Francois Hollande, France's new 'President Normal'
1 hr 25 mins ago - AFP 1:35 | 110 views
The moment France's president-elect Francois Hollande is sworn in on Tuesday, he leaves his cosy post-election no-man's land for potentially bruising encounters on the European and world stage. A profile of Hollande. Duration: 01:34
Here's why Canadians should pay attention to the French election:
There's a large number of French citizens in Canada:
According a Embassy Magazine, there are approximately 80,000 French citizens in Canada, the majority living in Quebec (including NDP leader Thomas Mulcair).
About 46,000 registered to vote for the Presidential election in 2007.
More economic trouble in Europe could mean economic trouble in Canada:
According to the Associated Press, a Hollande victory could reshape the debate and undo pacts already agreed upon in the the 17-nation Eurozone. Until now, France and Germany — led by Sarkozy and Angela Merkel — have set the agenda on how best to restore troubled state finances and sluggish growth across the continent.
The "Merkozy" solution: cheap funding from the European Central Bank and more cost-cutting to bring down debts and reassure markets.
Hollande's solution: government-sponsored stimulus to revive growth and punish the banks with higher rates and taxes.
CNN's Cyrus Sanati says a Hollande win could have dire consequences for the international community.
"The election of Socialist party leader Francois Hollande to France's top job this coming Sunday would introduce an air of instability into the global economy at a time when it desperately needs a steady hand," he wrote.
"It took almost two years for the [European Central Bank] to get over its fear of hyperinflation and finally open the spigots. If Hollande refuses to go along with this economic deal with the devil then a worst-case scenario could play out: Bank failures in Italy, Spain and Greece, and even in Germany and France, leading to high yields and crippling sovereign defaults across the eurozone. The euro would be finished. U.S. and Asian financial firms with European exposure would get hit hard, setting off a panic that would make 2008 look like a pleasant stroll along the Champs-Élysées."
International relations may buoy Canada in to a bigger role:
The next leader sets a five-year course for France, a wealthy and influential country with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
According to an article by the Associated Press, Sarkozy has aligned with both Washington and Ottawa on Iran and Syria, upped France's military presence in Afghanistan and took a major role in NATO's air campaign over Libya that helped oust dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
"Hollande, with virtually no foreign policy experience, wants to bring French troops from Afghanistan home early and might be less vigorous in flexing military or diplomatic muscle abroad," notes the column.
If France does in fact abate its role in NATO, countries like Canada may have to step-up with more troops and more resources.
Back in France, citizens continue to have mixed reactions to the news of their new president:
Among them: What happens in Europe affects us, America's influence is on the decline
Ira Stoll | May 7, 2012
Growth beats austerity. "Austerity isn't inevitable. My mission now is to give European construction a growth dimension," Mr. Hollandesaid on election night. As other commentators have observed, the definition of austerity in Europe has become somewhat muddled. It has been taken to mean everything from an increase in the income tax rate to 50% (the not-so-genius idea of Britain's Conservative Party prime minister, David Cameron) to genuinely needed trims in benefits for public employees and welfare beneficiaries. But the lesson for American politicians is nonetheless clear. Voters need to be able to hear a message about economic growth, not only about pain and burden-sharing and budget-cutting and entitlement reform.
You can't tax and spend and divide your way to growth. Monday's slump in French stock prices, rise in French bond yields, and drop in the Euro as measured against the dollar are all signs that the market has no confidence in either Mr. Hollande's proposals or his tone. The proposals — hire 60,000 more government-employed teachers, raise taxes to 75% on anyone earning more than 1 million Euros a year, or about $1.3 million — amount to taxing and spending. They stem from an ideology that, for all the hopeful chatter in the press about Mr. Hollande's supposed moderation, is a career politician's hostility to private sector success. Frédéric Filloux wrote, "the new president claimed '[he] doesn't like rich people' (a few years ago, he assigned a threshold of wealth to the equivalent of $60,000 a year)." Good luck constructing a "growth dimension" with that attitude.
Voters punish conservatives who don't deliver. As the Wall Street Journal put it in an editorial, "Mr. Sarkozy and his government responded by raising sales and capital-gains taxes, demonizing successful French businessmen, complaining that Germans work too hard, urging an international financial-transactions tax and trying to pin much of the blame for economic troubles on immigrants." Bloomberg Businessweek reports on a survey it said "showed that 73 percent of Hollande voters supported him because they wanted to punish Sarkozy. Only 44 percent said they agreed with the Socialist candidate's ideas." George H.W. Bush must be hoping that Sarkozy replaces him as every conservative columnist's go-to example of a tax-raising, election-losing, supposedly right-of-center politician.
America's influence is diminished. There was a moment, not all that long ago, when a Europe facing a financial crisis would look to America for leadership, or even a rescue. For better or worse, those days are past, as America's own resources are sufficiently stretched or depleted that any serious effort by America to assist — not to bail out, but to assist — Europe would face formidable practical and political hurdles.
Europe affects us. Any American celebrating Europe's woes on the grounds that it makes it less likely that that continent would emerge as a global rival to America is misguided. A Europe mired in socialism is likely to be a less healthy market for American exports, and a weak Europe drags down everything from America's tourist economy to America's retirement savings accounts. It's an interconnected global economy we are part of, not a zero-sum competition. A lot of Americans are now employed by European companies, or by American companies that sell things to European consumers.
Culture and nationhood matter. For all the talk of how interconnected the global economy is and how the world is "flat," France is still France, not some generic "Europe" or the West. For all the talk from Mitt Romney about how President Obama wants to turn America into a European-style social welfare state, America would never elect a self-proclaimed socialist who wants to increase taxes on the "rich" to 75% and who left the mother of his four children to go live with a twice-divorced journalist ten years his junior.
Right?
Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of Samuel Adams: A Life
cnn
Justin Vaïsse writes:
François Hollande did not thank his opponent, Nicolas Sarkozy, during his acceptance speech Sunday night, after defeating the incumbent with 51.6% of the vote in the French presidential runoff. But he should have, as he ran an anti-Sarkozy campaign, promising to behave like a "normal president" in contrast to the impulsive, unpredictable and sometimes ostentatious Sarkozy. And it worked: Fifty-five percent of the voters who cast a ballot for him did it to defeat Sarkozy rather than to elect Hollande.
Hollande, betting on the anti-Sarkozy mood, refrained from making big promises, and even his signature reforms had a lot of fine print. For example, he announced that he would recruit 60,000 more teachers -- but by shifting existing civil service jobs from other ministries to education. He promised to roll back Sarkozy's pension reform -- but for only a tiny fraction of workers. He pledged to renegotiate the European Fiscal Compact Treaty that Sarkozy negotiated with Merkel -- but only to add a growth stimulus, not to alter the new disciplines it imposes.
His prudence is easy enough to explain: French debt is close to 90% of GDP, the 2011 deficit was 5.2%, and Hollande has promised to rein it in to 3% in 2013 and zero in 2017 (Sarkozy was promising 2016). He will be closely monitored by the bond markets and the rating agencies, one of which stripped France of its triple-A in January.
That is precisely one of the three big challenges Hollande will face: to convince markets he can chart a fiscally responsible course and restore the competitiveness of France's economy while its southern neighbors are reforming fast and Germany is already very competitive. This in turn partly depends on a second challenge he faces: fashioning a new Franco-German, and then pan-European, consensus on the eurozone crisis.
