Republican conservatives reeling from President Bush's plummeting poll numbers, as low as President Carter's during the dark days of the hostage crisis in Iran, are excited. They have discovered hope in -- of all places -- France! Yes, the nation at the very center of what they disdained as "old" Europe, the country that has been Bush's bete noire ever since he went looking for WMD in Baghdad. The very same culture whose potatoes had to be renamed Freedom Fries so patriotic Congressmen wouldn't have to utter the dreaded "F" word when ordering lunch in the Capitol mess hall.
Why the sudden love fest? Because the French just voted in a "conservative" for president, dismissing his rival, a feminist fem named Segolene Royal as pretty as she was ballsy. She snatched the Socialist nomination from her companion, Socialist Party Chair Francois Hollande, with whom she has four children, only to give up a six-point victory (53% to 47% with a huge turnout of over 80%) to the son of Hungarian immigrants.
Which to the Republicans apparently proves the French have wised up to wily women like Hillary Clinton and have figured out that Bush is a friend of liberty, you know, like Chancellor Merkel in Germany, and are ready to cede power back to Washington.
Only it's not so simple. As usual, the Republicans are misreading international events. Sarkozy certainly stirred up right-wing populist passions against Muslim immigrants and the "thugs" and "scum" (as he called the unemployed and angry mobs of teens in the immigrant suburbs), and he owes his victory to the old -- the young voted against him. But he also got a majority of women -- they didn't go for Royal's message about sisterly solidarity.
Most importantly, he triumphed as an anti-establishmentarian promising to break up the old elites trained in the "grandes ecoles" and free up the entrepreneurial environment, long encased in a paralytic bureaucracy. He wants France to join the world and stop wallowing in nostalgia for its old civilizing mission and its vanished empire. He wants better relations with the United States, but he is as opposed to the Iraq adventure as Chirac, his predecessor at the Palais Elysee.
In other words, though he has exploited populist and nationalist resentments, he is first of all a modernizer who thinks France of the ancient regime has rendered itself irrelevant. As a nationalist, he is likely to enhance not American but French power. His election certainly reflects the appeal of nationalist politics, but it is signals not a return to but a striking break with the past.
My advice to Republicans: in reading the triangle of Chirac (outgoing Gaullist President), Royal (failed left-centrist candidate) and Sarkozy (successful right-centrist modernizer) Bush and his Republican wannabes are not Sarkozy, but Chirac, the tired, stubborn, out-of-touch-with reality ideologue. While Hillary may be, no not Royal, but the pragmatic and realist Sarkozy. In other words, the French election suggests why the Republicans are likely not to win but to lose the presidency in 2008.