Over the past 60 years, both left and right-wing French governments have tried to “keep everyone happy”, says Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph.
So next April’s presidential election is widely deemed a key test of whether France is ready to embrace free-market reforms, or will cling to the embattled social model based on a strong public sector and extensive welfare.
The likely centre-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has been making liberal noises, trumpeting the need for hard work and risk-taking, although he supports state aid for ailing firms. Socialist frontrunner Ségolène Royal is harder to categorise.
Royal has praised the Blairite approach to youth employment and public services and called for delinquent teenagers from sink estates to be enlisted and taught a trade. But this week Royal struck a less reformist note. What is startling about her attack on the 35-hour working week introduced by the last Socialist government, says the FT, is that her critique of this “failed make-work scheme” comes “not from the centre… but from the left”. Royal argues that the 1999 working-time law has the “unintended consequence of worsening the situation for the most vulnerable workers, notably for women with few qualifications” who have less time to spend with their families. The question now, says the FT, is whether her “policy eclecticism” will be successfully attacked as incoherent by opponents… or make her “an impossible target to pin down”.