Socialist malaise and Sarkozy's finesse
Cohen, Mitchell
PARIS: Last year an American socialist on a long stay in France ambled almost daily past the Socialist Party (PS) headquarters of Paris's fourth arrondissement. He thought to stop in. "What are...
...An intellectual architect of Tony Blair's "Third Way," Anthony Giddens of the London School of Economics, praised Sarkozy for recognizing that "wealth has to be created before it can be distributed"—not mentioning that France is one of the richest countries in the world...
...he wondered...
...He will have to contend, however, with some formidable PS urban politicians, such as Bertrand Delanoe, the popular mayor of Paris, and Manuel Valls, a former aide to Lionel Jospin, and current National Assembly member who is the well-regarded mayor of Evry...
...Complicating the Picture The left rebounded in elections for the National Assembly in June...
...He wants France to skirt the Eurozone requirement of a balanced budget by 2010 and aims to navigate around various EU rules in order to bolster what might be called dual economic policies—calling for free markets while protecting French industrial and financial concerns...
...A few weeks after Sarkozy's Libya trip, he vacationed in New England—an unusual site for Gaullist relaxation...
...The United States then took a more prominent role in the Arab-Israeli zone and after the 1973 war proved to be the sole power able to influence both sides...
...But Bush will be gone after 2008, and the United States will remain...
...After his victory, Sarkozy quickly brought political critics into his government to broaden its public standing...
...Let us break with our prejudices," appealed "Les Gracques...
...It originated within the Christian Democratic resistance movement (its adherents supported de Gaulle) and presented itself as "neither left nor right...
...Had he elaborated, he would have pointed out how part of the left ever imagines there is just one issue in the world (the market) and a sole remedy...
...Whether or not the PS's internal culture is ready for an alliance with centrists is an open question...
...The debate is over the nature of that change and whether it is forced through or done with consultation and negotiation which is normal and democratic...
...Chirac had imagined that an expanding EU would enhance French power, but it now appeared to dilute it...
...It seemed that he might win an upset victory in the presidential race, but ended in third place...
...He irritated Berlin with an attempt to make changes at the European Central Bank and did not consult Merkel before nominating Strauss-Kahn to the IMF...
...Even though Qaddafi signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, critics point out, so too did North Korea and Iran, and he was trying to make a bomb not long ago...
...Post•leo Gaullist Foreign Policy Tough-minded realism—rigorous pursuit of tightly conceived national interests—underlay most French foreign policy throughout the Fifth Republic...
...Kouchner has been a foe of antiAmericanism, and when he served in Mitterrand's government was admired for his "idealism...
...The last time the PS won the presidency was 1988, and the last time the left won the Assembly was 1997...
...In fact, he was initiating what Le Monde called "détente" with Washington...
...On the eve of the June war Paris tilted to the Arab side and imposed an arms embargo on the Jewish state...
...He hopes to do something similar in local elections next spring...
...Their differences could be argued on realist versus idealist grounds: "Turkey in the EU will sap European and French strength" versus "Turkey in the EU expands democratic possibilities...
...Listen to those around Sarkozy and you would think that unions control the economy and are "conservative" foes of "modernization...
...The PS is trying to steady itself and to survive recriminations...
...Valls calls for a thorough revamp of the PS...
...The UMP received 39.5 percent...
...These included, he went on, equality before the law, respect for the individual, and tolerance—not market fundamentalism...
...Kouchner, in contrast, could have a positive influence on French foreign policy...
...Who will be its superego...
...His presidential campaign promised he would protect "national identity" and control immigration...
...But a compelling case might be made that a refounded Socialist party in a globalizing (and Europeanizing) age needs to refound democratic unionism and at the same time to enhance substantive coordination among social democratic parties...
...Then PS voters said "No," too, pointing to a gap between its broader electorate and actual members...
...Next spring is the fortieth anniversary of May 1968...
...A constitutional quirk in the timing of elections has sometimes led to a president from one party "cohabiting" in power with a prime minister and cabinet from an opposing party...
...Aubry glared at him when he pronounced the word "liberal" 22 DISSENT / Fall 2007 much as, say, Irving Kristol would have done, albeit with American neoconservative eyes...
...He improved ties with the United States and Israel while his foreign ministers pursued third worldism...
...That doesn't mean it has no need of amendment...
...In the end, she presented "100 Pledges" but no persuasive vision of a Socialist project...
...Green leader Reinhard Biltikofer called the French moves "reckless and nationalistic...
...Please voice new ones as quickly as possible...
...The problem was the word "liberalism...
...In the French case, that makes "refoundation" of the PS itself particularly important...
...While Royal declared during her campaign that taxation should depend on the requirements of "social justice," the new finance minister, Christine Lagarde, complains that the tax system chases the wealthy out of the country and says tax cuts are needed to reward work...
...Royal spoke of "participative democracy" during the campaign and developed her own team that made extensive use of the Web, often deploying "interactive" means to shape her program...
...Still, thousands of young people filled the streets near the PS national headquarters on Paris's rue de Solferino waiting for the final tally of the presidential election...
...Most of them knew, surely, that socialist ideas undergo interminable crises...
...Combine Sarkozy's quest for better ties with the United States, his assertiveness in Europe, his Mediterranean proposal, and his Libya adventure, and the emerging paradigm is postneoGaullism...
...But envisage a doctor who thinks a clotting agent is good not just to stop bleeding, but to cure every health problem, including clogged arteries...
...Refoundation" (a common PS word now) will take shape significantly in reaction to what Sarkozy does, and that can trigger all sorts of changes...
...Not surprisingly 75 percent of PS voters concurred, compared to 38 percent of Sarkozy's electorate...
...Marx called himself a "communist" to distinguish his proletarian revolutionism from do-good "socialist" reformers...
...She also speaks out against what she calls France's "old national habit"—thinking...
...But in the end, the president will determine things (as did Mitterrand...
...They have a different take on social amendment...
...Then they will have to rethink their relation to the economic role of the state...
...This was obviously the first campaign for many of them...
...The cold war supplied context...
...These appeals were rejected...
...Or who thinks it should be used to thwart unpleasant bodily functions with which we must simply live...
...Egalitarianism is the regulative idea, the key value, of the left, but it is useless if disembodied...
...This has complex historical roots, first in a strong tradition of radical syndicalism whose adherents were averse to parties and reformism, and then in Communist Party domination of the largest union federation...
...Then-prime minister Chirac was especially friendly with Saddam Hussein...
...In the run-up, Chirac scolded east and central Europeans who refused to follow his lead...
...No, you wouldn't think Jospin's premiership was very good if you believed a PS government could create utopia in, say, a quarter hour...
...Rachida Dati, of poor North African descent, is justice minister...
...Sunday Telegraph, May 13, 2007...
...After this publicity coup, he rushed to Libya to sign several accords, including for arms, claiming there was no quid pro quo...
...Jose Bove, famous for trashing a McDonald's to protest Americanization and who presents himself as leader of a worldwide "alter-globalization" movement, received 1.3 percent of the vote...
...He proposed himself as the alternative who was neither left nor right...
...Americans who worked in Eugene McCarthy's challenge to Lyndon Johnson in 1968 would have found the atmosphere familiar...
...The UMP won 46.5 percent...
...Last summer, as EU Commissioner for Foreign Affairs Benita Ferrero-Waldner and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier closed a deal with Muammar Qaddafi to free Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor convicted in Libya on trumped-up charges of infecting children with AIDS, Sarkozy dispatched his wife to usher the freed prisoners abroad...
...He is a tough realist whose understanding of national interest would be difficult to distinguish from Henry Kissinger's, except for the nation involved...
...This included supply of nuclear technology to Iraq...
...Neo-Gaullist foreign policy failed...
...Berlin is uneasy because it means a "pole" outside the EU framework...
...A Labeling Problem In mid-2001, that same American socialist, the one who kept walking past the closed PS office, spoke briefly at a PS colloquium...
...There have been times, however, when genuine idealism and humanitarianism played important roles...
...Rama Yade, born in Senegal, is minister of state for human rights...
...The Communists, once a major force, are in decline and won just 1.9 percent in the presidential vote...
...Chirac's government was "the worst in the history of the Fifth Republic...
...They chastised their party for justifying "leftwing conservatism by electoral contingencies" (that is, for depending on the far left in the second round...
...But neo-Gaullism assumed multipolarism was the tonic for French weaknesses: a French-led Europe could counterbalance and compete with the United States...
...The far left may rejoice at this, but one thing that ought to have been learned from the twentieth century is that only disaster comes of "revolutionary" contempt for representative democracy...
...When Chirac explained his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the key theme was the need for a "multipolar" world (Iraqi suffering wasn't a factor...
...France harped at Israeli (and American) policy and nurtured Arab ties...
...The first round of legislative elections also yields a general sense of public sentiment...
...Pursued intelligently, it need not dismiss national interests, although it may sometimes demand tempering them in respect of the concerns of allies...
...A debate should come soon...
...When the disappointing results came in, they chanted "Merci, Segolêne...
...Sarkozy's appointment of Kouchner portended redefinition of the pursuit of French interests...
...To do that, Socialists will first have to rethink their programmatic relation to markets (at home, in Europe, globally...
...Democratic multilateralism, in contrast, makes a priority of mutual support among democratic countries regardless, say, of the Atlantic Ocean...
...The American socialist told listeners that the left had to be heir to the best ideas of liberalism...
...The U.S...
...Hollande chaired...
...There was no discord on this last point...
...But neo-Gaullist multipolarism preceded Bush...
...These are not original points, and there have been French socialists with the same notions (that cannot be said of the Communist Party...
...The European Central Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development also have French directors...
...Three Trotskyist parties live in a make-believe Bolshevik world...
...Unfortunately, he has little to say about inequality and economics other than rote praise of markets...
...In 2005, he campaigned against the proposed European Constitution in a PS internal referendum, but promptly disregarded his own party membership, which voted "Yes...
...Predictions circulated that Sarkozy's victory would provoke violence in suburbs with large North African immigrant populations...
...Enlisting Kouchner gave Sarkozy other advantages...
...Idealism, especially the sense that France has republican and cultural missions, often served as its superstructure...
...The French wanted an end to Chirac's era...
...Sarkozy served in their cabinets and as chief of the UMP...
...Here is something for comparison...
...The theme was "the future of the socialist idea...
...24 DISSENT / Fall 2007 reposition France...
...That Sarkozy thought of both these men for the Quai d'Orsay is another demonstration of his political prowess...
...In fact, he invoked the names of Jean Jaures, the founder of twentiethcentury French socialism, and Blum in the campaign...
...While the new president's personal popularity soared (and is still high), some people were clearly nervous about him...
...The PS is running on intellectual empty...
...Who will mind the children...
...But there was a problem...
...he was of the Gaullist establishment and outside it...
...There is no social majority on behalf of an old-fashioned socialist program—actually, there probably never was one—however attractive it might be...
...Still, at that time, France had an impressive left cabinet headed by Socialist Lionel Jospin...
...He has since founded "MoDem," the Mouvement Democrate...
...Census Bureau recently reported that 12.6 percent of Americans live under the poverty line (thirty-seven million people...
...But the "center" is an ambiguous reality in French politics...
...It will have to figure out what a twenty-first-century socialist party should— or should not—be...
...The MRP later fell apart, partly because of Algeria but also because de Gaulle sought to undermine potential challenges to his personalization of power...
...Whichever set you use, the decline came without the "modernizing" law urged by Chirac/ Villepin...
...If your "conscience" always tells you that you must out-radicalize yourself and that your best judgment betrays left-wing ideals if reality impinges on its formulation, you end up telling the world to change while you are an idee fixe...
...Royal had to put up with a certain amount of sexism in her own party...
...His criticisms of Washington and of a bipolar world, together with his withdrawal from NATO's unified command and his post-Algeria pursuit of influence in the third world, were all part of a quest to *But if Strauss-Kahn becomes a successful reformer at the IMF, his return to PS leadership becomes plausible and might even position him to challenge Sarkozy in the next presidential race...
...Nonetheless, his government now offers cash payments to immigrants (legal, not illegal ones) to go "home" and has stiffened requirements for "family reunifications...
...Blair-like, he inhaled "the center" and left the opposition gasping...
...Rocard had called on the PS to ally with the political center (Bayrou), as did a group calling itself "Les Gracques" (the Gracchi), after the ancient Roman patricians who rebelled against their own class on behalf of reform...
...That will emerge...
...They both need an intellectually open and innovative Socialist opposition party...
...Unemployment has never been so low in 25 years," said Le Monde...
...But only 8 percent of the workforce is unionized (almost all in public services) and union leaders—even in the Communist dominated CGT (Confederation Gererale du Travail), the largest union federation—are not "anti-reform...
...The French need to work more, he insists, usually neglecting to mention the high hourly productivity rate of French workers or that France's top companies did extraordinarily well last year on the Bourse (stock exchange...
...This was a time of massive demonstrations against labor legislation proposed by the conservative government of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin...
...Policy shifted after Mitterrand became president in 1981...
...He lived in France for much of the past two years...
...Sarkozy opposes Turkish entry into the EU...
...He positions himself as a leader of the party's left...
...Matters became worse when the French public voted against the European Constitution...
...It would bring together European states, North Africa (a traditional French concern), and parts of the Middle East in a new cooperative venture, providing an outlet for Turkey were its EU membership foreclosed...
...As the world becomes more and more "globalized," and if the "Old World" becomes more and more Europeanized, states will have fewer tools to shape socioeconomic policies...
...Look more closely at both the presidential and Assembly vote and France's political landscape emerges as more complicated than suggested by pronouncements of decisive triumph for Sarkozy's ideas...
...26 DISSENT / Fall 2007...
...These preemptive tactics took another form too...
...Despite most predictions, Sarkozy's bloc dropped from 357 to 313 of the 577 seats...
...Les Gracques" was actually a collective name for several toplevel administrators in past PS governments...
...Indeed, one could accuse the PS old guard of having taken liberties when it came to equality on behalf of a fraternity...
...asked Laurent Fabius targeting also Francois Hollande, the party's head, Royal's (now ex-) companion, and father of her children...
...There is a close historical link between the development of modern political parties in Western states and the success of representative democratic systems in them...
...This means," said the International Herald Tribune (April 18, 2007) "that four years into an economic expansion, the percentage of Americans defined as poor was higher than at the bottom of the last recession in late 2001, when it was 11.7...
...Although Chirac made a gesture to Washington in the mid-1990s, multipolarism stressed competition among geographic blocs, reminiscent in ways of competition among nation-states...
...Activists wore T-shirts that said "Fiers d'être Socialiste" (Proud to be Socialist...
...With the cold war over, "unipolarism" was the problem...
...We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come," she declared last summer, "This is why I say to you: Enough thinking, already...
...Sarkozy became the first national politician to break into his electorate.* But then he appointed the most diverse government in French history...
...Will it simply rearticulate its values and put forth old proposals in new guise...
...Sarkozy has also been assertive in the EU, in apparent competition with Merkel...
...The unions know and accept this...
...Sarkozy, who opposed the Iraq War, knows that Bush is unpopular in France...
...bune, adding, "Working families in France want to be richer...
...Sixty-three percent of all voters thought it needed partial revision...
...the American speaker was saying something that many socialists prefer not to admit fully...
...The first round of a presidential race gauges public sympathies broadly beDISSENT / Fall 2007 19 cause it allows a wide spectrum of parties to run...
...The German press denounced Sarkozy for continuing "the French tradition of selling nuclear reactors throughout the world" and for walking onto the "Libyan blackmail stage," in the words of the Suddeutsche Zeitung...
...0 NE OF Sarkozy's proposals is for a new bloc of Mediterranean-rim nations...
...French Socialists (and they are not the only ones) like to insist that they are "socialists" and "not social democrats...
...Le Pen's vote plummeted...
...Sarkozy insists that he is not a "thinker" ("I am someone concrete...
...But he has not yet faced significant resistance...
...WHEN CHIRAc succeeded Mitterrand, he conveyed foreign policy into neoGaullism...
...We are seeking an important cultural change," Eric Chaney, Morgan Stanley's chief economist for Europe, told the International Herald Tri*Thanks to Martin Schain for pointing this out and for valuable criticisms of an early draft of this article...
...Refoundation" also raises a crucial question for the future of the French left—indeed the left everywhere...
...Consider the implications if parties win elections on the basis of social and economic programs that cannot be carried out properly because the state has lost many levers...
...Royal wooed him in the second round of the elections...
...But he clearly has a potent political mind...
...Kouchner supports it...
...When de Gaulle looked at the world, he saw, before everything else, contesting nation-states...
...In Paris, Le Figaro, which is usually pro-Sarkozy, observed that "even if considerable contracts are at stake, even if uranium—which Libya possesses in high quantities—is a rare prime material that France needs, it must be acknowledged that the seawater desalination plant can very well be achieved without nuclear power...
...Kouchner's acceptance of the foreign ministry was chastised as opportunism by many Socialists and his justification surprised many observers...
...BernardHenri Levy didn't follow suit...
...His course in the Middle East provides a good example of his policies, and also their perils...
...France's intellectuals lack the cachet of, say, Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1950s or 1960s...
...Sarkozy, it seems, understands the implications...
...His foreign policy is in tandem with domestic strategy...
...Multipolarism" was the answer...
...But what may be good for French foreign policy is not necessarily good for French democracy or for the French left...
...Yet, the brief remarks by the American did not go over especially well...
...Some speculate that he is a pro-Bush "neoconservative" or a Right Bank Thatcherite...
...Social democratic" was "unscientific...
...It's a good question for the left everywhere, and readers will, I hope, forgive my old-leftish formulation of it...
...Perhaps President Nicolas Sarkozy is a Blairite Gaullist who dares not speak the adjective...
...Combine that with the far left and the total percentage reaches the mid-thirties...
...Evidently, Morgan Stanley and the French government are now a "we"—and evidently, French workers will be richer if the business class has more power over them, fewer state regulations protect them, and unions are weaker...
...Add up the first-round percentages of the PS (26 percent), centrist Francois Bayrou (19 percent), and several far left contenders (some 9 percent), and a majority voted against Sarkozy, albeit for different reasons...
...He had already outmaneuvered conservative foes of his own presidential aspirations, including a sitting president (Chirac) and prime minister (Villepin...
...Sarkozy secured conservative succession despite an unpopular conservative government...
...they rest on calculating relations of power...
...that change is necessary and that people want change," says Bernard Thibault, head of the CGT...
...He is especially preoccupied with "American hyper-power...
...Liberation, the left daily, captured what was happening with a front cover that showed a blue fist gripping the PS's red rose, whose petals were scattering...
...Socialist Fadela Amara, also of poor North African descent and renowned for work to protect women (especially in the suburbs) from violence, is a minister of state for urban affairs...
...France in the twenty-first century is not France of twenty, let alone a hundred years ago, when Socialists founded the SFIO (the French Section of the Socialist International...
...In spring 2006, during the demonstrations that forced Chirac and Villepin to back off from their labor proposal (to allow firing new hires under age twenty-six without cause), many American editorialists repeated the dire warnings of France's conservatives: chronic unemployment couldn't be redressed without such rules...
...Sixty-three percent of voters aged eighteen to twenty-four cast ballots for Royal, although only 46 percent of all women did...
...What are local Socialist politics like...
...But in July 2007, the Ministry of Labor announced that unemployment had dropped to 8 percent, down from 10.1 percent in December 2003...
...PS leaders like Hollande branded Bayrou as "rightist...
...Ankara has already expressed chagrin...
...A poll published after her defeat showed that 22 percent of her own voters thought the PS needed a fundamental modification of its program and "references...
...A year later, Nicolas Sarkozy, of the conservative Union for a Popular Majority (UMP), defeated Socialist Segolene Royal in presidential elections by 53 percent to 47 percent...
...DISSENT / Fall 2007 23 The welfare state depended on those sorts of tools...
...Yet a poll on "the battle of values" showed that 56 percent of the French agreed that "to establish social justice, it would be necessary to take from the rich and to give to the poor...
...Yet he finessed a double image...
...Ties to the United States would be repaired while his foreign minister sought to expand French clout in Europe and the postcolonial world...
...If he were a socialist, he might be taking cues from Leon Blum, who reconstructed the French socialist movement in opposition to the rise of French communism in the 1920s...
...Roll up your sleeves...
...it must be a function of the world it engages...
...Or can it originate a coherent Liberal Socialist project as the alternative to Blairite Gaullism...
...Finally, Chancellor Angela Merkel asserted Germany's leadership role on the European scene—the post-World War II era can't last forever—all while she sought to improve transatlantic ties...
...After all, if being "left" means anything, it means that you recognize the harm of reducing human beings to suppliers and demanders...
...It is a notable point by an eminent academic who has long had job security...
...Backers didn't do very well in the legislative contests...
...Yet, as prime minister in the 1980s, he steered away from left economics at the behest of Socialist President Francois Mitterrand (in what might be viewed as a Gallic anticipation of Blairism...
...If you stood in the crowd near the PS national headquarters on election night, you could have seen a lone figure with a sign declaring that the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) was "100% on the Left...
...The far left, in various guises, often steps into this role for mainstream left parties and hobbles redefinition...
...Had Vedrine become minister, Sarkozy's foreign policy could have been two-tracked in the Mitterrand mold...
...That is, he favored identifying French foreign policy with human rights...
...Panelists included Martine Aubry, whose Labor Ministry produced the thirty-five-hour workweek, and intellectual historian Pierre Rosenvallon...
...He campaigned for "No" in the national referendum...
...The election "should not have been lost," observed former Socialist prime minister Michel Rocard just after the presidential vote...
...In an American context, it situates you on the left, but in France it identifies you with Thatcher-like ideas...
...In the second round—for districts not won by a majority vote in the first—weaker contenders yield to stronger candidates, usually supporting a party close to them politically (or with whom they have a deal...
...Fabius's own trajectory is indicative of more general PS woes...
...It is designed to winnow out all but two candidates for the second round...
...The Socialists made good use of his proposal to raise the value-added tax in order to reduce social insurance payments by companies...
...He left the PS reeling when he coaxed several leading Socialists into his government...
...Royal received just a quarter of the vote in the first round, which probably represents the PS natural base...
...Sarkozy aims to weaken labor protections and the social role of the state in a country with a statist tradition and unease about its place in the world...
...A democratic left in power, said Blum, cannot press radical and total transformation without a strong majority mandate...
...National interests come first, he asserted...
...This only drew them closer to Washington...
...Qaddafi will gain nuclear technology, ostensibly for a desalination plant...
...Germany would follow France's lead because of all the past history, and so would smaller European countries...
...Unlike most major parties of the European democratic left— such as those in Germany, Sweden, and Britain—French Socialists have never been intimately bound to and molded by interaction with a sympathetic labor movement...
...In this, France is hardly unique...
...The left, in the meantime, seems stuck in its own Chirac era—faithful to a heritage, unable to innovate...
...And the status of political parties is also in need of reconsideration for broad democratic, not just socialist reasons —and not only in France...
...In the 2007 elections, Francois Bayrou declared himself the "radical center...
...Sarkozy is himself the descendant of a Hungarian immigrant...
...Their names disappeared from Sarkozy's rhetoric after the election...
...But if the state does not have all the old levers, and those it does have are at the disposal of Blairite Gaullism, what could be Liberal Socialist priorities...
...The result was indeed neither left nor right, just troubled...
...His human rights record is like decades of Abu Ghraib...
...MITCHELL COHEN is co-editor of Dissent and professor of political science at Baruch CollegeCUNY...
...Differences like these could produce another dual apDISSENT / Fall 2007 25 proach, at least in public...
...But this ends up as fidelity to labels...
...France railed against the Iraq War but was unable to prevent it...
...The only place to look for allies is the center...
...Today's left will have to ask, What is living, what is dead . . . and what is wheezing in the legacy of '68...
...He wooed supporters of JeanMarie Le Pen's anti-immigrant, bigoted National Front...
...Foreign policy will be shaped mainly at the Elysee Palace, where Jean-David Levitte, former ambassador to the United States, and an old foreign ministry hand, is now national security adviser...
...that is, be "open" to Socialists and thereby weaken the PS...
...France's electoral system allows a party to win a majority of seats without a popular majority...
...France was Israel's chief military supplier from the mid-1950s until 1967...
...The Mouvement Republicain populaire was an important force after the Second World War...
...This is, of course, in the United States, where the business class has enormous sway, taxes have been cut dramatically for the best off, there are fewer government regulations to protect workers, and there is less social legislation than in any other Western country...
...It responded to American power and to the changing role of the nation-state...
...The Germans now accuse the French president of "unilateralism...
...In its absence, it should use legislation to push society in a new direction...
...Blairite Gaullism All this displayed great political acumen...
...Nobody disputes...
...Markets have their baneful effects but they don't compare to those produced by twentieth-century efforts at their complete abolition...
...Blue is the traditional color of French conservative republicanism...
...This ex-education minister was a backbencher on the right who was pro-market, pro-European, but who began to vote against Villepin's budgets...
...Some economists prefer the statistics of EUROSTAT (the EU statistical office): unemployment in DISSENT / Fall 2007 21 June 2007 was 8.6 percent, down from 9.7 in December 2003 (8.7 percent in June 2002...
...The current Bush administration, from its first weeks in office, illustrated how not to achieve—and how to discourage—intelligent, democratic multilateralism...
...In one move he made a highly respected figure into France's face to the world and battered the PS...
...The difference between Chirac and Sarkozy is that Sarkozy really understands it is a post-Gaullist age and not a neo-Gaullist one...
...Finally, he saw a notice indicating when it was open—one day a week for a half hour...
...Unions have been on the defensive for decades...
...In doing so, they sacrificed any possibility of playing the role of conscience for a left seeking redefinition.* The same can be said of intellectuals such as Andre Glucksmann, who rushed to endorse Sarkozy because of irritation (sometimes justified) at the left...
...France would have sway there but not Germany...
...For instance, France argued forcefully for "humanitarian intervention" to stop Saddam Hussein's massacre of the Kurds at the end of the Kuwait/Iraq War of 1991...
...Sarkozy may be an original, a reformer of Gaullist statism for a globalizing age...
...Lenin renamed his party "communist" in 1918...
...Giddens pointed a finger at "rigid labor laws" like the "taxe Delande," which fines firms for making workers over age forty-five redundant...
...Sarkozy induced crisis in his opposition and covered himself politically in various domains...
...But 95.9 percent of the French voted against this Trotskyist vanguard of the universal class...
...Just after the election, Sarkozy moved to forestall future socialist alliances with the center by his offers to centrists (like the new defense minister, Herve Morin) and socialists (such as the new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Medecins sans Frontieres and an ex-PS minister...
...Less popular was his support for ousting Saddam Hussein...
...Here, a French peculiarity comes into play...
...He derided as "social democratic" the part of the French left that sought alliances with middle-class radicals in 1848, but late-nineteenthcentury German Marxists called themselves "Social Democrats...
...Its bequest, which Sarkozy vowed to vanquish from French life, will be the subject of books, articles, television programs, and symposia...
...He nominated a leading PS "centrist," ex-finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to head the International Monetary Fund...
...The PS is the major opposition party, thousands of new members joined it during the protests, yet it never seemed to situate itself in this broad opposition movement...
...After all, he came from the United States, where, unlike France, avowed socialists rarely come close to winning elections...
...Socialists in his government (but dependent on him) also provide leverage in the event of conflicts with his own party...
...Militants," as French parties call activists, filled the hall on the rim of Paris...
...The PS office was always closed...
...It is unlikely that any other PS candidate would have done better...
...Since the Mitterrand era, French socialists have leaned left in alliances, but they cannot secure a majority with the far-left parties...
...As interior minister in 2005, Sarkozy dismissed as "scum" residents who participated in mass tur20 DISSENT / Fall 2007 moil...
...It does mean that the future of parties with meaningful programs and possibilities to carry them out—parties that facilitate self-government— remains essential for democracy...
...Refoundation...
...The problem isn't only terminology...
...In this he sounded like the man who was apparently Sarkozy's first choice for the office, former foreign minister Hubert Vedrine...
...We are looking for change that betters the lives of the greatest number of people...
...Neither left nor right" may have reminded some voters of France's past history of "cohabitation...
...Red balloons with the PS symbol—a fist gripping a red rose— were in the air...
...Parties and elections become potentially meaningless...
...This might have been challenged in useful ways by people like Kouchner and Strauss-Kahn, but in the moment of left defeat they chose to turn away at Sarkozy's enticement...
...But if you considered its efforts to secure more social decency—for example, by extending significantly health care coverage for the poor—in the face of restraints ranging from globalization to the lumbering president Chirac, its record was quite credible...
Vol. 54 • September 2007 • No. 4
