Chirac is the sick man of Europe, say French

Weakened and more unpopular than any French head of state in half a century, President Jacques Chirac was yesterday branded "the sick man of Europe" in his own country.

Before leaving Paris for the European Union summit in Brussels, Mr Chirac suffered the ignominy of seeing his enfeebled state highlighted in the press.

Opinion polls since the May 29 No vote on the EU constitution put his approval rating lower than any president since Gen Charles de Gaulle ushered in France's Fifth Republic in 1958.

Even his allies seem to be turning against him. A senior figure in the ruling centre-Right was quoted as speaking ruefully of "an old gentleman who does not really understand what is happening to him".

He told the newspaper Libération: "He says nothing, he listens to conversation without hearing. I have never seen him like this."

Under the headline "Chirac, sick man of Europe", Libération called Mr Chirac a "serial loser" and claimed that other EU leaders would be relieved to see him stand down.

If the Left-wing paper is no champion of the beleaguered president, its sentiments were broadly echoed in less hostile quarters. The word "weakened" featured prominently in most reports previewing the Brussels meeting.

Mr Chirac is said to regard European and world issues as offering his best hope of clawing himself back into political respectability.

But obstacles appear even on the international landscape. Tony Blair is widely seen by French observers to be exploiting Mr Chirac's difficulties to promote his vision of Europe.

As host of the forthcoming G8 summit at Gleneagles, Mr Blair has even seized the initiative on Third World poverty, one of Mr Chirac's recent pet subjects.

Elysée officials said no one could have expected anything other than a slump in opinion poll ratings after the scale of the referendum defeat, adding that Mr Chirac was "pre-occupied but certainly not downhearted". Most of France appears to think differently.

Chirac is an old king isolated in the Elysee with his closest favorite, Dominique de Villepin, a toady with no political base of his own, a Napoleon complex, and perhaps the worst political sense of any leader of note in France.

Chirac depends heavily on Villepin for advice and support, but Villepin's guidance is almost invariably unwise.

This presents an interesting opportunity for France, because France is normally ruled from the top. When the top is so eclipsed, and the second-to-the-top is likewise without a power base other than his relationship to the eclipsed king...this has never happened in France in the Fifth Republic. It is unprecedented.

And it is a long, long time until the next election.

What it means is political paralysis, paralysis of the normal mechanism of power. This may cause subsidiary sources of direction in France, which are normally very much attenuated, to be forced to come forward and provide leadership in their sectors. There is no experience with this other than at revolutionary moments of the past, and this is not naturally a revolutionary moment.

It is likely that, if extragovernmental bases of influence begin to grow, that the next leader of France will find that to gain control he will have to bring them into the discussion.

In the discussions before the Referendum, I referred to the impending vote as "the Waterloo of the ENArchie". I still hold to that view. The ENArques controlled all of the threads of power, but they have been unable to do anything productive with them. And they still have no ideas and no sense of what to do. Villepin can speak boldly of Gallic genius, but everyone simply rolls their eyes at this. These men have great prestige, but their authority has plummetted because they quite clearly have no idea what to do.

In this vaccuum, something will arise, and it will not be a reconstitution of the ENArchie. It will be something new and interesting. What, we cannot yet say.

I think that M. Blair will have something to do with this, given his pressure on the PAC. If the European Agricultural policy is truly realigned and subsidies and regulation dramatically reduced, I think it entirely feasible that it will be the agricultural sector in France, the most unexpected place, where sudden and sharp reform will shape up, and where entrepreneurialism quite unaffiliated with the ENArchie will stand up. Farmers are, after all, almost entirely individual businessmen with their own fonds de commerce of sorts. If they cease to be as heavily subsidized and regulated, and begin to take their own daring decisions for their own benefit, this will reverberate politically across France, because France is an agricultural nation par excellence, and there are so very many deputes elected from agricultural departements that there is a severe imbalance in political power.

I believe that, if M. Blair persists, it will actually be the agricultural sector that becomes the place of greatest innovation in France, and the place from which reform begins and spreads to the rest of the French economy.

It seems so unlikely, and yet it is not. Count the deputes and agricultural departments. And think how isolated and even immune from the ENArque elite leadership the agricoles are. Think how they are uniquely immune from the rigid labor laws because of the efficiency of their mechanization.

"Un denomme Gutemberg a change la face du monde.
Sur les presses de Nuremberg on imprime chaque seconde
les poemes sur du papier...des discours et des pamphlets...
de nouvelles idees qui vont tout balayer.
Les petites choses toujours viennent a bout des grandes...
et la litterature tuera l'architecture.
Les livres des ecoles tueront les cathedrales.
La bible tuera l'eglise.
Et l'homme tuera Dieu.
Ceci tuera cela." - from Notre Dame de Paris

"Vicomte, that's an interesting thesis. But if, as you say, the agricultural sector is less constrained by the rigid stranglehold of labor than the rest of production in france because of mechanization, how will they have the numbers to effect reform? Can the few in agriculture overcome the entrenched self-interest of workers with their 35hr-&-falling work weeks and 2-months-&-rising vacations? There are just not that many people associated with agricultural production anymore, so how can they wield any influence to bring france back from the brink of social, economic & cultural irrelevancy?"

A few answers.
Please be assured that my views here are my own, and are quite eccentric. Currently things are very unsettled and there is no leadership and no vision. I am presenting the vague outlines of what I discern might be taking shape in the fog.
The answer to your first question, "How will they have the numbers to effect reform", is political and electoral. French voting power is territorial, and since so much of France is rural and agricultural, the power of the agricultural sector to place a very large number of elected deputies in the National Assembly is very high relative to their numbers in the work force. In a sense this is the same in America. The populations of all of the agricultural states of the American Great Plains are fewer than California, and yet California has two Senators, while North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Iowa and Missouri have 16 Senators between them. Agricultural interests in America are the most heavily represented of any economic sector in the US Congress, despite the vanishingly small percentage of farmers in the US workforce, because voting in America is territorial, and where agriculture is the preponderance of land use, agriculture is the preponderant economic interest, even if relatively few people are actually engaged in it.
It is not different in France. A third of the population of France lives in the Ile de France, and yet there are only a handful of departements there. The rest of the country, with a few smaller urban enclaves excepted, is rural, and there are perhaps 70 or 80 rural departements in which agricultural interests are very strong, although not perforce a large portion of the workforce.
That is how they may have the numbers to effect reform.

As to the 35 hour work week, there already is a consensus that the rigidity of this did not work, and so the law has been changed already to allow bunching of hours and other flexibility. Let us not be doctrinaire, and remember that the average industrial work week in the United States is actually only 35 hours. Having a law that fixes this natural average has provided a great symbolic windmill for ideologues to tilt at, but it is not the simple fact of having a legal limit on working hours which corresponds to the actual statistical norm for industry in the developed world that truly causes problems. It was, rather, the rigidity of enforcement, the refusal to permit workers who desired it to work more than the 35 hours, and the refusal to permit workers to work 60 hour weeks in peak seasons, to be compensated with 20 or ten hour weeks or very flexible vacation schedules during the off seasons. As I said, all of these things were largely addressed, without a general strike erupting, in recent legislation. I expect that this will actually work to resolve most of the actual problems with the 35 hour work week, although I also expect that the 35 hour week will remain a favorite jousting horse and cause celebre for the ideologues who hold it as a symbol of all that is wrong with France.

I do not believe that France is on the brink of social, economic or cultural irrelevancy. France's economy is growing (in spite of all of the gloom sayers who assert that France is in recession. No. France is growing at a rate between 1% and 2% per year. It would be nice if this were better, and approaching recent American numbers of 3.8%, but 1% growth is not recession, it is growth). France's population is growing quite rapidly, and by mid-century France will be the most populous country in Europe. The major European countries' economic standing relative to one another is almost entirely related to population. German workers are on average less productive than French workers, but Germany is the predominant European economy because Germany has a larger population. Germany, however, is tipping into steep demographic decline. France, by contrast, is growing rather robustly. The economic effect of rapid French demographic growth will be that France is the most powerful European economy, replacing Germany, in the next quarter century.

Americans dislike France with varying degrees of intensity because of political and diplomatic disagreements, but they err when they allow their political animus to convince them that France is a shrinking, dying country about to blow away in the breeze. France is the fastest growing population in Europe...along with England, it's the ONLY growing population in Europe. People are power. Airbus is clobbering Boeing. American companies are going bankrupt from the unresolved American health care and pension costs. French companies do not face these burdens.

One of the more irritating things for Francophobes over the course of their lifetimes will be that France does NOT simply disappear, but continues to be a growing and economically viable society.

To forestall the dire predictions of Sharia 2050 in France, since French population statistics are chiefly growing thanks to immigration and high birth rates among immigrants, I would point out that France's immigration, while large, is not uncontrolled. And the proportion of the French population that is of Muslim origins is small relative to both the US black and exploding, uncontrolled Hispanic population.

I daresay that, if the truth were faced, America may face a greater population crisis than France does, since the official statistics of 9 million illegal aliens in the US is probably off by over 50% (the real number is probably something like 20 millon), and unlike France, America actively avoids using public education to force cultural and linguistic conversion of immigrants.

France prohibits Muslim headscarves in schools, because France understands, au fond, that if the large influx of immigrants are not linguistically brought into France, and the majority of children of Muslim origin are not acculturated into France's secular culture, France will lose itself. The French do not desire, most of them, to go the route of Jean-Marie Le Pen (or, truly, the whole of the rest of Europe other than Britain) and simply EXCLUDE immigration from Muslim countries: population is power, and France wants the population. But the majority of those who do not want to exclude immigrants understand, well, that immigrants must be made French. Therefore, the headscarf law and the use of public education to force acculturation.

In the US, the move is farther and farther away from the melting pot, and American institutions are teaching Spanish and providing government services in Spanish. This offers, over time, a far greater territorial risk to the USA, in my opinion anyway, than the challenges facing France of assimilation.

There are problems everywhere.
But I do not believe that France is in any danger of becoming economically irrelevant in Europe. Simple demographics destine France to be the number one or number two economic power in Europe, supplanting Germany and in neck and neck competition with Great Britain, in this unfolding century.
Nor do I believe that France is destined to lose the race to assilimate the North Africans.
By contrast, I fear that America is in danger of fragmentation from an unassimilated and massive, and relatively unfriendly foreign element which is much more pervasive in the US, and which the US for its own political reasons is not only not attempting to force assimilation upon, but is actually encouraging, institutionally, to remain separate, with separate language and culture.

Will an agricultural revolution press France forward?
Truly I do not know. I speculate.
But will a lingustic and ethnic social divide start to tear at America? I think that this is much more certain, indeed it is the stated goal of certain militant Hispanic non-assimilationist groups in California and the US Southwest. I think that this is a far more potentially lethal threat to the US than the current dithering and fog in France is to the future of France.

"What makes you think that Blair has any chance in succeeding to change the agricultural policies?
The French strike and paralyze the country over any tiny proposed reform.
I would figure if agricultural subsidies suddenly are "on the table" and become a distinct possibility, the whole nation would starve, due to the response of the farmers."

In the short term, he does not.
But in the longer term, you have the Dutch and Swedes already signed up for a review. Eastern Europe will all agree to a review, a redistribution of the benefits. The future German Chancellor speaks in terms of the need to put all things on the table, in order to be fair. Blair will find support.

For a strike to work in France, it must be general or nearly so. General strikes always succeed. However, marginal strikes at the fringes and against moves that people understand are necessary: these do not. France understands that things do not work. Thus, when the 35 hours were recently overhauled to allow much flexibility, there was some striking, but it did not generalize and indeed it failed to stop the legislation. Why? Because French people are not so stupid. The general consensus was that the 35 hours as originally implemented did not work. And so when reasonable reforms came, the people did not join the malcontents in a general strike.

Agriculture will be more ticklish, but if Europe is tied into knots over the issue, with France playing the former role of vetoing all changes, there will be no agreement on a European budget and the subsidies will not flow. So, if France agrees to a change, the subsidies will reduce. But if France vetoes any change, but Britain and other countries will not, therefore, agree on a budget, the subsidies will also not flow.

This is why I believe that France will be forced to change because the money will be reduced either way.

Finally, I believe that Blair will press hard on Europe.
Europe is the deus ex machina that may well preserve Blair's own power. Since before the British elections, Gordon Brown has been hanging in the wings, and everyone expects him to get power sooner, rather than later. Blair was looking at accepting this as a fait accompli, but of course Blair himself does not WANT to relinquish power. Brown is much more of a socialist and to the left of Blair. If Blair can turn British Euroscepticism into his own platform, and lead diplomatically here, he will remain viable and popular in Britain, and will be able to put off perhaps for several years any handover of power to Gordon Brown.

Therefore, I expect Blair will fight these fights quite passionately, for a British home audience consumption. It is good for Blair. It is bad for Chirac, but in the end I believe that it is also good for France, and I support the British Prime Minister in his efforts. Europe needs to be shaken up. The French electorate just startled the world by firing a whiff of grapeshot into the settled parlors of the Eurocracie. If Blair follows this up by very passionately pursuing the issue of finance itself - by threatening the money flows - this will change everything. The French electorate can speak only with a blunderbuss. Now it is time for leaders to lead with the rapier. The French leadership is hopeless. But the changes that may come from without, because of the financial crack up of Europe will be creatively destructive for France, I believe.

I agree with you that the US's uncontrolled immigration is having a deleterious & divisive impact, at least in some regions. But I'm not sure it's quite as dire as you & some Californians (not to mention the distressing number of one-note whiners who try to turn every thread into an anti-immigrant jeremiad here on FR) make it out to be. I live in Texas where hispanic immigration (the legal kind, at least) is viewed more benignly, but that is because our experience is that we've attracted the more industrious workers who really do want to partake of the american dream, who want to succeed and assimilate. California's pseudo-progressive and hyperpaternalistic political culture which offered up the Cadillac of social-welfare benefit systems without requiring any reciprocal obligation on the part of the lucky recipients of all their noblesse-oblige generosity has, frankly and not at all politically correctly, attracted an entirely different class of immigrants, and not just from south of the border: a lot of the influx of folks to CA from third world countries and from urban populations of other US states are there for the bonanza of no-strings handouts that the short-sighted pols in Sacramento, with the blessings of the CA voters who keep putting them in office, have been offering up on a silver platter to any & all takers for more than three decades now.

Texas never offered the abundant freebies & glorified victim status to illegals and multi-generational welfare families from other states as CA and other "third way" states did, and as a result we simply got a more productive crowd who've contributed a lot to our state. (We've got a lot of problems, but ask your average conservative Texan what they think about the minutemen movement and you'll get a snarl - they have about as many supporters here as that thieving phony from Arkansas who proclaimed a bogus independant Republic of Texas in Marfa a few years back did.) The many parasitic immigrants (just the ones who have caused the majority of expensive problems there,mind you, by no means all) don't abide by CA law nor do they respect its people because native Californians are seen by the predatory class of immigrants as total suckers who deserve to get screwed for having such a patronizing view of "minorities". But I've spent enough time in the outskirts of Paris to see up close that Muslim ghettos there are giving the worst barrios in east LA a run for their money in terms of profound alienation & militant separatism. In fact, their complete resentment towards their adopted country & their deep-seated contempt for their french hosts' 'decadent' culture and secular laws is second to none, despite the notoriously pliant french press's best efforts to sugarcoat the incipiently exploding powderkeg that exists there.

I will cede to your expertise in matters of the economy there (although it contradicts long-term predictions I have heard elsewhere), but I will not cede that france isn't on the brink of geo-political irrelevancy. Through it's habitually feckless, compulsively hypocritical, cynically self-serving and cravenly corrupt actions, france has so squandered its moral authority to speak as a responsible member of the family of civilized nations that NO-ONE, not even the tinpot fascists and kleptocratic dictators france has cultivated as its closest friends trusts or respects them anymore. They're a pathetic joke now, strutting around as though it were still the age of Napoleon, resting on laurels so petrified they ought to be yielding crude oil any week now. The france of my forefathers & mothers is now a stagnant society that discourages innovation, castigates individualism, denigrates achievement & penalizes progress in a lethal vise of legalized corruption cloaked in a tentacled morass of haughty bureaucratic oppression that has become a kind of "Third Way Totalitarianism": dictatorship through mindless bureaucracy, administered by nit-picking permit applications and enforced by piddling penalty assessments. The rest of the world has concluded france's smug, sanctimonious & irredeemably dishonest leaders aren't worth the paper their sycophantic shills in the legendarily rubber-stamping french press bloviate upon, even if they're so blinded by the same suffocating fog of pompous, constipated self-delusion which has extinguished their global reputation that they can't see it.

People with aspirations for their children aren't risking their lives by navigating the English Channel in leaky fishing boats to get to france,Vicomte, they're doing it to leave their countries via france to get to England for a reason: the old France is finished and "Third Way" france has no future.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.