The Politics of Transference: Sego vs Sarko

Over the past several months I’ve been closely following the French Presidential elections, which came to an end today with the victory of Nicolas Sarkozy and the conservative UMP Party against Ségolène Royal, the rival Socialist contendor (who would’ve also been the first female president of France). The results were unsurprisingly close (reflected in the booming Sego-Sarko mask business¹ ) given the various polls that came in prior to the election as well as the results of the first round of voting. Sarkozy received 53 percent of the vote, while Royal managed to gain a substantial 47 percent.²

At first my support was unwaveringly for Royal. In terms of politics, I identify more with socialist ideology (generally speaking), but I also found Royal to be far less divisive. More generally, Sarkozy’s divisiveness has significant repurcussions for the problems of the Banlieues, where rampant riots, dire poverty and de facto segregation plague the largely immigrant population residing outside of the major urban areas like Paris. This is a major demographic and social problem faced by France, and one that has, in recent years, received worldwide attention as the riots have become increasingly violent.

While these are perfectly decent justifications for supporting Royal, they’re just that—justifications. I have to say that her campaign and the policies she endorsed throughout it were too equivocating and insubstantial to be rationally supported. These underlying doubts were reverberated when the French took to the polls and voted decidedly against Royal and what she stood for.

But the problem is an even larger one, not just for France’s suburbs, or France specifically, but all of Europe. Over the past half-century, Europe’s annual GDP growth has slowed to a crawl. This has part to do with declining birth rates and inflation, but also with government intervention in the economy and overly lenient minimum weekly work hours. Thus, it seems especially difficult to support increasing state intervention in an economy that truly can’t afford it. This isn’t to suggest, however, that France is somehow in dire economic straights or that they can’t afford to open the economy to the scorned immigrants who make up the largest contingent of unemployed French citizens. In fact, it means the opposite. They need to be encouraged to participate more fully in the French market economy and, perhaps, could be the very source of revitalizing France’s dwindling GDP.³ This could solve both a social and economic problem that France has faced in recent decades (my use of the passive voice shouldn’t suggest that the majority of France isn’t responsible for the de facto segregation either, because that is simply untrue).

The Economist wrote an almost irrefutable statement of support for Sarkozy and his policies, which I, too, found entirely convincing. So I had to ask myself: why do I still feel bad by supporting him?

The problem is what I’m calling “The Politics of Transference.” It’s not so much that I dislike Sarkozy as the next French President, but that I dislike him as the next President of anything. I feel as though that in the U.S. the subjects we debate about every four years are so far behind what the rest of the Enlightened world is discussing (for instance, we’re still questioning whether or not there should be universal healthcare, how much John Edwards’ haircut is worth and if evolution and global warming are, in fact, real) that it’s embarrassing. Completely embarrassing. I want for the U.S. to have a new discourse; one that is found not here, but instead in other industrialized democratic countries throughout the world. I want Ségolène Royal to be the President of the U.S., because I feel her socialist outlook would substantially help what America is and what it stands for.

That is what is so troubling. Thinking like a political creature instead of a rational one. I support Sarkozy’s policies for France, but I don’t support him as a person. It remains to be seen whether or not he can “unite France,” as he so often claims, but his economic goals give me hope that what he promises he can achieve, which is a stronger France. Why is that a good thing? Well, if you subscribe to the liberal world order, it means more money for the rest of the world. For me, I’m not so sure, but part of it is the hope that the U.S. will realize, in startling contrast, how far behind it is in comparison to the rest of the industrialized, modern world and maybe—just maybe—will start to gets its act together. (Com’on Kucinich, yeehaw!)

1. Reuters ↩
2. New York Times ↩
3. France diplomatie ↩