by DIANA JOHNSTONE
The choice of François Hollande over Nicolas Sarkozy was an extreme case of the lesser of two evils. Seldom has a winning candidate inspired so little enthusiasm. Considering how unpopular Sarkozy was, according to polls, the final vote of 51.6% for Hollande to 48.4% for Sarkozy was surprisingly close. Voting for the bland and inoffensive Hollande was finally the only way to get rid of the agitated Sarkozy, aggressively pretending to be President of France.
There is no more real President of France. The leader who is elected to occupy the Elysée Palace no longer lays down the policy direction to be taken by the nation. That role has been largely taken over by the European Union Commission in Brussels.
With his modest manner, François Hollande is more suitable to be non-President of France. Not that it promises to be an easy job. The financial powers that run the world are pushing him to break the news to the French that they can no longer have the policies they want, but only the policies dictated by “the markets”.
In fact, the French are already aware of this. Exactly what it entails and how people react remain to be seen.
Like all 27 EU member states, and especially the 17 who have adopted the euro as their common currency, France is now under what European Commission chairman Jose Manuel Barroso calls “the new European system of governance”. This is comparable to what happens when an individual is judged to be incapable of managing her affairs and is made a ward of a legal guardian or of the state. Little by little, the EU Commission is taking on the role of legal guardian of the economic affairs of the member states.
Last year, in response to the deepening crises in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, the EU adopted draconian measures requiring member states to decrease their budget deficits and public debt; if they fail to do so, they can be punished by huge fines: a measure that could be compared in its logic to the old practice of locking up debtors in the poor house.
France is under specific orders to deepen pension reform (meaning pension reduction, one way or another), reduce or eliminate job security, limit minimum wage increases, shift taxes from income to consumption and further deregulate professional and commercial activities. These anti-egalitarian, pro-capital, anti-labor measures leave virtually no leeway for the “Socialist” president to do anything significant in favor of economically disadvantaged segments of the population.
Instead, he can advocate gay marriage, which has become the flagship proposal of those who want to prove they are “on the left” by infuriating a segment of the conservative right. Hollande has promised to give homosexuals the right to marry and adopt children, to enforce employment quotas for the handicapped, to propose legislation allowing the incurably ill to benefit from medical assistance to end life in dignity, to combat racial discrimination, including in police identity checks. If – and it is still a big if – he gets a majority in next month’s legislative elections, President Hollande can keep these civilizational promises without asking permission of Brussels or “the markets”. And based on experience, it is to be expected that the police will be better behaved toward ethnic minorities under a Socialist government than under Sarkozy.
However, when it comes to Hollande’s key promises to shift from “austerity” to economic growth and job creation, the gambling “markets” are already yapping at his heels and the European Union stands as a bulwark against any effective measures in that direction.
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