FRANCE:The presidential candidate says he is more serene, and perhaps wiser, writes Lara Marlowein Paris
Less than three weeks before the first round of the French presidential election, frontrunner Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday detailed his plans to reform the country.
If elected, Mr Sarkozy promises to reduce unemployment from its present level of 8.4 per cent to 5 per cent by the end of his five-year term. "I will liberate the labour market," he told a crowded press conference in a Paris hotel. "The French moral crisis carries a name; it is the crisis of labour."
Mr Sarkozy believes the complexity of labour legislation (there are 17 different types of work contract), onerous social charges (60 per cent over and above an employee's salary) and over-generous benefits are responsible for France's high unemployment rate.
His answer is a single type of work contract, which would increase job security and benefits in proportion to time on the job, substantial cuts in social charges, and the loss of unemployment payments for anyone who refuses two job offers.
The first "shock in favour of work" announced by Mr Sarkozy yesterday would be an immediate €15 billion cut in obligatory withholdings, out of €68 billion over 10 years.
Mr Sarkozy says work creates more work, which stimulates purchasing power, consumption and tax revenues. One of his proposed measures - to use VAT to pay some of the burden of social charges - is certain to be opposed by the left, because VAT affects rich and poor alike.
In the first chapter of Together, the book he presented yesterday, Mr Sarkozy seeks to dispel fears about his highly-strung, authoritarian personality.
"I've stopped doing politics with the sort of jubilation that I felt for so long," he writes. "Gravity has replaced pleasure. The young man who loved adventure and was ready to sacrifice everything to ambition has become a more calm adult . . . I am more serene, perhaps wiser."
But yesterday it was the highly strung Mr Sarkozy who presented his presidential programme, talking at machine-gun speed, answering tough questions and alluding to rival candidates with a snarl. "I'm not an énarque or an agrégé, which is why I don't engage in demagoguery," he said, mocking the elite educational institutions attended by the socialist candidate Ségolène Royal and the centrist François Bayrou.
Several of Mr Sarkozy's plans are red flags to French labour unions and the left. He intends to do away with the régimes spéciaux under which public transport workers retire years before everyone else, establish a minimum service on strike days (something President Jacques Chirac promised to do but never achieved) and replace only one in two departing civil servants.
François Fillon, who is tipped to become Mr Sarkozy's prime minister if he is elected, told The Irish Times that past governments gave in too easily to street protests. "It's a form of cowardice," he said. "We must make a lot of reforms very quickly. I'm not saying things will be calm."
Mr Sarkozy's proposals may also worry his European partners. The presidential candidate promised to fight for a "European economic government" run by the finance ministers of the euro group and more flexible monetary policies at the European Central Bank. "Monetary dumping" by the US, Japan and China puts Europe at a disadvantage in international trade, he said.
"Why should we be the only economic zone that doesn't put the currency at the service of employment?" Though the high euro makes European exports less competitive, it also lowers Europe's energy costs and keeps service on France's huge debt manageable. Mr Fillon admitted these policies "are not shared by other Europeans" but said Mr Sarkozy would find it easier to impose them once he has carried out structural reforms at home.
"One of Nicolas Sarkozy's strengths is having reconquered part of Jean-Marie Le Pen's electorate," Mr Fillon said. Mr Le Pen has built his career on the issue of immigration, which Mr Sarkozy discussed with vehemence yesterday.
"The France of exasperation exists," Mr Sarkozy said. There was "a clear link between a policy of uncontrolled immigration over 30 or 40 years and the social explosion in our poor neighbourhoods. It's blindingly obvious there's a link."
He says he would create a Marshall Plan for 250,000 youths in the immigrant banlieues and establish preparatory classes to help the disadvantaged compete in entrance exams for France's most prestigious institutions.