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France Chooses Its Man
// Nicolas Sarkozy wins presidential election
Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president of France yesterday. According to preliminary data, he received 54 percent of the vote. It is a victory for those who are waiting for the structural reforms in the economy that France has been putting off for many years. Sarkozy owes his victory to promises of radical and even painful changes that will make France competitive in the world. His win may also be accompanied by social tension. Segolene Royal warned the day before the elections that a Sarkozy victory would lead to unrest in the poor suburbs of French cities.
A Worrisome Day
Election Day was tense in France. Turnout was a record high. By noon, more than 35 percent of voters had been to the polls. That is even more than in the first round on April 22. The pace did not slow. About 85 percent of registered voters participated in the election, similarly to the first round.
The police were even more active yesterday. They feared that rioting could break out if Sarkozy won.
In her last pre-election appearance on Friday, candidate Segolene Royal called her competitor a “dangerous choice” for France, who could divide the nation. She even compared him to U.S. President George W. Bush. She darkly predicted that a victory for the rightist candidate could stir up new unrest in the suburbs, where Sarkozy is considered unacceptable.
The former interior minister earned the enmity of the offspring of immigrants in the suburbs that surround large French cities when he rioting youth “riff-raff” in 2005.
Security was beefed up in the suburbs long before election results were announced. There were more than 3000 riot police on duty in Paris and its suburbs yesterday. Royal's warning was taken very seriously. The headline of yesterday's Journal du dimanche was “The Vote that Will Shake France.” Sarkozy chided Royal for voter intimidation. “We haven't heard such threats as that in the whole history of the republic,” he said. “That language of war is a show of disdain for democratic principles. No doubt she is just demoralized.”
Pre-election polls indicated that Sarkozy was the undisputable favorite. Polls after the first round of voting predicted that he would surpass Royal and take 53-55 percent of the vote. Sarkozy took first place in the first round with 31.18 percent of the vote, 5 percent over Royal's showing. Traditionalist Philippe de Villiers, who received 2.23 percent of the vote, threw his support behind Sarkozy immediately after the first round. The majority of the votes that went to fourth-place nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round were thought to be Sarkozy's in the second as well. However, National Front Le Pen urged his followers to abstain from voting and said that Sarkozy, an ethnic Hungarian, could not be president of France and should run in Hungary.
Sarkozy also benefited from the indecisiveness of third-place centrist Francois Bayrou. He refused to endorse either candidate, only saying in an interview with Le Monde that he would not vote for Sarkozy. Bayrou received 6.8 million votes in the first round and it seems that there support was decisive in the outcome of the second round.
Last week's televised debates between him and Royal were a big success for Sarkozy. An experienced polemicist and charismatic leader, Sarkozy did not lose self-control for a second, while his opponent repeatedly raised her voice. Royal accused him of “political amorality,” while he smilingly destroyed her campaign program point by point. The majority of viewers considered him the winner of the debate.
A Special Mission
The new president will have to find answers to some very pressing questions for France. As both candidates admitted while campaigning, most biggest problems the Fifth Republic has faced in recent years have been put off for later rather than solved. The situation is reaching the crisis point. Politicians and economists say that, if the new president does not carry out a series of structural reforms, the country will be on its way to collapse.
Jacques Chirac has left a complex legacy for his successor. France has the sixth largest economy in the world, with a highly developed social system. (The French healthcare system, according to the WHO, is the best in the world.) But the French government's social orientation is becoming a greater burden on the economy ever year. The ratio of workers to state dependents is changing continually in favor of the latter. France has the greatest state involvement in the economy of any developed country. Financial institutions say that France's social security system is making the country's economy uncompetitive. France has a trade deficit and its economy is growing at a slow pace in comparison with its EU neighbors.
At the same time, France has one of the highest unemployment rates in the developed world. Only 68 percent of Frenchmen of working age have permanent employment. The unemployment rate is 8.3 percent, down from a record 10 percent a few years ago. Students and new graduates are plagued by problems finding work. Employment was a key topic in the presidential debate. Sarkozy has been a steadfast critic of Chirac's policies in the last few years and mentioned the need for structural change in many of his speeches. He gave a scandalous interview to Le Monde in September 2005, in which he stated that France has been misgoverned for the last 30 years, with unrealistic policies and false promises. Sarkozy is associated with drastic transformation in France.
Sarkozy's main target is the faulty French tax system. He has said repeatedly that taxes are so high that they force well-off French to flee the country just to avoid giving most of their income to the government. He holds that the tax burden should not exceed 50 percent of income. Now it sometimes reaches 90 percent. Other radical measures proposed by Sarkozy include taking social assistance away from unemployed who turn down jobs offered to them. Eliminating the national deficit is a major goal for Sarkozy.
Sarkozy has promised to reverse the law on the 35-hour work week that was introduced by the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin. Sarkozy says that the French “must be given the right to work more.” He has promised to lower taxes by 4 percent and has said that the costs of running the government, which takes 45 percent of the federal budget, must be cut. Royal made similar promises, but Sarkozy proposed specific measures. For example, he wants to cut the number of government ministers to 15 and not replace every other civil servant that retires, thus gradually reducing the ranks of the bureaucracy by half. Sarkozy has also promised to reduce presidential powers, make the head of state accountable to the parliament and impose a two-term limit on the office.
Another of Sarkozy's ideas is selective immigration, under which only immigrants with good educations and professional qualifications be permitted to work. Sarkozy's election program, analysts say was better thought out and expressed that than of his competitor, whose campaign was aimed at less privileged member of the society. Frenchmen associated Sarkozy with radical change, and Royal with the socially-oriented state.
Sarkozy is an open admirer of the American administration and has said a number of times that he will follow the example of the Republican Party in the United States. He has borrowed one of his most-discussed proposals from the U.S. That is positive discrimination, by means of which he means to solve the problem of the impoverished suburbs, where the descendants of immigrants live. The idea behind positive discrimination is to reserve a certain quota of places in the workplace and educational institutions for non-native residents. His admiration of America will undoubtedly be reflected in the foreign policy of the new France. Sarkozy holds that the only way for France to increase its role in international affairs is through an alliance with the U.S. and only arm in arm with such a powerful ally can France assert itself as a great power. Sarkozy suggests that it is time for France to stop resisting Washington and reject Chirac and his predecessors' policy of independent foreign policy.
The candidates spent little time on foreign policy in their campaigns. Their interest and the public's interest was fixed on domestic issues. But it is already clear` that Sarkozy will change French foreign policy forever. It can be expected that the new leader, as he sheds the policies of Chirac, will reexamine relations with Russia as well. Russia's image in the French press is none too good, and Chirac was often criticized for excessively close relations with Vladimir Putin, president of Russia. “If you ask whom France will have the closer relations with, the U.S. or Russia, which is well known to us because of the war in Chechnya, I would have to say the U.S.,” Sarkozy has stated.
&Personal
Nicolas Paul Stephane Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa was born on January 28, 1955 in Paris. He graduated from the law department of Universite Paris X in 1978 and Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris in 1981. In 1974, he joined the Gaullist Union of Democrats for the Republic, which was later renamed the Rally for the Republic. In 1981, he headed the youth committee to support Jacques Chirac for president of France. In 1983, he was elected mayor of the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. From 1993 to 1995, he was budget minister and communications minister. He has been a party leader in Rally for the Republic since 1995. He became interior minister in May 2002 and minister of the economy, finances and industry in March 2004. On November 28, 2004, he became chairman of the Union for a Popular Movement, a successor to Rally for the Republic. He was appointed state minister and interior minister in March 2005. On January 14, 2007, he was nominated to run for president representing the Union for a Popular Movement. He quit the government on March 26. On April 22, he came in first in the first round of presidential elections. He is in his second marriage and has three children.
Mikhail Zygar
All the Article in Russian as of May 07, 2007
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