Yesterday the election campaign officially started. That’s not a misprint, but one of those strange quirks of French electoral procedure. What it means is that from now on every newspaper, radio and TV station is obliged by law to give exactly equal time to each of the 12 candidates. If you give column-space or air-time to one, you have to give an equal amount to the others (the media watchdog CSA, counts the minutes). There are 11 days left to give every candidate his or her fair share. And blogs? Where do they fit in? Are they media? If they are, I consider this blog to be off-shore. I do not want to give exactly the same number of words to each candidate.

At the same time, the polls are registering the highest ever number of Don’t Knows: 42 or 47% depending. All the candidates are desperate to win them over, yet the experts say it is too late to get involved in policies: if after 3 months hard graft arguing over unemployment, security, economics, national identity etc the candidates have not convinced half the voters, they’re not going to be persuaded now. What will sway them, says prevailing wisdom, is force of personality: who looks best suited to run France, who fits most closely to the image of a president. It is the person who matters now, not the policy. At this stage in the last presidential elections, outsider Olivier Besancenot rose high in the polls: he’s one of the Trotskyist candidates, a postman with a beatific face and a convincing manner. A lot of intelligent people have told me over the past couple of weeks as I toured Strasbourg and Paris that he is their man. I have to say that despite his enormous charm, that makes me sad: he is so violently anti everything that has got the UK back on its feet over the past decade or so. But there is a strong current in the present election to close off France from everything that is happening outside, as if the best way to protect the country against the rising economies of China, India and Brazil, is to close in on itself, like a hedgehog rolling into a ball or a tortoise retreating into its shell. In a sense that has been Chirac’s line for the past 12 years, the Gaullist patriotic withdrawal, standing aloof from the rest of the world. I had hoped that when candidates promised change, they meant they wanted to change that. Apparently not. Only Sarkozy, for a while, pushed a certain openess to other countries, but he soon changed as it lost him support. Even the centrist François Bayrou dare not suggest vaguely free-market solutions or look for examples beyond France’s borders.

Of course the reason why almost half the electorate is still undecided may be precisely because, knowing that France needs to look positively outwards, they are frustrated that no candidate has offered them that possibility. No candidate has said “it’s time to learn from the success of Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and even (deep breath) Britain”. Not copy, simply accept that some of what those countries do might help France. Of the twelve candidates, 6 are left-wing, 2 extreme right, one is Green, the tenth (Hunting, Shooting, Fishing) defends the countryside, leaving only Sarko and Bayrou. If those two make it into the second round, that may be because many French people reject that “closed-in upon ourselves” view. As I have said so many times, this election really is important for France, because the country is in a terrible mess, with its unemployment and massive debt, its falling self-confidence and rising number of pensioners. The election is the best way of making a fresh start. But maybe it’s already too late. What seems certain is that after 3 months debate, nearly half the voters are still waiting, unsatisfied.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.