A good French surrender

You begin to wonder about the skating conditions in hell when NPR, Andrew Sullivan, Guardian columnists, and Jonah Goldberg all agree on something. They all think that the abandonment of the CPE indicates that France is incapable of reforming its economy and therefore doomed. But yesterday might have been a good day for economic reform in ...

You begin to wonder about the skating conditions in hell when NPR, Andrew Sullivan, Guardian columnists, and Jonah Goldberg all agree on something.

You begin to wonder about the skating conditions in hell when NPR, Andrew Sullivan, Guardian columnists, and Jonah Goldberg all agree on something.

They all think that the abandonment of the CPE indicates that France is incapable of reforming its economy and therefore doomed. But yesterday might have been a good day for economic reform in France.

Why? Because incremental reform is dead, and de Villepin's electoral prospects are shot, which boosts Nicolas Sarkozy’s chances of winning the presidency next year. Now, as Allister Heath reports in The Spectator, Sarkozy doesn’t agree with the CPE because he thinks that this kind of piecemeal reform isn’t worth the hassle. The only way to sort out France is with “new rules for everybody, not just for the young.”

This kind of approach is risky, as Heath points out. But because it involves change for tout le peuple, not just one interest group, it might—bizarrely—encounter less intense opposition. And if Sarko campaigns on his plan and wins it will be hard even for France’s unions to thwart a president with this mandate. If he loses, then the unlikely alliance I mentioned above are right and we will all be left to reflect on the fact that no one has answered Charles de Gaulle’s question: “How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?”

James Forsyth is assistant editor at Foreign Policy.

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