Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has been chosen to replace Jean-Pierre Raffarin as Prime Minister of France.
De Villepin was the one who rejected the US’ second Iraq resolution before the Hussein regime did. If there was a person who’s picture deserved to be placed in the dictionary next to the word “vainglorious” it would be de Villepin. De Villepin is emblematic of the very problems of French leadership, another blow-dried technocrat énarque who looks down upon the people. The BBC makes the following observation:
Mr de Villepin is best known abroad for expressing France’s implacable opposition to the war in Iraq at the United Nations, and is likely to go down well with European allies.
He is also regarded as a consensual politician and is personally loyal to Mr Chirac.
But the BBC’s Caroline Wyatt in Paris says that as a career diplomat never elected to public office, he of all candidates most typifies the French elite so roundly rejected by the French people on Sunday.
The alternative, popular former Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy would have been a better choice, but Sarkozy stands for actually reforming the French economy, a position that is political suicide to French elites. Sarkozy would have been just about the only candidate with the vision to restore the French economy and end France’s endemic double-digit unemployment and stagnant growth, but the selection of de Villepin indicates that reform is not in the cards. Instead, Chirac’s mismanagement of the French economy will continue to expand the welfare state and limit French economic growth.
The fact that the French electorate has rejected the tried and true values of liberal market economics along with the EU should be a warning sign of the impending collapse of European society. As another Frenchman, Alexis de Toqueville, astutely noted, once the electorate discovers that they can vote themselves money from the treasury, democracy dies. The onrush of European state socialism in which everything from weeks of paid vacation to generous benefits from the state become enshrined as “basic human rights” is a sign that European democracy is in deep trouble.
One thing is clear – Chirac has no intention of changing his ways and reforming the French government, which is exactly why the decline of both Chirac’s popularity and France itself will continue unabated. Until Europe returns to its liberal roots, the growth of state socialism will drag Europe farther and farther down the road to serfdom.
I always thought that quote was Jefferson or Franklin and not de Toqueville. Perhaps I’m wrong.
Let them eat subsidized cake.
Sarkozy would have been a better choice as you state. However Raffarin wanted to reform the French economy and that was one reason why he became so unpopular and got the boot. The French electorates rejectıon of Jean Pierre Raffarin shows that the majority do not want free market change. Nikolas Sarkozy would have likely suffered the same fate as Raffarin. I hope in the future he is able to sell his vision to a greater number of French people. I also think it would be great to see an ethnic Hungarian running France. I think Sarkozy is also being punished because he backed Alain Juppe against Chirac in the mid nineties and as such Chirac distrusts him.