The simultaneous election campaigns in France and the United States furnish an astonishing spectacle of the limits and hazards of democratic government. The French Fifth Republic, founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1958, is the most successful state in French history, suffering neither the capricious despotism of the various French monarchical dynasties and two Bonapartist empires, nor the instability of the four previous republics, much less the shortcomings of the Directory, Consulate, or provisional or collaborationist regimes that dot France’s astounding history.

This is because de Gaulle set up a strong executive with the trappings and legitimist props of monarchy, and called it all a republic. Yet the occupants of the presidency of the Fifth Republic have traced a gradual descent toward the mediocrity and political banality that de Gaulle so desperately wished to avoid and discourage. From de Gaulle, an objectively great statesman, to the solid and wise Georges Pompidou, to the intelligent but erratic Valery Giscard d’Estaing, to the cunning hyper-cynic Francois Mitterrand (at one time a collaborator of both Nazis and Communists, who once faked an assassination attempt on himself), to the bumbling and sticky-fingered Jacques Chirac, the pattern was a precise step downwards with each succession. No other important country has followed such a straight trajectory over 50 years.

The current incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, does seem, on balance, a slight rebound from Chirac. But he has been, and remains, an underdog, opposite an implausible and rather mealy mouthed socialist, Francois Hollande, whose former companion and mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, leap-frogged his candidacy for the Socialist nomination five years ago, ending their prolific relationship, but lost the election to Sarkozy.

There are five principal candidates, arrayed symmetrically, from right to left: The reactionary anti-Europe and anti-immigration National Front’s Marine Le Pen, espousing petit bourgeois know-nothingism, though less rancorously than her father, the party’s founder, did. Next on the ideological compass is the centre-right Gaullist Sarkozy, who believes in the omnipotent French state of Richelieu, Colbert, and Napoleon. He has lengthened the work week and boosted the retirement age. He has also raised taxes, and now wants to impose a heavy exit tax, as the wealthy French are again fleeing the country, as they often have before. The French call Sarkozy “the water-bug” and “President Bling-bling” because of his frenetic behavior and garish tastes.

Then there is the radical centrist Francois Bayrou, who doesn’t really have a party, and departs his farm every five years to take 10%-12% of the presidential vote for a median platform of moderate tax increases and spending reductions.

Moving to the left, there is M. Hollande, who casually repeats: “I don’t like the rich,” and wants to raise their taxes to 90%.

The piece de resistance in every respect is Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the Leftist Bloc, a coalition of Trotskyites, orthodox Communists, dissident socialists, militant environmentalists, vegetarians, nudists, and anarchists. Melenchon wants a 100% tax on incomes above 360,000 euros a year, a 20% increase in the minimum wage, and the inability of any profitable company to lay off anyone.

France now devotes 56% of its GDP to the public sector, compared to the OECD average of 43% and about 40% in the United States. The French national debt is 90% of GDP and rising. If there is not steady progress toward a balanced budget, this naturally abundantly rich country and talented and preternaturally avaricious people will hit the well-stained Eurowall of official penury with a vastly greater impact than those lesser states that have preceded it there. And like them, France would then be taken to the woodshed, as it has in the most unpleasant moments of its past, by the German-Euro disciplinarian. Fifteen years ago, Sir James Goldsmith said: “France thinks it can ride the German stallion but will find that it is only the stable boy.” That day is nigh.

As public policy, then, this election is polemics and denial. But as pyrotechnic entertainment, it is excellent theatre of the absurd: marvelous poses, riotous insults. Melenchon calls his former comrade Hollande a “pedal-boat captain,” and describes himself as “the sound and fury of the volcano of European revolution,” of which, “France, by historic right, is the crater.”

The polls show Sarkozy and Hollande at about 28% each in the first round tomorrow (though the latest polls show Hollande reopening a lead), with Le Pen and Melenchon splitting another 28% about evenly and Bayrou taking a little over 10%. For the run-off on May 6, between the two leading candidates, the polls have consistently shown Hollande ahead of Sarkozy, and he will presumably take most of Melenchon’s voters. But Sarkozy will then run the greatest red scare since de Gaulle threatened to use the army to break the general strike in 1968, and will make secret but irrefusable offers to Le Pen and Bayrou. In the Fifth Republic, the Gaullists have won seven of the nine presidential elections; the French like to flirt with the left, but not marry it.

I still think it could be Sarkozy again, though he will have to be fast on his feet in the two weeks between the votes (and I did think that Giscard could win again against Mitterand in 1981, too). It’s a poor election and the carnival music is about to stop, whoever wins, and will be followed by a grim fiscal reckoning. For once, Italy, galvanized perhaps by 15 years of Berlusconi’s vulgar inanities, is showing more maturity than France. If Francois Hollande is elected president of France on May 6, de Gaulle’s mighty efforts to create a durably politically serious France will not have availed. It will be back to the frivolity of the Fourth Republic, under the gaze of an un-amused but triumphant Germany.

From the National Post