It’s been another seriously bad week for the French left. The consequences of telling French voters to “vote for the crook not the fascist” (“Votez pour l’escroc pas le facho!”) have come back to haunt them. After all, if the left reckon Chirac’s ok to vote for in a presidential election, why isn’t his coalition ok to vote for the legislative elections?
Whoops! The result is that a massive abstention rate (by French standards) of leftists unable to bring themselves to support quasi-market reforms by the socialist party, and a rout by the mainstream right. The new government has stolen just enough of the ‘far-right’ agenda to be able to plausibly claim that voter concerns have been taken on board: the government is apparently promising a socking cut in taxes and to tackle crime with something more substantial than platitudes.
French libertarians will be uncomfortable with the fact that Alain Madelin is backing the government which contains enough crooks and wets to bring down a British Conservative government many times over. Bill Clinton wouldn’t last a year with this bunch. Madelin isn’t as capable a political manipulator (and that isn’t an entirely bad thing).
However, looking at such Socialist ‘intellectual giants’ as Jacques Delors’ daughter Martine Aubry (the ‘mind’ behind the 35 hour week), Elizabeth Guignou and convicted haemophiliac-killer Laurent Fabius, the new French government may prove impotent, corrupt and paralysed by factional strife over reforming the French welfare state, but they won’t actually try to make things worse as the Socialist party would. I still think president Chirac makes Stephen Byers, John Major and Neil Hamilton put together look good, but a government with Aubry in it is even worse.
On a ‘least bad option available’ there is a case for kicking the Socialists out. It seems a large portion of the French electorate agrees.
