What kind of country would France be if it abandoned its 35-hour work week (it actually kills jobs), set up an affirmative action program for its Muslim immigrants (featuring a zero-tolerance framework for their assimilation), and scaled back its ambitions for Europe as a global political force to more attainable goals?
Answer: An imaginary one. There are no signs of it happening.
Roughly 100 days before voting in an elimination round April 22, and then in a final ballot on May 6, the French presidential election campaign so far involves back and forth on possible variations in French comfort — tinkering with, adjusting and applying new coats of paint to familiar and nonthreatening aspects of national life.
There’s something surreal here. Neither Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been a brash president for the last five years, or the presumedly bland François Hollande, named Socialist candidate on Oct. 16, is talking about the perspective for painful change.
You can’t argue about its necessity. In 2012, France lives with:
•An unemployment rate of 9.8 percent, a looming recession, and a likely loss of its triple-AAA credit rating.
•A report last year that detailed the emergence of Muslim immigrant communities resembling parallel societies, while a Le Monde poll showed that 61 percent of the French regard Muslim integration as failed because of its refusal by the immigrants themselves.
•A hardened notion among the French that, with the E.U. debt crisis, their country has clearly become a subordinate player to Germany.
For all of France’s accomplishments and uniqueness, a sense of lost identity and decline resonates.
At a moment that seems to command existential choice, the candidates are responding piecemeal and with calculation in a manner the French call “petit bras” — taking hesitant, little strokes where a full swing is needed.
A confetti swirl of isolated ideas and generalities (literally — truth, hope, fairness and determination) is present rather than coherent blueprints for national overhaul. Just an example: The two likely finalists have proposed either tax code alterations that would irritate the rich, while avoiding the economy’s fundamental rigidities, or arguments for a change in value-added taxation that could help businesses increase competitiveness, although only in theory and probably not in the long term. This says Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Hollande share an ungracious view of the electorate’s capacity for accepting givebacks.
Their refusal so far to confront sweeping structural change reads as if they agree with the notion that the French perceive almost any change in the system as a threat because virtually everyone’s self-interest is wired to a state-protected status quo. The biggest issue of avoidance for the election campaign is structural reform of the labor market.
As a counterpoint in a decade when countries in northern Europe and Germany were creating more flexible rules for relations between workers and employers, a Socialist government in Paris installed the 35-hour work week in 2000.
No other country has adopted anything similar, but the law, which has made companies shy from hiring, is enshrined here as a monument to progress. Nicolas Sarkozy has never attempted to abolish its symbolism.
The Socialist Party talks fairly vaguely about its interest in a Danish model called “flexicurity,” which exchanges job security for a supple approach to hours, pay and delocalization. But France’s trade unions, representing the biggest bloc of Socialist votes, have made clear it is a nonstarter without cash enhancements and no limitations on strikes.
The campaign’s second essential but absent debate goes to how Islam adapts to French society. Seeking the presidency in 2007, Mr. Sarkozy recognized that the alienation of Muslim immigrants was tearing apart France’s social cohesion, and proposed what he called affirmative action à la française. The pledge was not fulfilled or repeated.
Now, it would get in the way of the incumbent’s hopes to gather in votes from the anti-immigration National Front party in the election’s runoff round. The Socialists, also concerned about loss of white working class support, don’t advocate affirmative action.
As for the French place in the world, and how the E.U. can serve France as an amplifier, a traditional presidential election leitmotif, the debt crisis makes expectations of a multipolar world, with Europe as a powerful pillar, seem very hollow. The French have heard nothing about a reasonable alternative to its leaders’ hamstrung ambitions — like a new focus on an organic trans-Atlantic trade community in response to China’s economic challenge.
Mr. Hollande thinks that by avoiding a clear set of campaign commitments, he can circumvent anything specific that might threaten his wide lead over Mr. Sarkozy in current polling. The president concentrates on casting himself to the French not as a dispenser of much-need reform medicine, but as their worldly, combative protector.
That common burst of subterfuge means an election campaign poor in meaningful, coherent ideas. In this country, normally so productive in inventiveness and nerve, there’s nothing new or promising going on as it stutters and drifts toward choosing a president.
By John Vinocur, senior correspondent at The International Herald Tribune.