European Politics - Right Now?

The Labour Party had a good run with Tony Blair just passing the ten year mark as Prime Minister. It appears though, that the Labour run is over. The Guardian reports that across Great Britain, Labour's center or moderate supporters have abandoned the party in local elections. The anti-Blair Tories have benefited from the shift but what do the Tories represent these days? A kinder, gentler big tent? If so, we should get a preview of the Republican party. We may be entering a period of pragmatism in western politics; amorphous, nondescript pragmatism with little distinction from one party to the next. But that prediction doesn't apply to the French elections which offer a clear choice between an attractive but somewhat vacuous, status quo socialist versus a fiery and controversial populist reformer.

How do you make sense out of the news that Sarkozy has led Segolene Royale in every single poll and now appears to winning going away? The leftist Guardian UK reports takes a pessimistic view:

Royal has trailed Sarkozy in a hundred consecutive polls and is unlikely to make up the six to nine points that separate the two candidates. With 44 million Frenchmen and women heading for the polls, it looks very much as if Sarkozy's mix of promised radical change, economic liberalism and outright hard right populism has brought him victory - and possibly by a significant margin.

There is still a chance of an upset. Polls in France have been badly wrong before and 14 per cent of the voters, enough to swing the election, were apparently still undecided last night. But Sarkozy, 52, one of the most controversial and divisive figures of recent French political history, remains likely to replace outgoing President Jacques Chirac at the Elysee Palace. His slogan throughout months of campaigning has been 'Together, everything becomes possible'.

'That... is the least you can say,' muttered Loïc Delaurens, 29, a newspaper seller near the Place de la Republique in Paris, who voted Communist in the first round of voting two weeks ago. Sarkozy's team has already started working on the formation of a government and planning legislation, sources close to the former Interior Minister admitted. 'We'll get the parliamentary elections out of the way [in six weeks] and then really get moving,' said one member yesterday.

The campaign has been extraordinarily bitter, reflecting a polarised and divided people who know they are making a historic choice between very different individuals and very different programmes. 'If Sarkozy has the will and the ability to turn his announced policies into reality, he will turn France upside down,' said Ivan Rioufol, a leader writer at the right-wing Le Figaro newspaper. Royal, 53, also provokes fierce emotions, attacked by the right as an incompetent spendthrift representative of an unreformed left responsible for decades of cultural, social and economic decline. But the career politician, daughter of an army officer and educated at elite universities, remains far less controversial than her rival, the son of an immigrant seen as an outsider even by the establishment right.

For those who are voting against him, Sarkozy, whose electoral strategy has been to hunt votes amid the third of French voters who profess a 'sympathy' with the ideas of the extreme right, is 'the abomination of abominations'. 'This is a man who shook the hand of George Bush, who will destroy the French social model, who will institute a police state,' said Geraldine Chene, a Lyon-based Socialist activist. 'We hate him and all he stands for.'

Sarkozy's uncompromising statements on immigration are behind much of the fierce emotion he excites. Lilian Thuram, the French football star, has vociferously attacked Sarkozy's 'racist' rhetoric. He told The Observer yesterday he hoped that 'if Sarkozy is President he has the wisdom to find the words to unite the French'. Key public figures, such as the former tennis player and singer Yannick Noah, have pledged to leave the country in the event of his victory.

'You would think we were on the brink of civil war,' said Jacques Marseille, an author and historian.

For Mohammed Chirani, 29, who is walking across France to call for unity among his fellow citizens, 'the election has crystallised all the faultlines that divide the nation. I've never seen so much fear and hate. I'm not optimistic for the country, whoever wins.'

And though Royal's claims last week that a Sarkozy victory would lead to 'violence' were dismissed as scaremongering by her opponent's media team, significant social strife is likely if he wins. Many local mayors in areas where tensions are already high - Sarkozy is hated in many of the poorest housing estates in France for having described delinquents as 'scum' - are planning heavy police deployments tonight.

There is talk too of a 'third round' of the election in the streets. France's powerful unions last week vowed a trial of strength with Sarkozy who, through his plans to modify France's legally enforced 35-hour week, labour laws and expensive welfare model, is seen as the living incarnation of 'the excesses of American-style capitalism'.

'If Nicolas Sarkozy thinks that if elected he will have the right to push through all the reforms that he has announced, whatever the unions think of them, then he is making a big mistake,' said Bernard Thibault, the general secretary of the CGT, France's biggest union.'

Things are bad and getting worse in France. It wouldn't surprise me that a majority would vote for economic change. If Sarkozy is successful, what kind of country will he lead? Will the French socialists, communists and labor unions go ballistic?