Royal Flush

We have been spending a lot of time on American politics, and rightly so. However, I am now watching French Politics. They are setting up for an election in April 2007 and I suspect it is going to be very exciting.

The big news is that Ségolène Royal took 61% of the Socialist party vote (in an election with an 82% participation rate including 70,000 new party members) last week and will become the first woman to run for the French Presidency. The Economist calls this a landmark in French politics because Royal did not come from the party elite. She did not “work her way up”. Instead, she took advantage of the new “party primary” system used by the party and created a base of support by playing the image game. She purposely distanced herself from Paris despite being an alumna of ENA and having served as an advisor of Mitterrand. An ENA mate as quoted in the Economist says of her, “Everybody thinks she is nice and not clever. But the truth is she is very clever and absolutely not nice.””

Her nemesis, Interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy, ran for the center-right UMP. He has been something of a revolution in his own right. He never attended ENA and is the son of Hungarian immigrants. He enjoys mass appeal among the French, but has seen his star fade a bit due to his handling of the riots last spring. He is a straight talker who appeals to middle class voters.

Then there is Le Pen. NPR reported last week that he may enjoy a boost in the next elections. Apparently, the French have forgotten what happened the last time they lodged protest votes. Le Pen made it to the final round of voting, which forced voters to go for Chirac. Chirac won basically because he was, quite literally, the lesser of two evils. He has proven to be, at best, a “caretaker” president and at worst, a scandal plagued lame duck, a lame duck is who considering another run.

One thing the so called “War on Terror” has managed to accomplish is to feed anti-immigrant (i.e. anti Arab, Muslim) sentiments in France and elsewhere. The riots didn’t help and the French have never been shy about their feelings for North African/Arab/Turkish/Muslim mmigrants. Le Pen’s far right, super-Catholic, super-nationalist, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, rhetoric is appealing to the 18% of voters who say they will support him in April. These are the same 18% who haven't benefited from globalization and who want to retreat into yesterday.

So why should Americans care about French elections? Well on the surface, they don't seem to matter much to use. However if either Royal or Sarkozy win, expect to hear the audible groan in Washington. Neither is likely to “cooperate” quietly with the U.S. And there are some big reasons for the U.S. and Europe to work together: Instability in the Middle East (potential civil war in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Occupied Territories), Afghanistan, North Korea, Darfour, Turkey-EU talks, China, Iran, Koyoto, etc. These are the issues of the next 20 years. And no single country will be able to address them alone. We will need a multilateralist approach. So we should care about our allies’ elections.

Here is an interesting scenario. Imagine the G7 summit in say 2009. Merkel of Germany, Royal of France, and Clinton of the U.S. The faces of politics are changing boys. Watch out!