Sarkozy or Royal? The French election

[SFG75]

Looks like it will be a good one. Any predictions?, does it even matter?

Sarkozy to expats-come home!.

 

[France]

Any predictions?, does it even matter?

To those of us who live here, yes it does.

Sarko is going to win, sadly, because he's so business centric that he'll probably end up by sounding the death knell to all the small enterprises which keep the villages alive by removing the protections that allow them to exist. For instance large shops and supermarkets aren't allowed to open on Sunday mornings, supermarkets aren't allowed to sell bread below cost price to the boulangeries aren't undermined.

However Sego is completely incompetant so the country would probably grind to a halt.

It looks like we're stuffed both ways.

 

[SFG75]

Thanks for the interesting comments there France. From what I've read, what your nation is going through sounds like what America experienced around 1980. Your nation has a problem with a largesse of retirees and people on public aid, economic growth is anemic, and you have Sarkozy who is an apostle of free-market economics. Our Sarkozy was Reagan and the man destroyed what was good with the country. He broke the striking airline traffic control worker's union, weakened OSHA, gutted social programs, accelerated the demise of the factory worker through globalization and anti-union policies, not to mention overseeing the midwestern farm crisis, and the fraying of the social fabric by refusing to properly fund AIDS research and completely ignore race relations. A country can overcome slow growth and large public spending in a way that hurts few people as possible, in America, we chose the other option.

 

[JustinDT]

The election and Sarkozy winning the election has probably been my favorite international news story all year. Great fun to watch and very happy for France's future that he won.