MPS is travelling and enjoying wonderful unseasonal winter weather - days of sun and people in the parks and even eating outdoors at restaurants - in the ever-enchanting city, Paris. Yes, the French do how to "do" things with style and flair. However, their politics are another thing altogether, as John Vinocur details in his op-ed piece for The International Herald Tribune.
What kind of country would France be if it abandoned its 35-hour work week (it actually kills jobs), set up an affirmative action program for its Muslim immigrants (featuring a zero-tolerance framework for their assimilation), and scaled back its ambitions for Europe as a global political force to more attainable goals?
Roughly 100 days before voting in an elimination round April 22, and then in a final ballot on May 6, the French presidential election campaign so far involves back and forth on possible variations in French comfort — tinkering with, adjusting and applying new coats of paint to familiar and nonthreatening aspects of national life.
There’s something surreal here. Neither Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been a brash president for the last five years, or the presumedly bland François Hollande, named Socialist candidate on Oct. 16, is talking about the perspective for painful change.
You can’t argue about its necessity. In 2012, France lives with:
•An unemployment rate of 9.8 percent, a looming recession, and a likely loss of its triple-AAA credit rating.
•A report last year that detailed the emergence of Muslim immigrant communities resembling parallel societies, while a Le Monde poll showed that 61 percent of the French regard Muslim integration as failed because of its refusal by the immigrants themselves.
•A hardened notion among the French that, with the E.U. debt crisis, their country has clearly become a subordinate player to Germany.
For all of France’s accomplishments and uniqueness, a sense of lost identity and decline resonates.
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