‘I want Sarkozy to be right’

31 March 2007

Theodore Dalrymple, who lives in France, says that the presidential frontrunner faces an awesome range of problems — unsettlingly similar to those that will confront the Prime Minister unlucky enough succeed Gordon Brown

Yet France’s problems are deep and intractable. Under Chirac, its public debt has doubled, and the money borrowed has been used solely to pay for les acquis, the social and economic privileges that have been granted to large numbers of workers, especially in the swollen public service, such as long holidays, the 35-hour week, early retirement (at age 50) on three quarters of final salary, generous unemployment pay and prolonged sickness entitlements. No wonder three quarters of young Frenchmen say they want to be public employees.

The problem with these privileges is that, once granted, they immediately achieve the metaphysical status of inalienable rights, and any attempt to rescind them becomes a matter of violent contention and confrontation. Arrest without trial would probably cause less disruption in France than a rise in the retirement age of train drivers, and the motto of the republic under Chirac should probably have been Après nous le déluge rather than Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

Meanwhile, and not entirely unconnectedly, the situation in what I am tempted (having spent some time in my early adulthood in South Africa) to call the townships is terrible, worse than almost anything to be found in Britain. Indeed, I never experienced in the black townships of South Africa the sheer concentrated hatred, the malignity, directed not only against me but against the larger surrounding society, that I experienced in the banlieues of Paris. And this was well before the tumultuous riots there that transfixed the world.