Anglo commentators take the French to task for their 8 per cent unemployment rate. It's because the French enjoy excellent health, education, transport, and other services, unemployment support and retirement benefits, extensive state child care and "maternal" schooling from age three, not to mention five weeks of holiday and a 35-hour week. How dare they have it so good! Doesn't everyone know that, after 50 years of economic growth, we can no longer afford such measures? The French need to trade their holidays in, cut their bloated public services and privatise. -- Charles Sowerwine, La difference is a stark one. [italics mine.]

According to Meg Bortin in the International Herald Tribune, French voters gave Nicholas Sarkozy a healthy 54 per cent of the vote for "economic reasons". Yeah, sure. They don't want to admit it, but the darkly underlying reason is immigration. The French may have recoiled from the brain-dead militant intolerance of Jean-Marie Le Pen, but fear of the fruits of colonialism -- the influx of North Africans over several decades -- remains a constant nightmare. Enter Nicholas Sarkozy, or Le Pen-lite, with his promise of economic valhalla and that reassuring subtext that he will deal decisively with Racaille, read Muslim "scum".

Do the French really want to trade their well-developed, extremely civilised society for a bloodless Thatcherite dependence on weird concepts like growth (at all costs) and debt reduction (for ideological reasons)? Do they really want to put themselves at the mercy of the free market, read the politics of big money? Let's hope so, because if the real reason was to get rid of illegal immigrants then they will wake up one day in a country very unlike the one they are used to: a nation of constant upheaval iced by a privatised economy that, while letting infrastructure go to hell, overwhelmingly favours the rich over the poor.

Such is the siren call of racial hatred that it turns otherwise decent people into snarling fools, ready to gobble up the lies of agents working for high rolling profiteers.

For Australians there is a glaring similarity: Pauline Hanson was to John Howard as Jean-Marie Le Pen is to Nicholas Sarkozy. Sarkozy would agree with Howard's sinister warning: "We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come."

Other similarities between Howard and Sarkozy: both are favoured by retired people, traditionally the most frightened demographic. And let's not forget Howard's (and soon Sarkozy's) battlers, the aspirationals ready to cut anyone's throat as they ascend that old ladder of opportunity.

The French are not unused to racism. They lost their minds under Pétain. Now they get the chance again. Too bad there is ultimately no place in capitalism for liberté, égalité, fraternité.

-- Tara R. Bümdier