sarkozy taking france back to 1789:
In his victory speech, he vowed to “rehabilitate work, authority, morality, respect, merit”. Whether it was used deliberately or subconsciously, “rehabilitate” is an interesting choice of word, because it carries the implication of bringing back into vogue something that existed in the past. You will seldom find its proponents acknowledging that the neoliberal “reform” process falls squarely in that category, for it is based on the assumption that rapid “growth” and “wealth creation” are contingent on further empowering the owners and controllers of capital while wresting from workers many of the rights that were gained after long and arduous struggles.
(...) Trade unions tend to sell out, or become so bloated and bureaucratized that they lose the respect and allegiance of their members. But those that continue to serve their historic purpose of agitating and bargaining for better conditions face the wrath of the entrepreneurial classes: they are dismissed as relics of the distant past and as hurdles to “progress”. From the capitalist point of view, the ideal solution to the nuisance posed by organized labour is legislation that strips it of its powers.
(...) So much, then, for the legacy of May ‘68. It was, in fact, liquidated long ago. Sarkozy isn’t inheriting a socialist state any more than Royal would have sought to create one, had she won last Sunday’s election. France does, however, retain elements of the welfare state. As Tony Judt commented in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago: “The dysfunctional French social model, we are frequently assured, has failed. In that case there is much to be said for failure. French infants have a better chance of survival than American ones. The French live longer than Americans and they live healthier (at far lower cost). They are better educated and have first-rate public transportation. The gap between rich and poor is narrower than in the US or Britain, and there are fewer poor people.”
(...) European social democracy has been in decline for decades: most of the parties associated with that label have convinced themselves that there is no alternative to neoliberal economics and, furthermore, that deviations from the capitalist path are indefensible on the electoral battlefield. No one exemplifies this trend better than Sarkozy’s friend and admirer Tony Blair. The centre has shifted, making it simpler for conservatism to slide towards extremist variants of the creed. Sarkozy, with his appeals to nationalist pride, is one of the consequences. If the drift continues, it is not inconceivable that the far right in Europe will before long acquire “respectability” of the sort it hasn’t enjoyed since the 1930s.
(...) There is a small possibility, of course, that the reality of power will moderate Sarkozy’s crypto-fascist tendencies. However, given that their new president appears to have little time for notions such as liberté, egalité and fraternité, it’s more likely that the plurality of French citizens will sooner or later find themselves rallying to defend not the legacy of 1968 but the spirit of 1789.

what sarkozy brings:
A whopping record 86% of French voters went to the polls today to give an unambiguous victory to the autocratic, demagogic, hard-right nationalist Sarkozy, who campaigned on promises of a "rupture" with France's mixed economy and its welfare state, one of the most extensive in Europe.
(...) The crowd in the hall where Sarkozy declared victory after the polls closed repeatedly sang the national anthem, La Marseillaise -- with its famous xenophobic refrain, "Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!" (Translation: Let us march, let us march, May impure blood soak the furrows of our fields.) And Sarkozy's campaign was marked by incessant appeals to racism and the fear of immigrants, symbolized by his adoption of a slogan used by the neo-fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, "France, love it or leave it," and by his proposal for a new "Ministry of Immigration and National Identity," which was widely criticized by the left and by anti-racist groups for amalgamating the two concepts and suggesting a fundamental opposition between the two.
(...) That lurch to the right five years ago by a significant portion of formerly left voters was confirmed by today's vote, in which more than two-thirds of former Le Pen voters -- many of them from the one-time Communist-dominated working class suburbs -- went for Sarkozy, according to the exit polls.
(...) But in reality, what Sarkozy's victory means for France is something closer to the so-called "Reagan Revolution" in the U.S. that began in 1981 the process of dismantling and destroying the institutional New Deal legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Chirac was a Gaullist, and the political heritage of General Charles De Gaulle, who led France from 1958 to 1969, included a vigorously statist approach to the economy and defense of a wide series of social protection and social safety-net measures that had been instituted by the left's Popular Front government in the mid-1930s, and which were renewed and extended by post-war governments dominated by the political activists of the Resistance movement to Nazi occupation, who had a conception of government as a guarantor of economic security for all. Sarkozy is of a new generation than Chirac and, ideologically, not a Gaullist -- but rather in phase with the "Chicago school" of economics led by Milton Friedman, which believes in minimal government, a slimmed-down state that interferes as little as possible in the economy, an aggressively laissez-faire approach that is dear to the economic barons of the MEDEF, the French business leaders' association, whose tycoons were solidly behind Sarkozy's candidacy. Sarkozy has already promised to, in effect, abolish the ISF (the tax on large fortunes), accord more tax breaks to big business and the upper-middle-classes, and make more cuts in the state-run national health system (declared by a U.N. survey to be the finest in the world in terms of delivery of health services and quality of care.) Sarkozy's economic program is designed to help the already-privileged classes retain and extend their socio-economic position, to the detriment of the have-nots (the massive pro-Sarkozy vote in the upper-income neighborhoods today confirms that they understood Sarko's message to them.) And he has promised a major down-sizing of the civil service employed by state agencies.
(...) Life for the have-nots will become even more difficult under Sarkozy's hard-right, anti-immigrant, law-and-order society. He has announced "zero tolerance" for illegal immigration, has deported tens of thousands of immigrants during his two terms as Interior Minister and split up immigrant families while making it tougher for them to become French citizens. He has proposed strict minimum sentences for all sorts of crimes, thus removing all discretion from French judges, and France's already-crowded prisons will soon be overflowing with expanded, and younger, populations. French prisons, like ours, are training institutes for criminals, and by sending ever-larger numbers of young people to them for petty offenses Sarkozy will, in fact, be manufacturing new generations of hardened voyous (thugs in French.)
(...) And, in a major campaign speech just days before the election, Sarkozy surprisingly devoted 20 minutes of his discourse to a violent denunciation of the May 1968 student-worker revolt (Sarko was only 14 at the time of that rebellion.). The heritage of May ';68, Sarko thundered, must be "liquidated." He blamed it for a generalized attitude of "laxisme," for France's having become a country "in which work has no value, in which people think they can do anything they feel like doing, in which people are lazy," and on and on. May '68 was, of course, the fountain of social ferment that led to the sexual revolution, to women's liberation and the legalization of abortion, the gay liberation movement and the eventual repeal of laws criminalizing homosexuality, and a whole series of cultural changes that opened up a stuffy, arteriosclerotic French society. But May '68 was also a general strike by 11 million French workers that gained union recognition in many factories, higher wages, and that won a reinforcement of the social safety net in an agreement (negotiated on behalf of then-President Georges Pompidou by a young Jacques Chirac) that became known as "les accords de la rue de Grenelle" (the agreement of Grenelle Street). What was unstated in Sarko's anti-May '68 speech was that all that sort of thing, too, must be "liquidated."

as'ad abukhalil on sarkozy:
The election of Sarkozy points to a trend. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were all these articles in the Western press (and scholarship) about the New Right. The New Right referred to those organizations with neo-Nazi and fascist agendas that made xenophobia a central element in their electoral campaigns. In recent years, there is a new trend. People often now talk about the decline of the New Right. I disagree. I believe that the New Right left from the window, to enter through the front door. The New Right and their supporters have migrated to mainstream conservative political parties: in Germany, France, and elsewhere in Europe. So it is not that Le Pen is no more popular: it is that Sarkozy is now a more intelligent (and better marketer of hatred and racism) than Le Pen. The New Right merely discovered that it will only win big if it hides under the mantle of the Old Right.

french elections:
The pro-Sarko electorate is not the new, dynamic freedom-loving France. That France voted mostly for Ségolène Royal. The Sarko France is aging and scared. Among voters aged 18 to 24, 34 per cent voted for the Socialist woman candidate. Twenty percent voted for centrist François Bayrou and only 19 per cent voted for Sarkozy (who is not, as English-language reports persist in calling him, a "Gaullist" ; "Bushist" would be more accurate. Sarkozy's largest block of voters were retired people. He won 44 per cent of the electorate over 65.
(...) Asked which issue was paramount in their choice, 46 per cent of Ségolène's voters express their concern for "social inequalities", and 66 per cent want to live in a society "with more personal freedom". Sarko voters are indifferent to those themes, but give first place to "the fight against insecurity"; 88 per cent demand a society "with more order and authority". And 26 per cent of Sarkozy voters favor "the struggle against immigration", compared to only 5 per cent of Royal voters.
(...)But Ségolène led Sarkozy among intermediary professions and white collar workers, as well as blue collar workers--but in the last category, Le Pen came in first with 26 per cent -- by far his highest score in any category (Le Pen got 10.5 per cent of the national vote).

french elections:
[for the left] The results also reveal a stinging rebuke for the Socialists' habitual allies in government -- the Communist Party, whose candidate, Marie-Georges Buffet, got only 1.8%, and the Greens, whose candidate, Dominique Voynet, got just 1.5%. Independent left-of-the-left candidate José Bové -- the antiglobalization, farmers' union, and environmental leader --also did badly with just 1.3%, while the young candidate of the largest Trotskyist party, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire's Olivier Besancenot, broke away from the left-of-the-left pack with 4.3% (triple the score of Trotskyist Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvriere, who had only 1.4%).
(...) Not only that, Royal began to urge her rallies to sing La Marseillaise, declaring that France's national anthem was "neither xenophobic nor bloodthirsty." Now, most of the French left has long shunned La Marseillaise precisely for those reasons -- like its famous chorus, "Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!" (Translation: Let us march, let us march, May impure blood soak the furrows of our fields.) Groans of protest and ridicule came from much of the left, including Royal's own Socialist Party, at her nationalist tap-dance and her obviously false declarations defending the outdated, racist, and sanguinary lyrics of La Marseillaise.
(...) nd, in the course of the interview, Sarko expressed the view that one was born a pedophile or suicidal (a genetic theory traceable to the works of Alain de Benoist, the philosopher of a Nordic Aryan revival who was the intellectual fountainhead of the dissolved extreme-right grouplet Orient, and whose racialist works are favored by Europe's neo-fascist movements.) Again, it was Bayrou, not Royal, who first rushed to denounce Sarko's declarations as a return to "eugenics" and the discredited theories of the Nazi past. By the time Royal did speak out against Sarko's declaration, even France's senior Catholic, Cardinal Vingt-Trois of Paris, had already excoriated Sarkozy's declaration.
(...) It is obvious from Le Pen's relatively low score today -- he was doing better, between 13-15%, in the last pre-election opinion polls -- that he was not able to repeat his 2002 success in large measure because Sarkozy had stolen much of his electorate with thinly-veiled appeals to racism and nationalism.
(...) And what did Marianne (whose journalists voted narrowly to endorse the centrist Bayrou over the Socialist Royal) say about Sarko? It assembled a series of anecdotes (some previously known, others recounted -- anonymously -- by leaders of Sarkozy's own party and business leaders) which portrayed Sarkozy as a self-absorbed, mercurial assassin who treats all criticism as "a declaration of war." Sarko explodes with anger at his critics, screaming, "I'll fuck 'em all, I'll fuck 'em!" or "I'll cut their balls off!" or "I'll have their skin," and he puts his yelled threats into practice (this is particularly true of critical journalists -- Sarko is very, very palsy with the French media barons who control 90% of the print and broadcast outlets, and has the scalps of several offending editors and journalists, both print and broadcast, on his belt.) Of his fellow conservative, the current Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, the mag quoted Sarko as saying, "I'll make sure he ends up hanging from a butcher's hook!"
(...) Sarko [was] one of the few French politicians to have supported the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
(...) Serious European newspapers who have watched Sarkozy up close are similarly severe in their judgments about him. For the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Sarko is "a macho without scruples who plays on the fear of the people." For the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sarkozy is "the most ambitious and pitiless politician in Europe who has no real convictions, but who chooses to align himself with the worst whims of the electorate." The Spanish daily El Pais sees in Sarko "the regenerators of the Spanish right of the end of the 19th century." And the Italian press frequently compares Sarkozy to Gianfranco Fini, the former Berlusconi vice-premier who is the leader of the so-called "post-fascist" Alleanza Nationale (the party Fini, a former fascist youth leader, built on the ruins of the neo-fascist, Mussolini-worshipping Italian Social Movement).
(...)