too as he plans to reduce the regulations on businesses to make the job creation process much easier. Taxes too are to be reduced to improve the incentive to work.

Will he have the strength of character to follow through on these reforms is the biggest question though. I think he will: he seems to have that inner strength that is so necessary to do it.