France regained

With 85% of voters proud to have performed their civic duty, 75% of whom had already voted for the main government parties in the first round, compared with only one in three five years ago when every second voter stayed at home, the Republic has made a comeback. This is very good news indeed!

‘The rehabilitation of politics’. That was Nicolas Sarkozy’s motto for years. Too many promises not kept, too many major and minor scandals and, above all, too many failures of economic policy and too much cowardice about the necessary reforms had undermined people’s trust in the successive majorities. No outgoing parliamentary majority has been re-elected since 1981. The scepticism, disgust and despair of many of our compatriots found their supreme expression on 21 April 2002. On that day, 70% of workers and employees either abstained or opted for extremist parties. And then 29 May 2005 saw a majority of French citizens choosing to say ‘no’ to Europe as a gesture of defiance towards those who represented them there.

That page has been turned. A new chapter is opening. A new political generation is speaking the language of its time. The French are rediscovering the pride and potency of exercising citizenship. It is they who have sovereign power, who can bend candidates to their will. There was a time for protest. Now the time for responsibility has returned. Never have extremist candidates, or candidates with too specialised a message, been abandoned in such numbers.

Will this be a new chapter that is a continuation of the 20th century, or will it be a new volume in the history of France, a 21st-century volume? That is what is at stake in the second round.

Ségolène Royal has a youthful style, but after a promising start a year ago, she has finally given up the idea of grass roots renewal. Her discourse, her thinking and her proposals echo the credo of the old left in France. In her view, everything to the left is moral, everything to the right is immoral. Every problem can be solved with public funds, which means more debts today and more taxes tomorrow. The successful are the rich, who must be punished for being rich, regardless of whether that discourages success and effort. Companies are suspected of exploitation if they hire workers and guilty of a social crime if they fire them. The fact that France has the lowest weekly working hours and retirement age in the world is regarded as social progress, even if the other side of the coin is the highest unemployment rate in Europe; all you have to do is give the unemployed a status. The public service is a republican god and those who use it should be honoured to be subject to the whims of corporate unions, the main beneficiaries of this religion. The extraordinary success of other European countries, including the social democratic countries of northern Europe, which have achieved the best social results in the whole world, could not serve as an inspiration for the French model, because it makes too many concessions to shameful liberalism.

For Nicolas Sarkozy, problems are not a matter of either right or left, and the right solutions are those that succeed. His starting point is values, rather than technical measures: republican values, such as work, which is the precondition for integrating the individual in society; human dignity, which presupposes individual responsibility; economic good sense, which means you cannot spend more than you earn; the family, the forum of solidarity; the general interest, which must take precedence over sectional interests; the public service, which must return to its prime purpose of serving the public; the national identity, now underpinned by the European identity.

There are the same differences of view on Europe. Paralysed by the split in the Socialist Party at the time of the referendum, Ségolène Royal put off all major decisions to a later date. In repeating that any new treaty would have to supplement the draft Constitution and would be put to a referendum, she deliberately took the risk of blocking the impetus given by Angela Merkel with her proposal for a simplified treaty to be drafted before the end of the year. On top of that, she took the huge risk of the Constitution being rejected again, whether in France or elsewhere. For why should the Spaniards be happy to accept a new text that had the good fortune to please the French more than the one that 75% of our neighbours had adopted?

Like Angela Merkel, Romano Prodi and José-Luis Zapatero, Nicolas Sarkozy needs a Europe that works quickly and well. A genuinely political Europe. That is impossible on the basis of the existing treaties: not only does the unanimity rule prevent the settlement of differences between 27 States but, even if they all agree, as on energy and the greenhouse effect, we do not have the legal and political means of implementing the decisions that are taken! Hence the urgent need to incorporate, in an ordinary treaty, those provisions that were not called into question during the referendum debate and that do not prejudge the content of the Union’s policies but organise the way it functions, its decision-making procedures and the election of Europe’s leaders by its citizens. All our partners agree that they will try to achieve that by the end of the year, so that the national parliaments can ratify it and implement it in June 2009, the date of the European Parliament elections. Once that has been done, we will have enough time left to draft a genuine Constitution, broadening the debate as much as possible and ensuring that not just the citizens of a few countries but all Europeans decide by a referendum held throughout Europe on the same day.

On the eve of a fascinating and hazardous journey, the French have the choice between an experienced pilot who knows where he wants to go and a candidate who believes all winds can be in her favour. After all our country has gone through in the past 20 years, with two million unemployed, the need to integrate the young, to relaunch Europe, the threats of terrorism and international competition, how could we still entrust the future of France to the prejudices of old-style socialism corrected by the art of improvisation?

Alain Lamassoure, 24 April 2007.