So what are the main issues in this campaign? According to CSA, a pollster, unemployment (chômage). Already that suggests to me people are looking in the wrong direction: employment would be a better subject. The only main candidate who seems to look employment directly in the eyes is Jean-Marie Le Pen: for him the secret for getting France back to work is to create wealth so that employers need to employ. The other three remaining candidates (four, including Marie-George Buffet of the Parti Communiste) spend their time pacing round and round the Code du Travail, a massive, indigestible tome that has grown since the 1960’s from a mere 890 pages to 2,632. Like any bible, it is held by some as the cornerstone to civilised life and by others as the wad that is choking France.

Whichever you chose, any discussion about employment or its reverse is actually about the Code du Travail, another of the unread classics of the 20th century. The debate can be summarised: there are basically two types of employment contract, one that is for an indeterminate length of time and the other for a fixed length of time. Naturally, most people want the former: it contains all the benefits of more than a hundred years’ union negotiation and it is difficult and long-winded for an employer to terminate. Cynically, that means once signed, you’ve got forty or so years to sit back and enjoy the view. The fixed-length contract is exactly what it says it is: you know that at a specified date you will be back on the street, looking for another job. Since the summer of 2005, there has been a third type of contract, aimed at small companies, which allows employers to take on people for a maximum of two years. A similar legislation to help under-25 year olds get a first job, was revoked after riots and protests a year ago. Little is said or done for part-time work: in France that is a poor relation, even though it can be an ideal solution for working mothers. It’s almost a taboo subject – certainly in an election campaign.

The communist candidate wants to get rid of the small enterprise contract and reduce the fixed-length contract to 5% of a company’s workforce – so almost every job offered is for life and hard to terminate. The Socialist Party also wants to make the lifetime contract the norm, while lowering employment charges so that companies can afford to employ more people. François Bayrou wants a universal contract, guaranteeing lifetime employment with employee’s rights getting better the longer you have been in the company. Nicolas Sarkozy has also suggested a “contrat unique”, but his would be closer to the fixed-length contract. This caused howls of criticism from everywhere and his spokesman had to step in and spin it: “Of course he didn’t mean a contrat unique…..” What apparently he meant is closer to the Scandinavian model…. But the long and the short of it is that the French overwhelmingly insist on having a lifetime’s security and no candidate is going to offer anything else. In the face of existing competition from China, India and South America this is a bad decision; in the face of expected future competition from those countries it has to be seen as, well, perverse if not suicidal. As a nation, the French seem to have developed a blind-spot about how much the world has changed in 30 years and is still changing at possibly a faster rate. Competition from what used to be dismissed airily as “the third world”, changes in technology which inevitably bring changes in lifestyle: the French know they’re there but they do not want to see them or face them, rather like a country which admits global warming but refuses to do anything about it.

Many people have tried to explain this – the most obvious and understandable reason being that once used to creature comforts one does not want to live without them. I do not want to enter that debate, but simply show that while the candidates are patting themselves on the back for finally addressing the real issues, they are not, in fact. They are addressing quite the wrong thing and lack the courage to talk about what they know must be talked about.

Yesterday Sarkozy went off to London to try to bring back some of the 300,000 French people living and working there. I hope that later in the day some of those present at his meeting will give their reactions on this blog, and I would love to hear particularly from French people in London how they see his call to return. I would guess that the Code du Travail was the root reason why most ex-patriots left France – certainly I know that is the case with my two step-sons. They felt the country of their birth had not enough to offer their talents – talents which have been amply stretched and developed since in London and Toronto. Recently I gave a talk in Montpellier to a rotary club – thus to people of a certain age and income. At the end, many asked me whether I thought French youth was somehow callow, lacking in initiative, courage or even intelligence. They answer is, of course they are not, they are as full of adventure and a love of risk as any other affluent young people. But few can fulfil their desires in France, whereas on the other side of the Channel or the Atlantic they can experience at work that delicious feeling of “It’s down to me to make this happen.” Failure is a dark hole, certainly, waiting – as Hell used to be a couple of hundred years ago. But like Hell in those days, you get used to it’s being there and just get on with life. As long as the society is buoyant, and an individual has the nouse to duck and dive, it can usually be avoided. Which is Le Pen’s point.

José Bové, the charismatic, moustachioed, pipe-smoking sheep farmer, French to his finger-tips and educated in the United States, is due to tell us on Thursday whether or not he is running for president. The press and M. Bové assume he will. I can understand why he thinks he should: neither the extreme left nor the Greens are yet making any kind of mark in the polls (they each poll around 4%). He on the other hand is hugely popular: he has great charisma, he is French to his finger tips and he farms sheep. He goes to prison regularly for destroying GM crops and he smokes a pipe. What other qualifications do you need to be the most powerful president in the world?

Well, until about 10 days ago, one would have said “Not much”. But if Ségolène Royal’s gaffs and consequent drop in the polls have done nothing else, they have shown us that actually the French do want something else. They want someone who knows what they’re talking about and who carries within them a total awareness of what responsability means. And I think even M. Bové would agree that he has not got much of that. He is the champion of the anti-globalisation left, the left which believes that big gestures (destroying fields of GM crops, brandishing your hand-cuffed wrists to the TV cameras) replace big ideas. A CSA poll released yesterday shows that 71% of French people do not want him to stand: more importantly, 68% of those on the left said they do not want him to stand. His time has past. He was at the height of his popularity in the summer of 2003, and it was precisely then, at the fête de l’Humanité, the Communist Party newspaper, that he told the press he was not interested in politics. I can only hope he remembers that wise decision, for while it is true that the extreme left, and the Greens now that M. Hulot has taken his holiday, lack a credible voice, his husky, tobacco-stained tones are not what they need.

But it is equally true that if he does not stand, the extreme left will wither. Knowing that, there is considerable pressure on him from the internet begging him to run: in very few days 15,000 signed a petition. That has now been doubled. Bové says that touches him deeply, but as Ségolène Royal has found out, there is a world of difference between having the support of even a couple of hundred thousand well-meaning internet well-wishers, and facing the implacable efficiency of the Sarkozy machine. If the French information-gathering police, the Renseignements Généraux, had fun digging around the Socialist Party’s environment spokesman for his past with Greenpeace, just imagine what a field-day they will have with Bové! And as of today they’ll be watching his iconic pipe with an eagle eye: how can he give a press conference on Thursday without it? Yet if he has it, it will have to be unlit - and that would show how much he relies on sham stage effects. Will he smoke it to provoke? That’s probably the question which will grip France on Thursday morning. Which shows to what depths it has all sunk.

While Nicolas Sarkozy still dominates the electoral scene,Ségolène Royal is dipping in the polls, François Bayrou rising. The reason Royal is sinking is clear: her recent comments on France’s nuclear submarines and on Quebec which follow hard on an early confusion in her camp as people close to her put out conflicting messages. The internet, having created her image, has now caused some serious dents in it. The candidate who pushed for total transparency has found out the hard way what that means, with videos of policy meetings showing her making statements which she admits she doesn’t want most people to hear, or telephone conversations in which jokey asides become headline news. Although the ethics are debatable, these off the record statements show the gap between what Mme Royal says and what she does, and that disappoints the undecided. On a side issue, the French public who, for years, have pooh-poohed the British gutter press for its intrusion into the private lives of politicians, now find they too love that kind of thing.
The reason Sarkozy remains at around 32% of the polls is perhaps more surprising, since I hear a lot of people saying they don’t trust him, he’s too aggressive or he has no caring side. But this weekend’s poll shows that, regardless of whether or not they will vote for him, 57% think his campaign is more “solid” (against 25% for Royal), 52% say it’s more “precise” and 45% say it is more “credible”. But on issues he doesn’t do as well: 51% of those asked say that Royal inspires more confidence on the environment, against 35% for Sarkozy.

When asked which issues should be made priority during the campaign, the most urgent are felt to be the fight against unemployment (68%), health-care and education. The last two have been almost totally ignored by the candidates. Issues such as immigration and tax, which have been given a lot of coverage, are only rated priority by around 20%, similar to foreign policy and the construction of Europe. But anyway, none of the issues except security are being dealt with satisfactorily. In other words a majority of French people, while perhaps amused by the tittle-tattle, are dissatisfied with the campaigns so far because their preoccupations are not being addressed well. That dissatisfaction with the main candidates pushes more people to agree with the one who has said for years that those in power are a waste of space, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Which beings me back to François Bayrou: he can only make headway in the polls as long as Le Pen is not seen as a threat. If Le Pen starts rising again, Bayrou’s support will fall off, as voters try to prevent the leader of the Front national getting through to the second round. So Bayrou’s apparent popularity has little to do with his policies, but more to do with Royal’s current decline and Le Pen’s perhaps temporary pause.
Or are the dissatisfied voters flirting with the Communist party? That would really be a surprise. As a journalist on Le Monde has noticed, if you go to the Daily Motion site and write presidentielles in the search window, you find that the 8 most popular videos on that subject, some with over half a million viewings, are interviews with the communist candidate, Marie-George Buffet. Worth noting too that the video I mentioned above, showing Royal at a policy meeting, has been screened 647,136 times in 2 months, while one about Sarkozy has been watched 1,418,019 times in seven months, which again shows how active the internet is, and the effectiveness of viral communication (trendy phrase meaning word-of-mouth).

As a post-script to the still running Quebec quote. Leigh Phillips rightly pulled me up for calling Jean Charest Quebec’s prime minister, when in fact he is the province’s premier. However, the rest of France does not know this (and may be taken as yet another example of their almost total ignorance of the province they claim to hold close to their hearts). As the affair has blown up, the French press and radio without exception as far as I can see refer to Jean Charest as “le premier ministre de Québec” (including Le Monde), and Gérald Dahan, the practical joker who rang up Mme Royal claiming to be Jean Charest with a personal message, introduced himself as “le premier ministre de Québec”. Mme Royal probably still has not realised that such a post does not exist, and that anyone calling himself le premier ministre de Québec must be faking it.
Gérald Dahan impersonating Jean Charest took in Mme Royal totally. They had a good conversation in which Dahan/Charest said: “It’s as if we said Corsica must be independant” To which Royal replied: “The French would not be against that either.” She then burst out laughing and said: “But don’t repeat that. It will start another incident. It’s a secret.”

Dahan, if readers don’t know him, is extremely good at his trade: he phoned the trainer of the French soccer team and Zinedine Zidane just before a big international, claiming to be Jacques Chirac. He asked both men that every player should press his hand to his heart as they stood on the turf during the national anthem. Solemnly, they all did.

By the time television latches-on to something and starts getting breathless about it, you can be sure that something is either past its sell-by date or is in someway a threat to television itself - for the best way to kill anything is to let TV presenters gush about it. Is that what is happening at the moment to participative democracy?

Suddenly the media are prostrating themselves before “la sagesse du peuple” with almost indecent haste. Every French radio station has announced a series of innovating programmes with state of the art titles like “Les candidates face aux auditeurs”, “Air libre” or “Service public”, in which ordinary but selected people can go head to head with, and can actually ask questions of, the man or woman who may be the next president. On television it’s even worse: sheep-like, all the channels are trotting along the line given by France 2’s director of information: “[During the election campaign] we want the maximum number of French people to participate”. Her channel is producing “A vous de juger” in which two candidates’ representatives (not the candidates themselves) slug it out in front of a jury of ten “witnesses”. On sister channels you can watch “Français, votez pour moi!”, as “candidates are confronted with reality”, something then defined as “meeting French citizens, with all their experience of life and powerful convictions.” The flagship TF1 is pitting each of the main candidates against 100 of their “ordinary” compatriots. Why 100? How many questions can be properly answered in an hour, dodging commercials? Fifteen?

In other words France is going to be inundated with people’s democracy until everyone is heartily sick of it, fulfilling Churchill’s “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Which is a terrible shame. Participative democracy is a good idea, but it’s fragile and not a panacea for all the problems which so many western countries now face. It’s true it works best at the local level, when the people concerned know what is at stake, but even in a presidential election, if used wisely, it can stem the tide of disillusion with existing politics, get people implicated in the running of their lives or at the very least get them back into the voting booths.

Far more relevant for this election, I think, is the power of French political blogs, the 5^th power in France. If you want to look at the diversity on offer, start with BonVote, which classifies the top 100 most influential sites (out of the 1,436 sites scrutinised). BonVote also publishes its Top Buzz, counting the number of times each candidate is referred to on the net, for good or bad, in other words the noise each one generates. The current weekly evaluation shows Sarkozy at the top, followed by Royal, and then way below Michèle Alliot-Marie, François Bayrou et al. There is also a monthly version, drawn as a long tail: we can see that during January Ségolène Royal comes in first with 32,252 mentions (on the internet), Sarkozy now second with 26,807. Then it dips considerably: Chirac is third with 9,297. Other non-candidates follow until François Bayrou appears at 10^th position with 3,452 mentions, ahead of Nicolas Pont-Aignan and Le Pen with 3,363. Rachid Nekkaz, an excellent “petit” candidate, gets only 20 mentions (now 21). You can see the incredible gap: Sego get 10 times more mentions than Bayrou or Le Pen, who are jostling for third position in the actual race. It may well be that 9/10 of the battle is just to get people talking about you, particularly on the net. BonVote also shows how many sites are gathered round each party: the socialists have 255 sites, the UMP 157, the Greens a mere 32 and the FN 14 – but they don’t need the internet. The Greens do, however, and will never make headway on 32 sites.

Most of the best independent sites are listed on the right: Thierry Crouzet I find very good, Loïc Lemeur is considered the doyen of French bloggers and he has an English site. He has come down on Sarkozy’s side, Crouzet I think is more neutral. Thierry Maillet’s site is good too, and Nicolas Voisin’s Nuesblog. Reading them can be like a breath of fresh air, because they are not strait-jacketed by la pensée unique and indeed they are not always about the election. They are not necessarily interested in party politics, but often concerned more with deeper issues -  such as people’s democracy.

There is also a very good citizen’s newspaper, AgoraVox, which has an English version too, but since that is written by English-speakers, the centre of interest is mainly on the other side of the Atlantic and the French election features very little.

This week’s “Canard Enchainé” (no link because the Canard does not have an on-line edition) has a nice piece comparing the socialist French presidential candidate with Hillary Clinton. Both women prefer to make important announcements on the internet: Clinton that she was going to run for presidency, Royal her New Year’s wishes to the nation. Like Mme Royal, Mrs. Clinton invites internet users to take part in an important conversation on the future of the country. Like the French candidate, she has an assortment of elephants in her cupboard, old party stalwarts whom she has to accomodate. Both have a senior party figure who has “retired” from political life, but who threatens to come back and mess up their chances: former vice-president Al Gore for one and Lionel Jospin for the other. Hillary Clinton talks of 30 years fighting on behalf of children - Royal made her reputation in France as junior minister for schools education and then as junior minister for the family and childhood, and as for foreign affairs, Mrs. Clinton has said she will go on a trip to China (Royal has just come back) to defend the rights of women. Both women believe in strong moral values - Ségolène Royal annoys many French socialists by talking about l’ordre juste. And, says the wicked Canard, both are landed with a partner who is a senior party figure with a lot of clout but who is nevertheless “encombrant“. Someone who has undoubtedly helped them get where they are but with whom they might, in their heart of hearts, wish they were not quite so closely associated.

We used to wonder how, if elected, John Kerry would get on with Nicolas Sarkozy: the thought of Hillary and Ségolène having a cosy gossip in the Oval Office is even more intriguing - but not worth speculating about…..

There’s a video going round the (French-speaking) net at the moment, which illustrates well the role the internet is playing: yesterday Ségolène Royal was reminded in a radio interview that if she is elected president she becomes head of the army. She was asked how many nuclear submarines France has. She dithered a while and hazarded a guess. One? No, said the interviewer: Seven. Have a look at the video, which has the radio interview on the sound track while we watch images of massive destruction. But, as Thierry Crouzet says, there absolutely no reason why one person should have all the answers. Do we like her more because, like us she’s fallible? Many French people say that being president is closer to being god. But the more I study these elections, and hear what some French people expect from their president, the more I feel their expectations are over-blown. When the 5th Constitution was written in 1958 one man could somehow take it all on (not because issues then were less complex), but now we are all better informed, by our education and by the internet.

Participative democracy is not the monopoly of the Left. MEDEF, the French employers’ union, has just published a 150 page book which is the fruit of direct consultation with 50,000 managing directors. The book, “Le besoin d’air” (The Need for Air), is a non-partisan manifesto on how to breathe life back into French business and thus, argues Laurence Parisot, president of MEDEF, back into France. It is very rare for French employers to take any collective part in a presidential election campaign or indeed take any concerted action at all, and reflects the new direction being given to le patronat by Madame Parisot. In the past, MEDEF has been dominated, controlled by its (male) leader. Parisot, who became the first woman president of the union in July 2005, clearly believes in consultation and participative decision-making (before her present job she was managing director of IFOP, the French Institute of Public Opinion, so she has the track-record).

French companies and particularly small businesses can do very well, but they are handicapped not only by high tax, an excessively complex Code du Travail (at the employers’ AGM two years ago Laurence Parisot said “The freedom to set up business stops where the Code du Travail begins”) and what she calls “hyper-regulation”, but almost more fundamentally French entrepreneurs are crippled by being studiously ignored, if not spat upon, by much of French society. Nobody talks up French business. It would be electoral death for any candidate, even Nicolas Sarkozy, to praise the bosses. Why do so few take pride in something the French do well? It is perverse: the reason French companies do well is, generally speaking, because of the quality of conception and realisation, the reason they are not competitive is because of their high charges and the hyper-regulation. Yet the current chatter praises the latter and denigrates the job and income-creating employers. Laurence Parisot wants to switch that round that round: “Let us go out and meet people,” she told the 6,000 bosses at MEDEF’s annual general meeting (that’s probably a bigger crowd than Sarkozy got at his much-hyped coronation on January 14th), “show yourselves. How can we hope to be known and have a good image if we stay in the shadows, in our offices and workshops? Go out and talk about your successes, explain how you got where you are. Tell the French about our ideas and our methods.”

To me that is the most positive aspect of these election campaigns: the much-publicized change, break or rupture advocated by three of the four main candidates boils down to involving people, giving them information and trusting them with the intelligence to use it. If this movement continues, it can only result in a richer debate, and a higher turn-out on polling day. Many bosses at yesterday’s AGM were saying that this year, these elections, are make-or-break for French business. If that’s true, then they have to come out to people, via blogs or participative debates, why not, to explain why.

The row rumbles on about Ségolène Royal’s remarks in favour of independance for Quebec. On Tuesday evening she repeated them loud and clear on Europe 1, a French radio station. Ten minutes ago the internet version of Le Monde published an interview with former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, who says: “On matters of Canadian unity I cannot remain silent….I am very disappointed by Mme Royal’s remarks on such a delicate and deeply Canadian matter. It’s an unforgiveable mistake, probably linked to inexperience……Those who do not have the vote in Canada should not interfere with Canadian affairs.”

According to a blog on Le Monde’s site, M. Chrétien has just been invited for dinner by Sarkozy’s UMP!

Ségolène Royal is approaching a crucial moment in her campaign. According to one poll she has slipped 3 points against Nicolas Sarkozy and according to another she has lost 8 points to him in a month. Her now established habit of making naïve remarks about other countries is diminishing her in the eyes of her compatriots: only now 29% say she has the stature of a president, against 60% for Sarkozy.

That in itself could be of little importance at this early stage of the campaign, except for two things: one is that Sarkozy is such a professional. He is a machine for winning: since he is a keen and ruthless tennis-player I will allow myself a tennis metaphor and say that he reminds me of Björn Borg in the mid 1970’s, almost too focussed on winning. Once he gets a lead it is going to be very hard to catch up. People vote for success probably more than for cogent policies.

Royal’s drop in popularity is also important because she is being pulled down by her insistence on people’s democracy, and she is going to have to decide whether or not to jettison it. That’s a paradox, because it was people’s democracy which catapulted her into the driving seat of the Socialist Party. But she has yet to see the difference between fighting to be a party’s official candidate and fighting to be president of France. There is no doubt that her policy of participative democracy and the use of the internet gave her a huge popularity all last year amongst those disillusioned with the present political system. Learning from that, she announced she would spend the first month of the campaign listening. It sounds so refreshingly sensible – but that’s why she is losing ground so fast. Her rival is out there making rousing speeches, promising the earth while she quietly listens to ordinary people. And when she does speak, she puts her foot right in it. When it’s not her, it’s either her partner or her official spokesman. It is a very ragged, amateur team. What she is doing makes a lot of sense to those fed-up with conventional politics, but tactically it is a no-hoper: by the time she has decided what her policies are going to be (February 11^th, 2½ weeks away), Sarkozy’s lead will be beyond her. Unless of course he makes a major mistake. Which is what the Socialist Party is now looking for. At the beginning of the campaign Royal promised she would not demean herself to making personal attacks. It has not yet come to that, but the party did admit that as of Tuesday there is now a dedicated cell scouring Sarkozy’s speeches looking to capitalise on any possible weak link. They were helped in this by yesterday’s “Canard Enchainé”, a satirical but also probingly investigative weekly, which announced that Sarkozy’s party has used the Renseignements généraux, a sort of information gathering branch of internal security, controlled by the minister of the interior, to dig up dirt on Royal’s ecology spokesman, Bruno Rebelle, former No.2 of Greenpeace International. In riposte, the Socialist Party has asked Jacques Chirac to force Sarkozy to resign as Minister of the Interior, claiming that he is abusing the considerable means at his disposal to order such investigations.

The time for dreaming is fast drawing to a close, and the campaign is turning into yet another dirty little war.

Many people say People’s Democracy is bound to fail, and of course if they keep saying that, it will. So here’s something to make waverers think and the rule-by-experts school see red: an experiment in using participative democracy to decide whether public money should be spent on research for a subject which experts assure us is so deeply specialised and abstract that no ordinary person can possibly understand it: nanotechnology. Well, the Regional Council of the Ile de France (the large area surrounding and including Paris) decided to see whether ordinary people can take decisions usually monopolised by politicians. It chose a random jury of 16 ordinary folk to find out about nanotechnology, discuss its implications and then decide whether, in their view, research into it is worth funding. Gender equality was respected, ages ranged from 21 to 70 years, there were members from black and north Africa as well as whites on the jury and professions ranged from a forklift truck operator to managing director, with at least one member of the jury on the dole.

The idea of allowing a group of citizens to express themselves on issues considered taboo for the general public, either because of their complexity or because they have been monopolised by strong lobbies, seems quite current in Denmark. The Danish Board of Technology site says it’s a method developed in the US and Britain, so if any readers have direct experience of a citizen’s jury, it would be interesting to know. But as far as I can see it has not been used much, if at all, in France. This particular project on nanotechnology was in fact part of a deal: the Region agreed to put 4.7 million euro towards research if, in return, the researchers agreed to explain their work to a citizen’s jury and accept that their findings would influence the Regional Council’s ultimate decision. You can’t say fairer than that. The jury spent three weekends brushing up their molecular manipulation techniques and then, on the 20^th January, they held a day of auditions to interview not only the researchers but industrialists who use nanotechnology. This calling of experts to public account is a first in France. Most, Lefarge, Oréal, STMicroelectronics, agreed to come and be grilled. Some, like Michelin, refused, as did some parliamentarians.

Broadly speaking, the jury were impressed by the possibilities of nanotechnology, but worried by a few possible consequences, particularly the risk that some of its techniques, such as therapeutic implants, could be/will be hijacked by the unscrupulous or simply mad. The majority verdict was that the Regional Council should “support nanotechnology, because of its openings for medicine, energy and job creation.” At the same time the jury noted the “marked lack of information about the risks involved”, for example the dissemination of nanoparticles when not enough is known about their impact on health and the environment, so their conclusion is that public finance for nanotechnology research should be contingent on a “correct” sum of money being allocated to research the possible dangers, and that would include a permanent supervisory body, passing on information to the public.

This blog is not the place to analyse their findings, nor am I the person to do it. But from the point of view of people’s democracy the 6 page downloadable .pdf file written by the jury as a summing-up is a very good example of how the ordinarily educated person, given responsibility (and that is the key), is far more perceptive than his stereotype allows. It is also a rather beautiful document, with, from the very first sentence, echoes of 1789 : “Nous, citoyens hommes et femmes d’Ile de France, avec nos différences, nos particularités et notre diversité, avons débattu des enjeux liés au développement des nanotechnologies…..”. Throughout there runs a cri de coeur that they want to be informed, they are taken aback that so much has been done without their knowledge, as if behind their backs and certainly as though those in authority (politicians more than the people doing the research) believe that ordinary people have nothing useful to say. Yet they show their awareness of the problems and pressures, commercial, political, international, and they are not Luddites, indeed they want to be properly informed and they want to be involved.