A French election about tolerance

The candidates are merely tolerated, but the contest's bigger issue: How much change can France tolerate?

By Jerry Lanson

from the April 25, 2007 edition

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AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France - The signs and billboards of this gracious city give an interesting glimpse into its live-and-let-live culture.

Each morning, on our daily 30-minute walk to town, we are greeted on Cours Saint Louis by a black-and-white sign that announces livraisons tolérées, "deliveries tolerated." The choice of verb intrigues. Deliveries on this busy street, part of the circular route that carries traffic around the city, are not allowed. They are not accepted or encouraged. They are tolerated.

It's a sensibility, it seems, that applies to the country's presidential election, too. Tolerance, at least of personal style and eccentricity, remains eminently French, even as the country struggles in choosing its next president with issues of economic uncertainty, dwindling influence, and growing immigration. One of the two remaining candidates in the presidential runoff, to be held May 6, Socialist Ségolène Royal, had four children out of wedlock and has never married her partner. The wife of the other leading candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, recently left him for awhile, but returned. Such facts might cause ripples in an American political race. En France, c'est la vie.

But the next two weeks of campaigning in this country's presidential runoff just might strain the civil manner in which life, business, and politics are carried out here. With the conservative Mr. Sarkozy holding a polling edge over Ms. Royal, one commentator on BBC television Sunday night suggested that Royal might try to make the final vote a referendum on the character of her opponent. Things could get nasty.

Sarkozy, after all, is a candidate who has alienated many in France's immigrant communities. As interior minister, he branded as "thugs" the unemployed youths in the weary Paris suburb where violence flared 18 months ago. He has not campaigned there despite promises to do so. He has offended many French leftists and centrists alike by courting the supporters of rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen and by proposing to create a "ministry of immigration and national identity," with undertones of Big Brother.

"He is personally very controversial," an acquaintance, a Parisian economist who supports Sarkozy, told us when we visited earlier this month. "Many people do not like him."

But, as with our acquaintance, Sarkozy also is the candidate of choice among those who would cast themselves as economic modernists, those who say France can no longer tolerate a social welfare state that in their view impedes growth and progress.

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