International Affairs

The French are not a modest bunch. So it wasn’t a surprise last night when the victorious candidate in the French presidential election, the Socialist Francois Hollande, said that his victory represented “a new hope for the world.”

The way Hollande sees it, Europe should chart a different course than the tough budget-cutting austerity packages that have cut the tax base in the U.K. by increasing unemployment and driven Greece into the arms of the neo-fascists.

If Europe switches course, the debate about economic stimulus will intensify here and could affect the election campaign. Already there have been signs of nervousness in the Obama administration about the effects of the massive cuts by the Cameron coalition in the U.K.

One hundred years ago France, the center of the world for the previous thousand years, suddenly experienced the darkest harbingers. The new big screen brought forth a golem, Yeats saw a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, the Irish poets were dreaming of rivers flowing with blood, but 1912 saw the most prescient and darkly foreboding specter. Marcel Duchamp had a shattered cryptic vision of a nude woman descending a circular staircase in 1912, as if France and all of Christendom was about to lose all form and descend beneath the waves into the collective unconscious. It was a perfect Zen observation of what was ahead for Europe, its feminine spirit shattered and descending into the maelstrom. The death of Europe would surely follow, and surely it did. But today, France might be seen as ascending the stairs.

Somewhere in Hollywood a scriptwriter must be firing up a laptop to tell the story of the blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng.

But it won’t have a Hollywood ending. This story can only end badly, with humiliation for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and probably exile for the human-rights activist who originally wanted to stay in China and study under an agreement negotiated with the Chinese authorities since he fled house arrest and pitched up at the U.S. embassy in Beijing.

The two remaining Republican presidential candidates, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, share this problem: Neither one believes in taking personal responsibility for his actions. Romney had attacked the very notion of the United States focusing so much effort on finding and killing Osama bin Laden. Romney also attacked President Obama's vow to kill bin Laden in Pakistan (a vow Obama fulfilled). Paul has moved so far to the isolationist viewpoint that he would significantly dismantle America's military and counterterrorist capabilities. If either of them were president today, Osama bin Laden would probably be alive and planning attacks against us.

The increasingly likely victory of Francois Hollande in the French presidential election would be the shot for economic justice and jobs that will be heard around the world. It would be the repudiation by one of the world's leading nations of the unjust economics of the 1 percent that is championed by Sarkozy in France, Merkel in Germany, Cameron in Britain and Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and George W. Bush in the United States. A Hollande victory would bring a French Spring.

Hollande leading France would end what I called "Midnight in Paris" after his triumph in the first round of voting, and begin a new French Spring that would elevate France to a rejuvenated position of world leadership. It would end the right's Euro hegemony dominated by the conservative economics of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and would reject the "government of the banks" and the "government of the 1 percent" that created and continues the financial catastrophe of our times.

If the socialist candidate wins the election in France next week, as The Washington Post’s David Ignatius says he is likely to do, it will shift the paradigm of Europe. It will change everything. Specifically, it could shift leadership in Europe from Germany to France. Or more likely, it could begin a power contention between France and Germany; a struggle for the soul of Europe. Because now that France has challenged austerity it brings respect, acceptance and leadership to the countries that have in the recent brief history complained. That would be Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, which France can begin to assert European leadership to. France brings status and a legitimate program of opposition to these countries by the repudiation of Sarko and the election of Socialist leader Francois Hollande, not only to France but to these other countries. While Germany would retain leadership of others. Until now, a few of us Euro deniers referred to the EU as Greater Germany. Now two realms emerge: Greater Germany and Greater France.

What’s the difference between France and an ostrich? None: They both have their heads stuck in the sand.

The first round of France’s presidential elections yesterday was a sad demonstration of the extent to which the French are in denial. After a campaign in which the burning issues were hardly debated, one-fifth of the French electorate voted for the racist extreme-right National Front, which scored its biggest success ever.

The National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, thanked the supporters of “the French identity” for her stunning success (even though she will not go through to the runoff, which will pit President Nicolas Sarkozy against his Socialist challenger, Francois Hollande, in a tight contest).

The victory of Francois Hollande over Nicolas Sarkozy in the first round of voting in France, and Hollande's probable victory in the runoff in two weeks, has major implications throughout Europe and the United States. It is a reaction against the ultra-conservative right that would impose more austerity, pain and joblessness while trying to appeal to anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner and at times anti-Muslim fear. There are shades of the French battle from other nations in Europe to Mitt Romney (like Sarkozy the voice of the 1 percent) and the Tea Party (like the radical Le Pen movement, the voice of anger and fear with a phony populist accent).

From the Occupy Wall Street movement to the voting in France, from the backlash in southern Europe to the falling popularity of the Tea Party in America, there is a reaction against the right and a move back toward the populist center-left.

The ongoing leadership race in France is of vital importance to the EU and to individual European countries because there are basically two vital questions Europeans have to ask today. The first is, how will other European nations and France in particular get along together and with Germany in particular? And how will they and France in particular get along with the Muslim and other immigrant people they have brought in to do the work? The second question is more important, and that is what this race is about.

Global pressure continues to mount on Iran.

You would think this would make it more difficult for the regime to justify the nuclear program to the Iranian people. The economy is straining and the sanctions are increasingly biting, but Russia, China and their puppet states have been complicit in helping keep the country afloat. The threat of military reprisal has kept the population at bay.