Music to read by:
Here I am, baby
You got my future in your hands, baby
Here I am, baby
You got my future in your hands, baby
Here I am, baby
Here I am, baby
Signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours
(You got my future in your hands, baby)
Here I am, baby
Signed, sealed, delivered,
I'm yours...for about 6 months...at which point, I will adopt most of my predecessor's economic policies because I have no other choice except to leave the Eurozone.
- President-Elect François Hollande, the Uncommitted Socialist
6 May 2012
The French have just confirmed their political creativity. In other Western democracies, a presidential election leads to the clear-cut victory of one candidate over another, along with the endorsement of a more or less predictable program. Not so in France. On April 22, the elections’ first round, French voters were free to choose from among ten contenders, including Trotskyists, radical ecologists, and a representative of America’s Lyndon Larouche cult. In the second round, concluded Sunday among the two remaining challengers, voters rejected incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy in favor of Socialist François Hollande. Now Hollande, the nation’s new president, faces a much less forgiving “electorate”: the financial markets, which will determine whether he can save France from a Greek scenario of default and bankruptcy.
The first round was most significant for revealing the strength of the so-called populists. Including groups on the right and left, populists tallied one-third of the vote. The far-right National Front won slightly above 18 percent of the vote, allowing Marine Le Pen to outperform the past achievements of her father, the party founder. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, a Communist Party–supported candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, won 11 percent.
A loose collection of other marginal candidates also won a small portion of votes. While the candidates of these diverse parties went at one another furiously during the campaign, they all, more or less, represent the same forgotten or downtrodden segments of the French population: those who live in the nostalgic glow of France’s glorious past, when Imperial France dominated the West and when jobs were stable and protected from competition by high tariffs.
The far right may be more xenophobic and the far left more
revolutionary, but they share an anti-European, anti-euro, anti-market,
anti-competition agenda. They advocate a stronger state to protect the
so-called French way against any foreign infringement—whether
ideological or ethnic.
In a nutshell, one-third of the French, in the first round, expressed support for some version of the populism that pervades Western Europe. France will be difficult to govern if one-third of its citizens feel disenfranchised and opposed to the overall direction of French society concerning European integration, cooperation with the U.S. against terrorism, and participation in the global economy. The first-round results, moreover, ensure that these groups will remain discontented: whatever their differences, Hollande and Sarkozy are not populists. Both are rational and accept the world as it is.
Contrary to popular impression, the second round merely confirmed how close the two rivals are—their identities as left and right candidates notwithstanding. Hollande bears little resemblance to the socialist firebrands France embraced through the era of François Mitterrand, president from 1981 to 1995. His views are closer to the German Social Democrats or British Labor than to the obsolete Marxist tradition. He did not propose nationalizing industries and banks, the core of Mitterrand’s 1980s platform. In fact, Hollande hardly mentioned the necessity for public investment to rekindle economic growth. He only cautiously promised to increase the number of teachers (the Socialist Party’s core constituency), and except for promising to close one of France’s 50 nuclear plants—a symbolic gesture to Greens—he made no attacks on nuclear energy. Above all, in a complete rebuttal of the French Socialist tradition, Hollande promised to contain public expenses and balance the budget in compliance with European treaties. He uttered not a word against the independence of the Frankfurt-based European Bank, issuer of the euro, a currency shared by 330 million Europeans in 17 countries. His only modest quibble with the German-led so-called “austerity” strategy was to suggest that the word “growth” be added to the Bank’s statutory obligations (up to now, its only duty has been to maintain price stability).
Such a shift from socialism as we knew it to a center-left social democracy considerably narrowed the ideological gap between Hollande and Sarkozy’s more rightist platform—especially since the French right has been traditionally more statist than free-market-oriented. The run-off campaign, then, was far from a clear-cut debate between a free-market right and a statist, or at least Keynesian, left. It instead became a competition for financial virtue: each candidate suggested that the other was not up to the task of reducing the public deficit. Sarkozy, a tactician lacking strong convictions, knows that his countrymen dislike the free market and expect the state to alleviate their existential anxieties. He thus said nearly nothing about what entrepreneurship and economic innovation could bring to the French economy. He did not mention the labor market rigidity that is one of the major causes of the nation’s 10 percent unemployment rate. Avoiding unpopular economic issues, he tried to shift the argument toward issues of national identity and border control, the Left’s weak point, at least from a rightist and populist perspective. It didn’t work.
Hollande’s victory appears to be less an endorsement of him than a referendum on Sarkozy. The new president remains a broadly unknown, untested politician with no clear agenda. Based on Hollande’s campaign, French citizens understand only that he is no Sarkozy. It remains to be seen how he will govern and above all, how he will manage the looming sovereign-debt crisis.
The new president will have to contend with two unpredictable forces: the French populists, often ready to take to the street in protest, and the financial markets. With enough police, a French president can control the Paris street; but he cannot compel Wall Street to buy French Treasury bills at sustainable rates. So far, no head of state—whether in Spain, the United States, or Japan—has devised a convincing way to balance the national budget. Thus, all Western economies suffer unsustainable debt, and all stand on the verge of a sovereign-debt crisis—a shared malady born of 30 years of public profligacy.
The way forward is, as the Germans suggest, austerity—a
precondition for growth. In France, by a remarkable historical irony, it
may fall to a formally socialist president to carry this program
forward.
Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor, is the author of numerous books, including Economics Does Not Lie.
What if the new socialist president of France does not win the National Assembly Elections next month?
8 May 2012 - 11:23 am
François Hollande, the socialist
candidate, won the French presidential election on May 6. He got 51.63%
of the vote against 48.37% for the incumbent conservative president,
Nicolas Sarkozy. Quite a good score, even if Sarkozy did much better
than expected.
However, the presidency is only a first step. A lot will depend on the National Assembly elections, which are due to take place on June 10 and 17. If the socialists and their allies secure themselves an absolute majority, Hollande will enjoy quasi-monarchical powers for five years. If they do not, he will be a lame duck.
Americans are familiar with similar scenarios, except the United States Constitution provides a clear-cut separation of powers and thus preserves many of the presidential powers and prerogatives, even against a hostile or uncooperative Congress. Whereas the French Fifth Republic constitution, a creation of Charles de Gaulle in 1958, combines — in an uneasy and uncertain way — presidential and Westminsterian features, and thus turns any conflict between the powers into a ballistic zero-sum drama. In theory, France is not ruled by its president, as in the American presidential system, but rather by its prime minister who, as in the English Westminsterian system, is answerable to the National Assembly. As long as both officials are political partners, the president — endowed with such special powers as the right to call for an early election or a referendum — is a de facto but undisputed CEO. When they belong to different and competing parties, the prime minister takes over.
De Gaulle perfectly understood the logic — or the illogic — of his system: he made clear that the president, once deprived of electoral support, had no choice but to resign. He actually acted accordingly in 1969, when he abdicated following a failed referendum on comparatively minor issues. Things changed, however, when François Mitterrand, the Fifth Republic’s first socialist president, was faced with a conservative National Assembly in 1986: instead of resigning he agreed to become a lame duck — but a lame duck with teeth who made full use of his residual powers in order to undermine the cabinet, to hasten its fall, and to win a reelection in 1988.
A conservative and allegedly Gaullist president, Jacques Chirac, followed in 1997 when his party lost an early election he himself had called. For the five ensuing years, he “cohabited“ (to use the authorized French expression) with Lionel Jospin, the socialist prime minister. Both under Mitterrand and Chirac, cohabition led to such ridiculous situations as the president and the prime minister of France together attending international summits like G7 or the European Council.
Things went even further in 2002, when Jospin introduced — with Chirac’s assent — a constitutional revision that shortened the president’s term from seven to five years. Since the Assembly is also elected for five years, the obvious outcome was that the parliamentary election would closely follow the presidential one. It worked to Chirac’s advantage upon his reelection in 2002, and then to Sarkozy’s advantage in 2007.
Hollande is convinced that the same will be true about him next month. But will it? There is at least one precedent that he should consider. After being reelected in 1988, Mitterrand called an early election to get rid of the 1986 conservative National Assembly. What he got was a lame Assembly with a relative but not an absolute majority for the socialist party, and a weak centrist minority could not act as a steady ally. Five years later, he lost the 1993 parliamentary election and was reduced to a lame duck position again. Since he was then dying of cancer, he could not again mastermind a socialist revenge; on the other hand, he was treated in an extremely respectful and dignified way by the day’s ruler, conservative Prime Minister Edouard Balladur.
Can the Right actually wrest the National Assembly from Hollande next month? It is not wholly unthinkable. First and foremost, one must remember that the main factor for Sarkozy’s defeat was his personal unpopularity, and not just among the Left — which hated him from the onset in the most irrational way — but also among the Right, which felt he had not implemented the platform he had been elected for in 2007. Even given such unpopularity, Sarkozy managed to win back most of the conservative vote.
What, then, of a new and less controversial conservative leader? For the time being, there are three potential leaders. Jean-François Copé, the UMP (conservative party) boss, is an overambitious young man who opposed Sarkozy on many issues but is nevertheless seen as a Sarkozy’s clone (a bad point). François Fillon served as Sarkozy’s underling prime minister for five years and enjoyed some kind of popularity among conservatives for looking more conservative than his boss, but he could not possibly cut it against Hollande. Alain Juppé, the mayor of Bordeaux and a former prime minister under Chirac, seems to enjoy as much gravitas as Hollande and could actually be up to the job.
A second argument for a conservative rebound next month is that a socialist parliamentary victory would subject France to a one-party regime. The socialists and their allies would control the presidency, both houses of Parliament (the Assembly and the less consequential Senate), the government, almost all regional councils, most counties, and most big towns. They would, in line with France’s statist character, control the media, the academic sphere, and many of the most important industries even more tightly. Sarkozy declined to mention this throughout his campaign for reelection — another mistake of his. I have noticed that Nadine Morano, a Sarkozy archloyalist and a rising conservative star, started talking about it right after Hollande’s election.
A third argument is that Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, and François Bayrou, the centrist maverick, may have lost some of their luster. Both declined to support Sarkozy on the presidential second round. Le Pen said her voters were free to act as they wished. Bayrou said that while he would vote for Hollande, he would allow his voters to decide for themselves. That ran against the wishes of most of their respective supporters. Most National Front voters switched to Sarkozy in order to defeat Hollande at any cost; most Bayrou voters supported Sarkozy or abstained. A new conservative leader with charisma, vista, and guts could certainly get them to “vote for France” or to “vote for democracy” in June.
Hollande’s toughest challenge is to make sense of his economic platform. The new French president is a follower of Keynes: he believes in state control, high taxes, and extended welfare. The fact that the global economy has undergone massive changes since the days of Keynes and that Barack Obama failed while implementing similar policies in the United States does not deter him. What he takes seriously, however, is the European Union, which will not allow for too much state control, and the euro, which does not allow for inordinate welfare spending. He can quit the EU and the eurozone as both the Far Left and the Far Right recommend, a move that would probably bring about a “Greek effect” on the French economy. Otherwise, he can abide by European rules, thus negating his platform altogether. Since both options are beyond him, he frantically insists for a drastic “production-oriented” and “people-oriented” revision in the European and euro policies.
His European partners may listen to him to a point. He may then tell the French that in order to overcome a very dangerous situation a broader coalition or even a national unity government is needed, and that a “socialist cum allies” parliamentary victory may help.
However, the presidency is only a first step. A lot will depend on the National Assembly elections, which are due to take place on June 10 and 17. If the socialists and their allies secure themselves an absolute majority, Hollande will enjoy quasi-monarchical powers for five years. If they do not, he will be a lame duck.
Americans are familiar with similar scenarios, except the United States Constitution provides a clear-cut separation of powers and thus preserves many of the presidential powers and prerogatives, even against a hostile or uncooperative Congress. Whereas the French Fifth Republic constitution, a creation of Charles de Gaulle in 1958, combines — in an uneasy and uncertain way — presidential and Westminsterian features, and thus turns any conflict between the powers into a ballistic zero-sum drama. In theory, France is not ruled by its president, as in the American presidential system, but rather by its prime minister who, as in the English Westminsterian system, is answerable to the National Assembly. As long as both officials are political partners, the president — endowed with such special powers as the right to call for an early election or a referendum — is a de facto but undisputed CEO. When they belong to different and competing parties, the prime minister takes over.
De Gaulle perfectly understood the logic — or the illogic — of his system: he made clear that the president, once deprived of electoral support, had no choice but to resign. He actually acted accordingly in 1969, when he abdicated following a failed referendum on comparatively minor issues. Things changed, however, when François Mitterrand, the Fifth Republic’s first socialist president, was faced with a conservative National Assembly in 1986: instead of resigning he agreed to become a lame duck — but a lame duck with teeth who made full use of his residual powers in order to undermine the cabinet, to hasten its fall, and to win a reelection in 1988.
A conservative and allegedly Gaullist president, Jacques Chirac, followed in 1997 when his party lost an early election he himself had called. For the five ensuing years, he “cohabited“ (to use the authorized French expression) with Lionel Jospin, the socialist prime minister. Both under Mitterrand and Chirac, cohabition led to such ridiculous situations as the president and the prime minister of France together attending international summits like G7 or the European Council.
Things went even further in 2002, when Jospin introduced — with Chirac’s assent — a constitutional revision that shortened the president’s term from seven to five years. Since the Assembly is also elected for five years, the obvious outcome was that the parliamentary election would closely follow the presidential one. It worked to Chirac’s advantage upon his reelection in 2002, and then to Sarkozy’s advantage in 2007.
Hollande is convinced that the same will be true about him next month. But will it? There is at least one precedent that he should consider. After being reelected in 1988, Mitterrand called an early election to get rid of the 1986 conservative National Assembly. What he got was a lame Assembly with a relative but not an absolute majority for the socialist party, and a weak centrist minority could not act as a steady ally. Five years later, he lost the 1993 parliamentary election and was reduced to a lame duck position again. Since he was then dying of cancer, he could not again mastermind a socialist revenge; on the other hand, he was treated in an extremely respectful and dignified way by the day’s ruler, conservative Prime Minister Edouard Balladur.
Can the Right actually wrest the National Assembly from Hollande next month? It is not wholly unthinkable. First and foremost, one must remember that the main factor for Sarkozy’s defeat was his personal unpopularity, and not just among the Left — which hated him from the onset in the most irrational way — but also among the Right, which felt he had not implemented the platform he had been elected for in 2007. Even given such unpopularity, Sarkozy managed to win back most of the conservative vote.
What, then, of a new and less controversial conservative leader? For the time being, there are three potential leaders. Jean-François Copé, the UMP (conservative party) boss, is an overambitious young man who opposed Sarkozy on many issues but is nevertheless seen as a Sarkozy’s clone (a bad point). François Fillon served as Sarkozy’s underling prime minister for five years and enjoyed some kind of popularity among conservatives for looking more conservative than his boss, but he could not possibly cut it against Hollande. Alain Juppé, the mayor of Bordeaux and a former prime minister under Chirac, seems to enjoy as much gravitas as Hollande and could actually be up to the job.
A second argument for a conservative rebound next month is that a socialist parliamentary victory would subject France to a one-party regime. The socialists and their allies would control the presidency, both houses of Parliament (the Assembly and the less consequential Senate), the government, almost all regional councils, most counties, and most big towns. They would, in line with France’s statist character, control the media, the academic sphere, and many of the most important industries even more tightly. Sarkozy declined to mention this throughout his campaign for reelection — another mistake of his. I have noticed that Nadine Morano, a Sarkozy archloyalist and a rising conservative star, started talking about it right after Hollande’s election.
A third argument is that Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, and François Bayrou, the centrist maverick, may have lost some of their luster. Both declined to support Sarkozy on the presidential second round. Le Pen said her voters were free to act as they wished. Bayrou said that while he would vote for Hollande, he would allow his voters to decide for themselves. That ran against the wishes of most of their respective supporters. Most National Front voters switched to Sarkozy in order to defeat Hollande at any cost; most Bayrou voters supported Sarkozy or abstained. A new conservative leader with charisma, vista, and guts could certainly get them to “vote for France” or to “vote for democracy” in June.
Hollande’s toughest challenge is to make sense of his economic platform. The new French president is a follower of Keynes: he believes in state control, high taxes, and extended welfare. The fact that the global economy has undergone massive changes since the days of Keynes and that Barack Obama failed while implementing similar policies in the United States does not deter him. What he takes seriously, however, is the European Union, which will not allow for too much state control, and the euro, which does not allow for inordinate welfare spending. He can quit the EU and the eurozone as both the Far Left and the Far Right recommend, a move that would probably bring about a “Greek effect” on the French economy. Otherwise, he can abide by European rules, thus negating his platform altogether. Since both options are beyond him, he frantically insists for a drastic “production-oriented” and “people-oriented” revision in the European and euro policies.
His European partners may listen to him to a point. He may then tell the French that in order to overcome a very dangerous situation a broader coalition or even a national unity government is needed, and that a “socialist cum allies” parliamentary victory may help.
Related Reading:
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Voting For Yesterday In France
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Europe's Demographic Deficit Grows Wider By The Day
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Après Sarkozy, Le Déluge. Viva M Hollande - L'homme, Qui Va Détruire La France!
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France Commits Suicide
Signed, Sealed, Delivered by Stevie Wonder
Like a fool, I went and stayed too long
Now, I'm wondering if your love's still strong
Ooo baby, here I am
Signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours.
Then that time I went and said goodbye
Now, I'm back and not ashamed to cry
Ooo baby, here I am
Signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours
Here I am, baby You got my future in your hands
Here I am, baby
You got my future in your hands
I've done a lot of foolish things
That I really didn't mean, didn't I?
Oh baby, seen a lot of things in this old world
When I touch them, they mean nothing, girl
Ooo baby, here I am
Signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours, I'm yours
Oowee baby, you set my soul on fire
That's why I know you're my heart's only desire
Ooo baby, here I am
Signed, sealed, delivered,
I'm yours
Here I am, baby
You got my future in your hands, baby
Here I am, baby
You got my future in your hands, baby
Here I am, baby
Signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours
(You got my future in your hands, baby)
Here I am, baby
Signed, sealed, delivered,
I'm yours
(You got my future in your hands, baby)
Yeah, I've done a lot of foolish things
That I really didn't mean
I could be a broken man [Incomprehensible], here I am, baby
Here I am, baby
Signed, sealed, delivered,
I'm yours
Here I am, baby
I'm yours, yeah,
I'm yours, yeah
I'm yours, yeah, I'm yours
Here I am, baby
I'm yours, yeah,
I'm yours
Here I am, baby
Signed, sealed, delivered,
I'm yours, yeah
Here I am, baby, yeah
I'm yours
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