France pretends to want change

From The Washington Post:

PARIS, April 22 -- French voters Sunday chose ruling party candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Ségolène Royal to compete in the French presidential runoff in two weeks, with a massive voter turnout backing a generational shift of the country's leadership.

Sarkozy, the tough-talking former interior minister and candidate of the Union for a Popular Movement party, won 31 percent of the vote, and Royal, who has cast herself as a maternal protector vying to be France's first female president, received 26 percent, with nearly all of the ballots counted.

Eighty-four percent of the 44.5 million eligible voters cast ballots -- an apparent record in a first-round presidential ballot in France -- reflecting the urgency of an election that centered on the country's fear of economic decline at home and diminishing influence abroad. The huge turnout also underscored voter enthusiasm for the more modern, personality-driven, American-style campaigns to replace outgoing two-term President Jacques Chirac.

The election results indicate that French voters want a clear choice in the decisive May 6 runoff, which will be a classic right-left showdown pitting the hard-line, pro-business, pro-American Sarkozy, 52, against Royal, 53, who advocates greater spending for social welfare programs and supports more multipolar global relations. Royal, a mother of four, is the first woman to advance to the second round in a French presidential race.

"I want to tell all the French who are scared, who are scared of the future, who feel fragile, vulnerable, who find life harder and harder, I want to tell them that I want to protect them," Sarkozy said in a victory speech to supporters at a concert hall near the Champs Elysees. The comments clearly were aimed at voters who tell pollsters they find Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, too tough and divisive.

Royal, speaking to boisterous supporters in her voting district town of Melle in southwestern France, said she wanted to lead "the fight for change, so that France can stand up again, to get optimism back." In a clear swipe at Sarkozy -- though she didn't name him -- Royal said she wanted to "change France without brutalizing it."

"Together, we are going to put the smile back on the face of our country, and conquer the demons of depression and decline," Royal said.

The campaign was dominated by voter calls for change as the domestic economy and job market have stagnated and France's international financial and diplomatic influence is waning. Voters said they fear encroaching globalization and rising immigration, which they see as threatening their traditional way of life and the cradle-to-grave benefits of the state's social welfare system.

Both Sarkozy and Royal pledged major changes to shake France from its doldrums, and both promise a less imperial presidency that is more in touch with the people. Whoever wins will be the first French president from the baby boomer generation, heralding what voters hope will be a more modern style at the Elysee Palace.

You have to understand that Sarkozy's "hard-line, pro-business, pro-American" policies are "hard-line", "pro-business" and "pro-American" by French standards which, in real world terms, means that he is a bit less of an America hating communist than the average French politician.

The efforts to reform and save France will fail. I say this not out of any malice which I hold for France but simply out of a realistic evaluation of the French electorate and their desires:

The campaign was dominated by voter calls for change as the domestic economy and job market have stagnated and France's international financial and diplomatic influence is waning. Voters said they fear encroaching globalization and rising immigration, which they see as threatening their traditional way of life and the cradle-to-grave benefits of the state's social welfare system.

See. The French do not want anything to jeapordize their cradle-to-grave welfare state. This means that meaningful reform to rescue the nation's economy will not be undertaken because it is France's cradle-to-grave welfare state, along with its fear of participation in the global economy and its socialist employment laws which are ruining its economy in the first place.

The French people do not want to live in a capitalist nation. They want those cradle-to-grave benefits and those short work weeks and month of paid vacation and those laws which make it almost impossible to fire an employee no matter how incompetent he might be. The reason that the average French man in the street opposes the EU Constitution is the fear that it will open their economy up to competition and force them to actually work for a living.

It is for this reason that the French and the other Europeans will lose the battle to save their cultures from being swallowed by Islamism. The immigration is needed to make up for the falling European birthrate - workers are needed to pay taxes to support all those living on the dole and finance all those benefits that even the young and employed receive.

The French and the other nations of Old Europe are faced with a choice. They can either decades long state of arrested development and emerge from their life long adolescence and assume individual personal responsibility for feeding , clothing and housing themselves as well as funding their own medical care. And they can assume national responsibility for defending themselves and maintaining a responsible foreign policy that does not enable, appease and empower malignant dictators and Islamist theocrats.

And they will also have to start breeding again and creating stable family structures to raise and socialize the children, which means rediscovering the institution of heterosexual marriage.

Of course to do any of this the French, and European, people would have to rediscover their faith in the future which means rediscovering their faith in God. Only a belief in a reality which transcends the here-and-now of mortal earthly existence can inspire man to consistently lift his eyes from the pleasures of the moment and set them on a better future which he will not necessarily live to see.

Does anyone out there seriously believe that the Europeans in general and the French in particular will have the courage and will to do any of this?