Foreign Perspectives

In years gone by the French were one of the most backward nations in the world with their use of the Internet. They stuck resolutely to their France-only Minitel system and, for the most part, refused to have anything to do with the American-dominated Internet.

That situation is changing very quickly. For example, whilst we had our first ever online reservation from a French person just two Summers ago, nowadays they are commonplace. So, it’s not surprising that the election campaign has gone online in an equally big way. Blogs are coming to be an expected part of that with the Royal campaign blog started early on and campaigning even taking place on SecondLife. Not so long ago, I’d have said that the SecondLife campaign office was totally crazy but apparently the swing against the recent EU referendum was started with the blog from an obscure teacher in Marseille so it would appear possible to swing public opinion in the real world from our vantage point in the virtual one, even in France.

But what about the real politics? Royal prefers intuition to ideology and is said to be good on the “small things” that arise in truly local politics and weak on the bigger picture. She is deliberately vague and promises to consult the people which are, in some ways, excellent approaches. The problem is that when one consults the people one finds out what the people want, not necessarily what they need.

Where she is more specific there are clear contradictions in her policies. In her economic policy objectives she wants to raise the minimum wage substantially, to abolish the CNE labour law (which makes hiring & firing easier for small companies) and to promote even more mass-unionisation (in an already highly unionised country), all clear job destroyers. Yet, on the other hand, she also hopes to create 500,000 youth jobs, generate training opportunities for longer term unemployed youths and even review the 35 hour week. Those two groups of objectives seem to be in clear opposition. Throughout her policies there is the underlying strand of more state intervention with talk of state aid (barely mentioned elsewhere in the world), increased tax on dividends (thus discouraging investment), state regulation of banking fees (no doubt to support the indigenous banks) and renationalisation of EDF/GDF.

What about Sarkozy though? Well, to our eyes he appears more of a “normal” western European politician with his hopes to encourage the job creators to return home to France, to cut taxes and generally free up the state burden on the population. However, he’s unlikely to do much about the farming subsidies or go far to address France’s head in the sand approach to globalisation.

The problem that both face on behalf of the country is that, whilst they might complain about their taxes, the French like their cozy system of benefits and jobs for life. After all, why would anyone want to bother working a 40 hour week when they could work a 35 hour week for the same salary? For that matter, if Royal’s proposal to take unemployment benefit to 90% of that received from one’s previous job, why would anyone want to work at all? This approach is quite typically French in totally ignoring what the rest of the world is getting up to. That, of course, is the main problem with French politics. For example, when an attempt was made to make it easier to hire & fire young people in early 2006, the predictable result was riots in the streets and, equally predictably, a climbdown by the government. Whilst the people needed jobs, what they wanted were jobs for life.

I suspect that this time around the French people will get what they want which is pretty much what Royal has on offer. However, what they need is Sarkozy, if he’s strong enough to push through his policies in spite of certain opposition to a number of them.

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