French president's vision is closer to Tony Blair's 'Third Way' than to US capitalism, writes Lara Marlowe
Two hours after the new French government was announced on Friday, prime minister François Fillon made his first official outing, to a home for battered women, many of them immigrants, in an affluent area of Paris.
Fillon promised he would "do everything to make sure that, alongside economic efficiency, which will be one of our priorities, solidarity will be real, effective, not just in speeches". On the pavement outside, Fillon collided with the central challenge facing France as the country begins dramatic change under president Nicolas Sarkozy. A resident of the neighbourhood complained of "problems" created by the battered women's home. "You campaigned against hand-outs, and the first thing you do is visit free-loaders!" she griped.
For the nearly 47 per cent of the French electorate who voted for Ségolène Royal on May 6, la solidarité - meaning the redistribution of wealth and a guaranteed standard of living for all - is the cardinal value. For the 53 per cent who elected Sarkozy, French solidarité long ago veered into l'assistanat, a country where the middle and upper classes are taxed to the hilt to fund welfare programmes that are exploited by ingrates and fraudsters, where economic growth and initiative have been stifled by an overbearing, inefficient state.
Sarkozy believes he can shake loose the regimented strictures of the French economy and society, enabling those who are bright and motivated to surge ahead, all the while maintaining the minimum level of social justice required to prevent the extreme left, immigrant youths and trade unions creating chaos.
That balancing act, along with Sarkozy's desire to win an absolute majority in next month's legislative elections, explains why he and Fillon keep making gestures towards the poor and downtrodden, why the word solidarité figures in the titles of a ministry and a high commissariat created on May 18th.
In Testimony, the book Sarkozy published during the campaign, he frequently refers to US and British examples. Though he sees the US as a land of opportunity, the society Sarkozy wants to create is closer in spirit to Tony Blair's "Third Way" than what the French call "savage capitalism".
The government named by Sarkozy was revolutionary for its inclusion of four men from the left and a centrist, and for the appointment of an unprecedented number of women to positions of genuine importance. At least two measures - the appointment of a national security adviser at the Élysée Palace, and the future provision for an attorney general - are directly borrowed from the US.
Most symbolic was the choice of Dr Bernard Kouchner, who was minister of health in two socialist governments, as minister of foreign affairs. Left-wing newspapers scorned the defection of this "sun-tanned mummy from the Mitterrand era," who was a co-founder of the Nobel peace prize-winning group Médecins Sans Frontières. Along with the philosopher André Glucksmann, Dr Kouchner is one of several formerly left-wing Jewish intellectuals who have aligned themselves with Israel, the US and president Sarkozy.
Kouchner was one of the first proponents of the humanitarian "right to interference", which advocates military intervention to stop human rights abuses such as occurred in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq. Despite their different backgrounds, he and Sarkozy agree on the need for France to oppose human rights violations, for example in Chechnya and China.
Their only known point of discord is Turkish accession to the EU, which Sarkozy opposes and Kouchner supports.
Sarkozy's appointment of Kouchner's former cabinet director, Martin Hirsch, as high commissioner for active solidarity against poverty was a clever move. As president of the Emmaus-France association for the homeless since 2002, Hirsch has impeccable credentials.
His appointment of Rachida Dati, the 41-year-old daughter of a Moroccan father and an Algerian mother, to the post of minister of justice, is unprecedented in French politics and lends credence to his battle against discrimination. At the justice ministry, she will oversee mandatory sentencing for repeat offenders and a change in the status of 16- to 18-year-olds, who are to be treated as adults after the first offence. She also holds responsibility for the future of corruption cases against Jacques Chirac.
Xavier Bertrand, the new minister for labour, social relations and solidarity, and Brice Hortefeux, minister for immigration, integration, national identity and co-development, are the other close associates of the president with responsibility for major reforms. Sarkozy believes lack of flexibility in the labour market is the single greatest cause of stagnation in the French economy. He will gut the socialist law on the 35-hour working week by abolishing taxes and social charges on overtime.
Two other explosive reforms await Bertrand: bringing the privileged early retirement regime enjoyed by transport workers into line with the rest of the country, and establishing a "minimum service" in public transport on strike days.
France is now entering a period of change unparallelled since the socialist François Mitterrand was elected in 1981. Right-wing commentators believe France will regain lost affluence and influence. For the left, decimated and inaudible for the foreseeable future, Sarkozy is about to tear up that unique recipe that made the exception française.