Is This the New Look of France?

In Paris this week I am shocked at the number of homeless people sleeping in the cold and rain in doorways of the richest arrondissements. Leave the Gare du Nord where the new Eurostar train sweeps in after its two-hour trip from London and you have to thread your way over beggars and the homeless, victims of the French indifference to expanding their economy. Indeed, the crisis in France can be summed up simply: a quarter century ago, the French economy was 15 percent bigger than Britain's and growing faster. Today, the French economy is 10 percent smaller than Britain's and is slowing down—again. Some 400,000 of France's best business brains work in Britain. Some 400,000 of France's best scientific and technological minds work in the United States. Yet no one in France seems to question why their country drives so much of its best talent into exile.

Few answers are forthcoming either. When he took office this year, President Nicolas Sarkozy promised a radiant new dawn for a confident, modernized France. So far he is not delivering. Despite his apparent victory over the unions last month, he appears to want an economic revolution without pain. On foreign affairs, his cuddling up to George W. Bush, and his bellicose rhetoric on Iran look curiously dated as America prepares to say goodbye to the Bush years and the intelligence community downgrades Iran's nuclear threat. Meantime, he has little interest or vision for Europe. His attacks on the European Central Bank, his plea for the EU to adopt protectionist economic thinking and his Islamaphobic hostility to Turkey are not far from some of the Euro-skeptic nationalist thinking of Labour in the 1980s or the Tories today. For now, French voters are cautiously endorsing the Sarkozy mini-reforms but the president knows it will take very little to convert street protests into regime-shaking anger.

This state of affairs presents an opportunity for an intelligent French left. Nearly 25 years ago I wrote a pamphlet entitled "French Lessons for Labour," which argued that Britain's out-of-power Labour party could learn from a Socialist France that created world-beating firms, embraced Europe and faced down Soviet bullying. Now France limps behind Britain, and Sarkozy calls Putin to congratulate him on rigging an election as the rest of Europe looks with concern at Kremlin autocracy. So while Labour in Britain should remain a reference point for any reinvention of the French left, such is the hostility to les Anglo-Saxons and contempt for Tony Blair on the part of the Paris left that there will be no young politician or intellectual writing a pamphlet entitled "English Lessons for the French Left." Instead of looking for what Labour has done right, French critics point to the number of part-time jobs in Britain as evidence of failure, failing to understand themselves that for a party of the left the only way forward is to put people back into work under almost any conditions. Instead of accepting Labour ideas, they look for mechanisms like working weeks of 35 hours to help combat unemployment, as if work was a fixed amount of time that simply needed reallocation. Instead of coming up with ideas, the left is fleeing France or becoming wrapped up in internecine disputes.

The closest France has to a top-class European social democrat—Dominique Strauss-Kahn—left French politics to become boss of the IMF in Washington. Able politicians from the political left, like Laurent Fabius or loudmouths like Arnaud Montebourg have been badly compromised by adopting anti-European positions over the EU constitutional reforms. French Socialists, meanwhile, still fondly believe their job is to teach the world how to understand France, rather than how to encourage the French to understand the world. Their candidate in this year's election, Ségolène Royal, just published her account of the campaign, which settles scores with fellow Socialist leaders, notably her ex-partner and general secretary of the Socialist Party, François Hollande. She also reveals she had meetings with centrist politician François Bayrou, offering him the post of prime minister if she won the presidency. But all this was done in secret, as if being the socialist presidential candidate was the private possession of one person.

Amid this turmoil, the Bonapartist tradition of a totalizing head of state, father of the nation and unique source of authority continues to dominate France. It is not that Sarkozy has a government of all the talents, but that he believes he has all the talents to be the government. Ministers hardly exist as every initiative has to come from the all-knowing man of destiny in the Elysée. But Sarkozy's restless energy and desire to be an omnipresent president cannot be sustained indefinitely. Though he has been compared with Margaret Thatcher, she had allies, and an enemy to vanquish in the form of poorly led trade unions and an unreformed leftism exemplified by the anti-European Labour Party. Sarkozy has no clear enemy, and if he is to achieve change he has to defeat his own supporters within the protected state apparatus. He could imitate Thatcher and sell off the state-owned French electricity company, EDF, raising enough money at a stroke to pay off France's national debt, which is twice that of the U.K. Breaking up the giant monoliths of state capitalism would reduce the crushing weight of the French state on the economy. But at heart, Sarkozy remains a statist unwilling to embrace truly radical reform.

In short, Sarkozy may be much more of an interim figure than a new de Gaulle or even a Mitterrand. He may be more like Ted Heath than Britain's Thatcher or Blair. Heath inherited a declining Britain and thought the answer was to try and fudge his way to compromises between capital and labor. In the end, Heath alienated labor while simultaneously failing to unleash new economic energy. He wanted to reform, but like Sarkozy was not willing to be sufficiently radical to make it work. Now, much depends on whether the French left and especially the Socialist Party will yield to the populist temptation of hurling darts at Sarkozy's policies, without admitting that much of left thinking and practice in the last 20 years has been part of the French problem, not a solution. A beginning of a renaissance for the French left would be an honest discussion of the failure of French unions. Despite their seeming power, they remain the weakest and least representative in the world. Even American unions represent more workers, and their incomes come from membership dues, unlike the occult financing of French unions, whose income comes from companies or state agencies. Key state employees want to protect their right to retire at 50 and the huge French state employee sector is not going to forgo its generous retirement benefits paid for by workers in the private sector who have none of these rights. Paris remains terrified of its streets.