The French way

JOEL GORDIN
Jerusalem Post
05-21-1997
France has entered its last week of campaigning before voters go to the polls on Sunday, but anyone expecting the recent British political revolution to cross the Channel will be disappointed. If "fresh" is an appropriate word to describe the new British parliament, in France "fudge" probably will still do.

At the end of the 1990s, France is acquiring a faded patina of the 1890s like an old dowager lost in her memories of past glamor. In a world gone fanatical on free marketry and high technology as a kind of economic religion, it is difficult not to look at France with a certain wistful admiration - while being perfectly aware that its old ways really don't work any more.

France is having trouble coming to grips with the dawn of a new century because it is so reluctant to part with the comforts of the old one. The resistance is compounded by the fact that its leaders insist on seeing the lean and shiny new economic policies as suspiciously "Anglo-Saxon" - that cultural buzzword that makes every patriotic Frenchman shudder. Thus we saw such odd anomalies as the fact that France was the first European country to be "wired" to its excellent Minitel computer network a decade before anyone else came up with a similar idea and yet it is among the last to embrace and exploit the global Internet. The suspicion remains that Minitel was a success because it was perceived culturally as quintessentially French, while the Internet - horror of horrors - is another dread Anglo-Saxon conspiracy.

This observation is meant to be somewhat whimsical - but it does illustrate the image of total confusion that has marked the current election campaign. While seeking some sense of France's identity in the new world, its politicians seem bent on carving their place in it with blunt and ancient tools. Although center-right Prime Minister Alain Juppe is preaching tax cuts, more privatization, smaller government, and strict adherence to the measures needed for a single European currency, the leftist opposition leader, Lionel Jospin, remains a believer in the state and wants to create another 350,000 public sector jobs. He is against privatization, for the welfare state and workers' rights, and for a 35-hour work week with no pay cuts. Jospin certainly will not be mistaken for the Bill Clinton or Tony Blair of the French left.

Of course, even if he wins the election, France will hardly expect any lurch to the left as the country will return to another absurdly Gallic institution, cohabitation, where Jospin would share unequal power with the rightist President Jacques Chirac. As the (appropriately) French proverb says - the more things change, the more likely they are to stay the same.

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