The election of Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France implies massive, even revolutionary, change for the country. He comes to office having promised to crack down on crime and illegal immigration, to cut taxes and to put France “back to work,” as he put it. His unmistakable implication is that years of socialist thinking, even in his own party, have enfeebled the country. His victory speech on Sunday evening, while conciliatory in tone, also indicated that he will put relations with the US on friendlier terms and pursue a firmly Euroskeptic platform.
All the old certainties that have been part of the French state since World War II — its Europeanism, its involvement in the daily lives of its citizens (and taxing them to the hilt in return), its intellectual embrace of internationalism — face attack as never before although whether he will — or can — roll back the tide of socialism remains to be seen. President Chirac came to power promising reform, such as an end to the 35-hour week; in the end, however, he failed to deliver.
The rest of the world, though, will be not be looking so much at Sarkozy’s reforms or whether he succeeds in his pledge to bring unemployment down from eight percent to below five percent by 2012. The concentration will rather be whether he can achieve his aims without violence. His tough rhetoric on crime and illegal immigration have made him a hate-figure for second and third generation immigrants, many of them Muslims from former French colonies in North and West Africa. Many live in often run-down, public-housing estates across the country and face high unemployment levels. There is, as defeated socialist candidate Segolene Royal pointed out last week, a real possibility of anti-Sarkozy riots in the suburbs. If they happen and are met with an iron fist, as Sarkozy has threatened, it will impact on France’s image across the world. But equally, France’s immigrant communities have to accept that Sarkozy has been elected president by a decisive majority; to protest against that is to embrace fascism.
For Sarkozy and for France, the answer has to be economic reform. If he can bring down unemployment, then immigrants will feel they have a stake in the country and its transformation will be peaceful. For the moment, that cannot be assured. In fact, much will depend on what happens in five weeks’ time when French voters again turn out to elect a new National Assembly. Unlike Sunday’s vote, that will not be a two-horse race between Sarkozy’s UMP and the Socialists. All the other parties will be competing, notably the new Democrat Party of centrist François Bayrou which will certainly win a significant number of seats. The result is likely to be a coalition government, but that coalition could just as easily be center-left as center-right and, if the former, Sarkozy may be isolated in the Elysée Palace and his ideas untried. If center-right, which is more likely, some of those ideas could still vanish like mirages, blocked by Bayrou. France will have to wait a little longer to see where it is going.
