One third of all voters in France are still undecided how they will vote. I wonder whether in part that’s because their expectations were too high at the beginning and now disillusion has taken hold. It comes back to something I mentioned yesterday, that five out of the twelve candidates are not professional politicians. They are, we are led to assume, “like us”. Regardless of their true nature, many voters think of them as basically “nice people” who care about their country enough to stand up and defend or even improve it.

These ordinary people are in strong contrast with the “others”, the professional politicians well-known to the voter already, living in a different world, an elite. We know they live by horse-trading, making promises they have no intention of keeping and generally looking after their own futures.

Throughout much of the campaign the “small” candidates were presented to us as the key. One minute the press are making a great fuss about whether or not Bové will get his 500 signatures, with a resounding Hooray for Democracy when he does, then they dismiss him as an irrelevant also-ran, treating him with the legal minimum of respect. Worse, they put all their effort into reporting the main four candidates, who now do little but denigrate their rivals in their bald race for personal power. Voters, you might say naive voters, perhaps young, idealistic first-time voters, are a bit shocked by this sudden reversal.

For another difference between French presidential elections and their American counterpart, or parliamentary elections in Britain, is that French elections are treated as an opportunity not only to compare nitty-gritty policy issues such as tax increases and housing shortages but to mull over all the theoretical stuff as well. My desk is covered in special issues of magazines devoted to Liberté (one issue), Egalité (another whole issue) etc, each containing some 100 pages of heavy text written by academics taking us back to the writings of Voltaire, Diderot, Jaurès: reminding us in other words about the fundamentals. Beautifully (and expensively) produced, but who reads them? They fight for space on my desk with a quite extraordinary number of books published since January 1st on the same subjects. Most of the candidates, including the “small” ones, write a book - how the world would be if they were president. Some, like Sarkozy and Bayrou, have written two or three since January. They all contain things that the conscientious voter, or commentator, should read and retain.

All this space and effort given to high ideals is quite foreign to British or American elections, which are only about issues, for which read money, the bottom line: who gets it and who pays the bill? Please don’t misunderstand me, here too debates are about that as well, but underneath there is this current of deeper things. It’s easy to say they have nothing, or little to do with issues like job losses at Airbus, or income tax levels or even a ministry of national identity. But that would be wrong – they do. French job losses are about Fraternité (or solidarité, supposed by some to be a specifically French concept), income tax levels and proposed ministries of identity are about Egalité. These noble ideals become the benchmark by which we measure every candidate’s policies and propositions. For example, at the moment there is a heated debate over whether the very very few (half a dozen out of some 63 million people) bosses of major companies should get enormous golden handshakes. So seriously is this taken that the present minister of the economy, Thierry Breton, is threatened with losing his job (will that provoke solidarity?) because he supported one such handshake. The amount of money involved clearly transgresses some deep-seated but high-minded limit about how much any individual should be allowed to make (a limit that only applies to businessmen, not sportsmen, actors, writers or painters). But this current spat is only the tip of the iceberg: much of the campaign has been dominated by the same anti-profit debate in speeches and writings by the anti-free-market, anti-globalisation lobby. That is the extreme left, the moderate left, part of the centre and the extreme right. Their argument is that profit for one means poverty for another, whereas life (perhaps as described by Voltaire, Diderot and Jaurès), should be equal for everybody: that is fair, with a guaranteed secure, problem-free future for everyone for ever. Perfectly commendable, yet most of us learn quite early on it can never be obtained, for all sorts of reasons which can be resumed as human nature.

It is the enormous contrast between these two elements in the election, the utopic and the real, which causes the initial high hopes and then growing disillusion amongst some. Reading commentaries on 18th or 19th ideals is not a good preparation for choosing which of the four major candidates you should vote for this Sunday – and that is the only question which will make a difference to France in the next five crucial years.

Finally the filming of the documentary on the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, France’s post-post-graduate school for those who want to run the country, is finished and I can settle into the editing and go back to writing this blog on a regular basis. I apologise to my regular readers for the long breaks, although I hope my new knowledge about the French elite will find its way into the blog.
On Friday, in Paris, I had one of those enriching conversations about the election with two people who at 8.30 I did not know but by 6.00 I knew quite well: my cameraman and the taxi-driver who ferried us about the capital all day. The cameraman, like so many others, has spent the last couple of months on the road with most of the different candidates. He follows them every day, watches more than listens, and never gets to talk to them himself, since he is simply the medium though which the message passes. But having spent his entire working life watching people through his viewfinder he is a pretty shrewd judge of what’s what. The taxi-driver, also accepted as no more than a means to an end, listens all day to his fares as they chatter on  about the election, watching only through his mirror. The cameraman had no time for Sarkozy, but, as a left-leaning person, was terminally disappointed by Royal, while Bayrou is too soft to succeed. Nobody likes a man who is half one thing and half another.
What preoccupied the cameraman was the environment, perplexed by the central contradiction that cutting back on emissions means cutting back on our way of life. At the mention of green-house gases, of course, the taxi-driver shifted in his seat uncomfortably, fiddled with the volume on his radio and tried to bring the conversation back to more reasonable topics, like the recent violence at the Gare du Nord. As the day wore on and we got to know each other better he did come up with the suggestion that a massive, taxi-exempt congestion charge in Paris would be the best way of cutting exhaust emission at a stroke, enabling him to work in greater freedom.
Just after Christmas, the campaign kicked off with great excitement and chatter about the environment – at that time there were four of five potential candidates representing the various factions of the ecology movement. That first surge culminated with a much publicized document drawn up by the charismatic Nicolas Hulot, a television presenter. Hulot challenged all the major candidates to sign his charter, in effect promising that if elected they would address in  proper fashion the problems of climate change. Hulot is a household name in France (not because his grandfather gave the family name to Jacques Tati’s cinematic persona, but because of the popularity of his own unpronounceable entitled  TV series Ushuaïa) and at that early stage of the election he had the clout to be able to make candidates bend to his will. But since then the campaign has degenerated into intense navel-gazing (well, that’s not entirely fair – the unemployed, the national debt, the economy generally are all important, but they are purely French issues, and the president is supposed to look beyond France into the greater abyss), with none of the main candidates talking seriously about Europe (the 50^th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome was greeted by silence all round), let alone the rest of the world. A fact which in itself shows France’s changing perspective: a few years ago it considered itself a weight in international affairs. So the silence on how France is going to fight global warming, for instance, is sad. Monsieur Hulot thought so too, and yesterday organised a rally in Paris to bring the environment back into the headlines – the only way to make the candidates sit up and take notice.
As the cameraman said, the reason candidates have dropped green issues is obvious.: de-polluting the atmosphere is in direct contradiction with increasing economic growth, both personal and national. Cutting back on green-house gases means cutting back on our wasteful lifestyle – all of us, not just big companies – and at every level. Next weekend the French roads will be choked with cars, admittedly most of them full, which makes a change, crawling off to holiday destinations because we have all come to assume that holiday homes a long way from our principal homes are a right. Airports will be full of people flying to further destinations for the same reason. But if people stop going on holiday, the hotel and restaurant trade will suffer, airlines will collapse, more people will be made redundant. But even in our working lives we all move about the country to an extraordinary extent, creating the wealth which France needs to get back into a situation of full employment. The French public know this, and may be the reason why the only Green candidate, Dominique Voynet, is scarcely polling 1% (Hulot decided not to stand, naively considering his charter was sufficient)
Last year university students took to the streets because the government seemed to be proposing employment measures that might reduce the style in which they have become accustomed to live by reducing the number of lifetime-guaranteed jobs. Learning from that, the presidential candidates have built on the assumption that everyone wants to have greater job-security and earn more money, so it is little wonder they have not, dare not, address serious environmental issues. It’s a choice we all have to make.
Hulot’s demonstration will bring the subject back on to the agenda of all the candidates, but it is now plain that none of them take it seriously. Like all their campaign promises, commitment to the environment is to be taken as gentle fiction.
 

The scene shifts from the Salon d’Agriculture to Airbus - from pedigree pigs to pigs that fly - a wishful dream that Europe could sustain the development and manufacture of a major industrial project. Only a few months ago all the great and the good of Europe were on the tarmac at Toulouse to see the launch of the mega-plane, the A380. That particular day I was having a picnic with my family beside a local stream and long-abandonned 18th century mill, when this enormous beast came flying low over us, turning with the slow majesty of some massive sea mammal. Leaning my head against the mossy 18th century industrial ruin, I was impressed at man’s fathomless ingenuity, his unceasing quest for this and that and all the accompanying clichés. Today those same ingenious men are out on the street, demonstrating their despair while yesterday’s great and good bury their heads in the sand and it is tomorrow’s hopeful leaders, the candidates in this presidential campaign, who are flocking to Toulouse, each seeking to show that he or she is better equiped than their rivals to deal with the death-throes of European industry.

Jean-Marie Le Pen is quite clear: it is not the state’s responsablity to bail out Airbus. “Ah!”, cries the eager reporter, scoop at the ready, “So (heartlessly) you’d abandon Airbus….” Not at all, cut in Le Pen, I’d work hard to find private companies who want to invest or buy - the old admiration for Thatcher has not died. François Bayrou has the same line, less agressively stated. I wonder whether they will be quite so keen if (when) a wealthy industrialist from India or China says he is willing to buy. The blatantly racist comments from all major politicians when Lakshmi Mittal first announced he wanted to buy Arcelor are still echoing. As president of a Region, Ségolène Royal wants to involve the Regions, let them invest in Airbus. All her fellow-socialist regional presidents have said that’s just what they want too. Unfortunately their combined wealth seems to be about a tenth of the money required, though I am fully prepared to believe that’s a grossly unfair figure thrown up by the opposition. But nevertheless I’m not quite sure why I should have to pay even higher local tax to support an aeroplane that most other French people won’t have to pay for. And anyway, should we be supporting air travel? (and will I be asked?) - although of course A380 carries more people per load (assuming it flies full), so I suppose it pollutes proportionately less. Nicolas Sarkozy for his part immediately brought his Alstom trophy out of the cupboard. In 2004 he attracted great criticism (including from me in Prospect) for shoring up the ailing French engineering company with public money, justifying it by saying that “uniquely French engineering knowledge must not be allowed to fall into the hands of foreigners” (meaning in that context the Germans). Sarkozy fought and won that battle with Brussels and it is true that today, thanks to public money, Alstom is back on its feet. Today Sarkozy is busy reminding us all of his vision and wisdom as he now joins with Germany to find a way to stop Airbus (or part of it) falling into the hands of other, perhaps less savoury foreigners. But certainly the Airbus experience is showing us that Sarkozy is not a free-market man. When the going is good he will let his mates (like Arnaud Lagardère, principal private French shareholder in Airbus) ape American business, but when there’s a problem he’ll fall back on vote-catching dirigisme. However, more to the point, as Elie Cohen of Telos points out, both Royal and Sarkozy speak as though Airbus were a wholly nationalised French concern and the German partner does not exist

The press says there are some 4,300 jobs at risk in France (although presumably only if no one, Indian or otherwise, buys part of the company). Worth noting perhaps last year’s decision by the French car manufacturer Peugeot to close its plant in Britain, with the direct loss of 2,300 jobs and a further 5,000 jobs amongst ancillary suppliers. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t remember a single French voice lifted in sympathetic protest at the time. 50 years of European union may have done wonders preventing wars, but it hasn’t done much for neighbourly solidarity.

For information in this confused scene: Airbus is managed (owned?) by EADS, the troubled Franco/German company. Lagardère (French) and Daimler-Chrysler (German) are the two private shareholders, each with a vote, in EADS, and therefore presumably a say in the running of Airbus. The French and German governments are investors in EADS but have no vote. Louis Gallois is the new boss of Airbus, he is also the French president of EADS, a position he shares with the German Thomas Enders. As far as I can see there is no German represented at the top of Airbus.

Despite dwindling numbers of farmers, the power of agriculture in France is still strong – as the annual Salon d’Agriculture in Paris, which opens today, shows. Yesterday was press day, and the Salon was the lead item on all media, they talked of little else. It’s an annual ritual that I suspect will become much less important if either Nicolas Sarkozy or Ségolène Royal is elected president. For two weeks, millions will flock by car, bus and train to France’s largest city to spend a couple of hours imagining they’re in the countryside. Needless to say, the pomp and fuss made of fancy bulls and pedigree pigs bears little relation to the real situation in rural France, which is disastrous. A survey in 2004 showed that half the people moving into rural France are below the official poverty line – which means they earn less than either 50 or 60% of the median wage-earner (the first figure is the French measure, the second the European). They cannot afford to live in towns, and in the country there is no work. The famous farmers so cosseted in this weekend’s press employ no one: in 30 years, farming has ceased to be a labour-intensive occupation and now, certainly round me, it is a purely family affair. European subsidies have enabled farmers to mechanise every part of the food-producing process, at the same time dig themselves deeply into debt since the subsidies are not 100%, whereas, in my view, those subsidies should be for paying wages beyond the family. Then of course the farm-equipment manufacturers would squeal – but since most have already moved their manufacturing outside France….. But no one wants to hear that: Sarkozy’s publicity director puts him on a poster against a backdrop of an idyllic French village – la France éternelle. 16 years ago, the same idea worked well for Mitterrand, and we all know France has not changed one iota since.
Jacques Chirac, who spent four hours at the Salon yesterday, is constantly referred to as the farmers’ friend, mainly because way back in 1976 when he was Minister of Agriculture he defended their rights tooth and claw against Britain and Brussels. It’s a trick he has repeated often since, each time to great applause: yesterday he did it again, lambasting that perfidious Brit, Peter Mendelson who only has to twitch his pen for all France to boo. But in between times the farmer’s friend has done strictly nothing to prevent rural decline – as if his annual visit to the Salon patting heads was enough to keep the peasants happy. But farmers are fed up that in this election campaign the candidates (and M. Chirac) waste their time banging on about the environment. Thus far they haven’t addressed real farming issues: money. That will change this week of course, as each candidate visits the Salon. The air will be thick with extravagant promises about defending the Common Agricultural Policy to their dying breath – more methane to add to that produced by the cows. The only candidates to talk honestly about subsidies, Bayrou and Bové, both practicing farmers, have pointed out that they distort trade and hurt, kill farmers in the developing world. And then Bové wonders why rural mayors are not endorsing him!

Farmers want to produce food to feed the masses, a virile, status-rich occupation, not receive a monthly cheque from a computer in Brussels for titivating a few hedgerows –for farmers are as much seduced by rural nostalgia as townies, and look back through rose-tinted spectacles at the time when all winter we ate nothing but the potatoes, Swedes or chestnuts (if we were lucky) grown in good French soil, and meat was a once a month luxury.

Two or three evenings a week I visit lonely farms to give the children extra English lessons. Nobody could claim that their parents are poor, but they far from well-off after working long and anti-social hours. They know their world is changing, if not disappearing, and their children had better adapt. The simple time-honoured expedient of inheriting the family farm will be much less attractive in ten years’ time.

Two figures: there are 1 million farmers active in France - and nearly 2 million retired. That merits reflection. Traditionally most rural mayors (those chaps so sought after for their endorsement by the “small” candidates) are retired farmers, they have kept local power leaning their way. But that too is changing, in my neighbouring village the mayor and ten of his councillors live and work far way, in large towns. They return to the village where they grew up most weekends, but inevitably their mindset is now urban. Similarly the vast majority of the millions who visit the Salon d’Agriculture will get in the car afterwards and drive to the nearest supermarket to buy (at best) a nice piece of shrink-wrapped (special offer) meat, vegetables ‘produced in the European Union’ and fruit from a long way away. At best. Even in France a growing number opt for the prepared meal, the frozen veg, the ready-to-eat pudding. The one piece of French produce they will buy is cheese – although increasingly in supermarkets that is industrial, as unpasteurised milk becomes proscribed by Brussels. That is the reality of agriculture – what it produces has to be cheap and safe and as far removed from the realities of farming as possible. A few years ago I was helping one of Bové’s neighbours on the Larzac plateau milk her sheep. As she worked, the sheep she was milking shat into the bucket of milk. Calmly she hoiked out the turd and carried on milking.

Yesterday François Bayrou made his major policy speech about the French economy: it runs to 33 pages and I’m not going to catalogue it here. Suffice it to say that from the outset he distinguished himself from his two principle rivals, Sarkozy and Royal, by describing France as it is now, rather than, as they did in their equivalent speeches, painting a rosy picture of how France might be after 5 years under their control. Bayrou’s policy has always been to avoid making promises.

He kicked off talking about the national debt. It would be misleading to say that the debt is a forbidden subject in the election, but most candidates apparently consider it’s not nice to talk about it, or perhaps they think we simple folk would not understand it, or would be frightened if we knew the truth. Bayrou claims there are three debts: financial, generational and ecological, and we have a collective responsibility to address all three. The financial debt is sobering if not downright frightening: 1,200 billion euros plus a further 800 billion in pension commitments. “Every day the State spends 20% more than it generates,” he said, adding that there are economists who consider it normal for a country to function with a massive debt. He believes, on the contrary, that massive debt cripples a country, is a brake on growth, induces this state of febrile insecurity we see in France today and is particularly harmful for those on low incomes, the elderly, the disabled, those who can no longer fend for themselves. He would add a clause to the constitution making it illegal for a government to present a deficit budget – as I think it is in the UK. Unlike Sarko and Ségo, he does not invoke that litany of long-dead men whose recitation is like reading the street-map of any French town – Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum, Condorcet, Zola, Hugo, Clemenceau, Carnot, Jules Ferry – as if somehow they were going to get us out of this mess. Bayrou simply describes France as it is now.

One of Bayrou’s closest advisors is also one of France’s best economists – by ‘best’ I mean he not only talks the hind legs off a donkey with great wit, insight and deep experience (amongst many other things he’s a magistrate at the Cour des comptes) but he’s an iconoclast and fiercely independent, a chap called Charles de Courson. He and I discussed the state of France for an hour or so last week, and while we talked mainly of other things (the French elite and why it is responsible for the mess France finds itself in), I was pleased that he took on board and incorporated in Bayrou’s speech everything I didn’t say on the French economy simply because I couldn’t get a word in edgeways. That’s what I call clever. But certainly Bayrou’s whole approach to economics is De Courson orientated: being up-front about the problem and realistic about the possible solutions (One of the things M. de Courson told me in his monologue-fleuve was that there are always several solutions to every problem, and all of them can work – this flies in the face of conventional enarque thinking that, as in mathematics, there is only one “right answer” – and only a bona fide enarque has the skill to find it).

Bayrou on business was also good news to me, and I would guess to the several hundred Brits who have set up businesses in France. While his rivals glorify the multitude of fonctionnaires (and implicitly the bureaucracy they uphold), he says clearly that small businesses will never flourish while they are buried under reams of Ubu-esque (actually more Ionesco-like) paperwork, describing exactly the situation of my neighbour, a plumber, whose wife spends all day every day battling the paperwork while her husband is out trying to earn the family income. Or indeed the situation I find myself in, wanting to pay a French cameraman for three days’ work with money from a UK-based production company: the quantity of forms and what they ask on them is simply mind-boggling, and will take me much more than three days to fill in. And we’re in Europe!

Associated with small businesses of course are French banks, which again Bayrou quite rightly identified as a disaster area – not a French exception as the current internet-based revolt in Britain against high-street banks shows. But in France they simply do not want to make small loans to a shop-keeper, say, to improve their premises.

At a more fundamental level he recognises that in France business is a dirty word, a mind-set that has to change if the country is ever to bring itself into competition with even its European neighbours. To set things straight, he took the trouble to point out the reality of the French business world: in fact of the country’s 2.7 million companies, fully 1.5 million are one-man bands, with no employees. A further 1 million companies employ between 1 and 9 people. Thus nearly 93% of all French businesses employ either no one or less than 10 people – a far cry from the stereo-type of slave-driving businessmen ruthlessly exploiting shed-fulls of workers. Like the inestimable Jacques Marseille (another iconoclast economist and historian whose recent book I shall be quoting soon), François Bayrou risks disbelief by telling his compatriots the way it is, rather than the way they think it was.

Bayrou proposes to allow every company, large, small or tiny, to take on two new people with no employers’ charges. The only thing the employer would pay on top of the wage would be something towards pensions.

Similarly with the electorally thorny 35-hour week. The problem at the moment is that often workers cannot work any overtime because every hour they work incurs even more charges for the employer. Bayrou suggests that they should work overtime at salary plus 35%, and their employer should pay 35% less than normal charges, so in fact the employer pays out the same amount as he would for a normal hour’s work while the worker gets 35% more. If you give the employer any more incentives to work his people overtime, he’ll do that rather than take on new employees, which has to be done as well – given, as M. Bayrou says, there are really 4 million unemployed and as many again under-employed.

He wants to introduce the idea of Business Angels and a French version of the American Small Business Act. To help young people start businesses he suggests that a “senior” be put over the company as a godfather for a year at least. Not sure who pays for him or her. In the same logic he suggests that people taking a first job should be paid by the state for the first year, since they are unlikely to bring much benefit to the company while they are learning. He also suggests a French VSO scheme where young people would do community service, either in France, Europe or in a developing country, and their work during these 6 months, officially assessed, would count on their CV’s.

As with much of what M. Bayrou says, the press do not give it much time, preferring to write about Sarkozy’s “improvised” visit to a deprived estate in Perpignan or Le Pen’s mega-meeting in Lille – about which I shall write later.

Another aspect of Ségolène Royal’s lack of vision is her attitude towards what the French call statistiques ethniques. At the moment it is illegal in France to ask on any official form, such as the Census, questions about racial origins or religious beliefs. In France there are only French citizens. Thus any figures about how many people of North African origin there are, or how many Muslims, are based on guess-work, and published totals vary according to the political views of the editor of each newspaper or magazine. It is simply not possible to say with any certainty how many North African, black African or Asian French people there are – nor therefore to get proper statistics about unemployment, housing, scholastic success, public health. There have been attempts to do so, initially by Michèle Tribalat, a researcher and more recently by other CNRS researchers, but their work remains unacceptable to many of their own colleagues, as revealed by a petition launched today to keep ethnic origins out of statistics.

At the moment, the only way to get figures about non-white French people is to assume someone’s racial roots from their name – which contradicts the idea of anonymity: you have to know his name is Mohammed Hamoun before you guess he has North African roots. But from there to say he is or is not Muslim (let alone whether or not he’s a practising or lapsed Muslim) is a mind-boggling leap into stereo-type. (It has always intrigued me that the French, who claim all immigrants leave their cultural baggage at the frontier and willingly adopt total Frenchitude, never wonder why couples of North African origin still call their children by North African names, and indeed talk in Arabic amongst themselves – on a train approaching Montpellier last week the air was full of Arabic as the French passengers phoned their families or friends).

However, moving in a more open direction, the Representative Council for Black Associations recently sent a questionnaire to all the presidential candidates, asking for their views on the principal of statistiques ethniques. Nicolas Sarkozy replied they are “necessary and useful”, in keeping with his sympathy for some discreet form of positive discrimination. François Bayrou replied that “Nothing is gained by concealing the diversity of our people,” which seems consistent with his honesty in other matters. Marie-George Buffet (Communist) and Dominique Voynet (Green) also said they are in favour of using ethnic statistics. Only Ségolène Royal demurred, saying interpreting ethnic statistics is “very delicate” because of “the risk of labelling”.

The fear of labelling people from other backgrounds is a hang-over from Vichy, when of course it became literally that, a label pinned to the chest. But that was a period when most “foreigners” had white faces and, without a star on their chest, could blend into the crowd. That is not the case today, when people from North and West Africa are rightly called the “visible minorities”. Meeting them, you don’t have to ask their names to know their roots lie beyond Europe. Denying on paper the evidence of your own eyes seems to me a glorification of blindness.

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.

The press and media this morning are having a field-day rubbing salt into Ségolène Royal’s wounds. After a brilliant 2006, she has started the new year badly, and her popularity is slipping. Rumours abound: rifts within the Royalist camp, gossip about domestic tensions, dissections by learned psychologists about the unsustainable pressure on the male (François Holland) seeing his partner in the driving seat. Most of all, the press are piling on the agony after Royal’s forced admission that she and her partner own enough property to qualify for ISF, an annual tax levied on those with property worth more than 760,000 euro. Many old-school socialists claim they are scandalised, but really the whole story is being blown out of all proportion: the Royal/Holland couple are not rich, they have simply saved and spent wisely, thinking no doubt of their four children. But the response, as Jean-Michel Aphatie says, shows the French attitude to money: “In our country we stigmatise getting rich so much, we have thought so little collectively about how a society gets rich, about the creation of wealth within a society, that now we have the Holland/Royal couple hoist by their own petard.” Perhaps that’s why politicians’ exhortations to create a wealthy France get nowhere. François Holland himself has said on television “I don’t like the rich.” None of the above will, in my view, have any bearing on the election, but what must be most galling for Royal is that the so-called scandal broke on the web, the very same which so powerfully pushed up her fortunes last year. This year it could be her undoing. That is, of course, the curse inherent in the uncontrolled web: while citizens’ news and opinions spread like wildfire, so do scurrilous rumours and lies. If that sort of thing persists, it could discredit the whole idea of the web, leading to a back-lash, pushing power back firmly to the carefully controlled centre. Many political bloggers say their sites are being inundated with spam sent by angry socialist party members, getting their revenge for this property/tax story by “killing” the blogosphere.

All this media fuss is of course taking everyone’s eye off the ball. Ségolène Royal’s over-hyped problems are superficial compared to Sarkozy’s, which characteristically are not mentioned at all as he basks in post-coronation euphoria. But he would do well to spare a thought for those around him in his party. The day after Sarkozy’s coronation, prime minister De Villepin gave his new year’s wishes to the press. Last year you had to fight for standing room at the back, this year I could have brought the (extended) family. What changed? Very simple: he tried to reform one small part of France’s archaic employment laws, those dealing with first-time employment, so crucial, particularly for the dispossessed in the ghettoes. The man who thrilled us as, with Gaullist rhetoric, he defied Bush at the UN, is forgotten by those he sought to save. Defying America is a piece of cake compared with trying to reform France, even though everyone knows both need to be done.

Mais ce n’est pas tout, as my favourite TV presenter says. Sitting on Sarkozy’s right-hand is Alain Juppé, another prime minister who tried to reform France and for his pains was invited to inspect the inside of Matignon’s dustbins. Both men have cringed before their television sets, watching the rioting street mob baying for their blood. And then there’s the boss, Jacques Chirac, destroyed because he tried to get his compatriots to accept the European Constitution. Three extremely clever men (whatever one thinks of their politics) incapacitated by trying to make essential changes. I feel little compassion for them personally, but much for France, today whooping with joy because it fondly imagines that all its problems are solved, not by reform, but because it has the second highest birth-rate in Europe. A glorification of motherhood, with echoes of Pétain, as if finally French women understood their real role in life. But those 830,900 babies born last year are only going to make things worse! Each one, educated and kept alive at great public expense, is going to grow up into a rioting, cobble-throwing young person demanding nothing more adventurous than a secure, well-feathered job for life because that is his/her droit aquis. And as for being proud of now having a population of 63.4 million, they should contemplate De Gaulle’s wise words about the impossibility of governing a country of 368 cheeses.