Anyone following the French election. The following is an editorial from the Guardian. An interesting view point. Sorry if you don't understand some of the British references to politicians.
The myth of democracy, ritually parroted from left and right, takes progress as a given. There's always nirvana on offer just over the next valley, if only you'll vote for me one more time. In fact, once such rhetoric stops, the magic of the ballot box usually provides something different. Duck, weave, stutter, squeeze: a lifetime of making course corrections along a winding road that may not end in progress at all.
So, after neocon Bush, the new centrists gather in America: Barack Obama, decking midwest Blairism in soothing adjectives; Rudy Giuliani, espousing a woman's right to choose from inside the Republican den. So, after Margaret Thatcher, there is David Cameron, at last a wet that Willie Whitelaw might have embraced. So Angela Merkel shows Christian Democrats reverting to emollient, coalescent type in Germany. So Romano Prodi succeeds Silvio Berlusconi. And then there is France, poised now (on the exit polls) for its essential choice: Nicolas Sarkozy or Ségolène Royal?
The worst trap for British commentators, when French elections come around, lies in peddling Anglo-Saxon condescension. Our economy is booming; theirs is an arthritic shambles. Our model brings prosperity, flexibility, jobs; theirs inflicts only waste, disillusion and despair. We are sons of honest toil; they are irredeemably duplicitous.
It's self-serving rubbish, of course. Try to build an equivalent list the other way round. They have a transport infrastructure to be proud of, a health service to goggle over, an appetite for technology that makes them European leaders in broad and many other bands, a bureaucracy of professionals fit for modern purpose, a sense of history and continuing nationhood. They play great national football, eat healthily, run a unique film industry, still mass manufacture cars and possess a pretty independent deterrent. Plus they were right about Iraq. And we?
Of course France has its stagnations and disappointments. Of course, in disappointment, there are always angry questions to be asked. But the choice that defined itself yesterday is no party in a last-chance saloon. Here is a country evolving inside an evolving Europe. It has its problems - and a political system that initially tends to highlight extremes. But the next generation is taking charge now in terms that the previous generation understands.
Sarkozy is not some new kid on the block. He is Mr Continuity from the Chirac years, an abrasive interior minister going up in the world (rather as though John Reid were Blair's successor). He may hint at profound change on immigration when he talks tough on Jean-Marie Le Pen's southern flank and seem to offer even tougher action when he talks to public-service unions, but in reality the name of his game is more transition than revolution, just as it has been for Royal throughout her own wavering campaign - full of style yet curiously traditional in substance, old socialism in designer clothing.
Here, in part, is the myth of "progress" again. France since De Gaulle has mostly been led from the centre-right but embraced the centre-left beneficences Mitterrand bestowed on it. Royal may berate Sarkozy's "politics of brutality", just as he may jeer at her soft-centred blankness on hard-edged issues, but neither of them in power will be able to make huge course corrections. Some problems, like youth unemployment, will have to be addressed. Some questions, like France's place in Europe, will have to be answered afresh. But, at the end of the next presidential term, there will still be a recognisable France following well-trodden French routes.
Of course politicians jeer at the mush in the middle. Nico and Ségo have battered François Bayrou as some kind of Gallic Roy Jenkins, proffering harmony for the sake of harmony. But the fact of Bayrou's candidacy has been a powerful hint to both of them. This isn't (to use David Miliband's formulation of non leadership interest) part of some essential, everlasting battle between Labour and Tory. This is a matter of what happens after the electioneering is over.
Put away your pat Brit handbooks, then. Can a socialist without much of a programme provide change and success? Absolutely. That's why José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the symbol of such success, rode over the Spanish border to stand side by side with Royal. Can French society cope in a globalised world? That's the next question. But, locked into Europe as well as its history, the results, whatever they are, won't win much Westminster applause. We're all victims of our own enduring myths.
· peter.preston@guardian.co.uk
