French and British Lefts Pas de Deux: Kill the King[Queen]

The Economist has a good article on the fratricidal strife in the French Left as the Socialists try to take back the presidency Chirac deprived them of after Mitterand. The gist of the article:

it looks as if the standard-bearers will indeed be Mr Sarkozy and Ms Royal. For months the polls have suggested that the campaign will become a contest between them. Attention is now turning from the candidates to their strategies—which in some respects seem confusingly similar.

Both Mr Sarkozy and Ms Royal promise to break with the past (Mr Sarkozy's favourite word is rupture). Being different and unbound by party traditions has been their common recipe for success at a time when the French are disillusioned with the political class. Both have broken party taboos: she by attacking the 35-hour week, he by calling for positive discrimination.

Both have also talked more of values than of actual reforms. The work ethic, classroom discipline and family values have been recurring themes, not concrete proposals to tackle France's 8.9% unemployment. Mr Sarkozy, who vows to cut the jobless rate to 5%, once called himself a liberal and urged more flexible labour laws. But since the government withdrew its new flexible youth contract last spring, his language has changed to what he calls “popular liberalism”. Last week, when the government announced a big rise in the minimum wage and more subsidies for low earners, Mr Sarkozy cheered.

Ms Royal is as hard to read. She has expressed admiration for Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, and she recently went to Sweden to study the Scandinavian social model. But she wants to scrap a flexible work contract for small companies that was introduced a year ago. And her real objection to the 35-hour week is that it benefited managers, not workers.

So should France expect much change if either one of these is elected?

There are two risks in maintaining such vagueness for the next seven months. One is another 2002, when disillusion and leftist squabbling enabled the National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, to beat Mr Jospin in the first round. The second is "another 1995," as Mr Baverez puts it. That year a candidate promising vague but radical change was elected. Yet, 11 years on, the problems that Jacques Chirac vowed to tackle still haunt France.

And the Economist doesn't mention that Britain has much the same problem, only on the flip side. The Govt in power appears to be self-destructing slowly like the Thatcher regime did while I was living in London sixteen years ago. Gordon Brown is undermining Tony Blair as if the PM job was an entitlement for [New] Labour, just as Heseltine did with Thatcher. David Cameron might have the last laugh, and England might reject the [Olde?] Labourite Brown and swerve right into Tory arms.

My money says Cameron and Sarkozy will be on top two years from now.