French Elections, immobilism, and contemplativeness

The First round of the French presidential election is on Sunday and I must admit that I’m having trouble sleeping because I’m so anxious about the fate of my champion, Ségolène Royal. It is possible that she won’t make it, and what saddens me is that there is nothing that I can do. Jeremy Harding has an article about the French elections in the London Review of Books, which is instructive even though it fails to read correctly the candidates, their message, and the state of France. Harding concludes his article with the following sentences:

There is a glimmer of hope in French immobilism and the dogged willingness of France’s voters to unthink the thinkable. It lies in the possibility that the long assault mounted against the so-called French model by neoliberalism may not last for ever. In which case, digging in and doing nothing will prove not to be as foolish as it looked at the time: a handful of French republican values will come through intact. Yet the dangers of simply trying to hold out, including ethnic unrest and endemic unemployment, are too terrifying for many voters to contemplate.

I don’t think that France is an immobile nation as much as it is a contemplative one which is trying to decide not only where to go and what it wants to be but also what to accept and to reject from the world as well as what to transmit to it.  I prefer Ségolène Royal to Sarkozy because I believe that she epitomizes Frenchness in the sense that she has style, class, and even though she hasn’t yet decided what she wants to be even though she knows in her soul who she isn’t. I like Sarkozy energy and Americanism, but I don’t like his view of society and his methods, which are too brutal. Anyway, I hope that Ségo makes it through the first round because I think that she can do for France what Blair and even Thatcher did for  Britain because she has the will, the strength, and the douceur to take the French out of their contemplativeness by galvanizing them.