Paris – France’s presidential election today is a ground-breaker – a choice between an immigrant’s son and an army officer’s daughter, each offering a radically different vision of how to put a dispirited nation back on track.
Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal are mavericks who changed the rules of French politics and energized an electorate hungry for change. Whoever wins will be the nation’s first president born after World War II.
Of three final polls, taken Wednesday and Thursday, one put them even and two gave Sarkozy the lead.
Sarkozy, a conservative, wants to free up labor markets, make the French work longer hours and whip them into shape for the global marketplace. Royal is the Socialist Party candidate who would save France’s generous welfare system from the lash of Sarkozy’s “neoconservative ideology.”
Both have ideas for restoring national self-confidence, which lately has been battered by economic decline, unrest in France’s immigrant slums and shrinking clout in the new, united Europe, which France once sought to lead.
Sarkozy doesn’t hide his admiration for the United States, and Royal uses this to paint him as the yes man of American capitalism.
But France’s perennial frictions with Washington never came up in the candidates’ only debate, on Wednesday. Domestic affairs dominated the often peppery exchanges.
