France's electorate has voted for years of decline under a Socialist leader

France's electorate has voted for years of decline under a Socialist leader
Daily Mail

Flags of the French Communist Party were visible in numbers at Place de la Bastille on Sunday night, the symbolically-charged location of Socialist François Hollande’s victory rally.

Mr Hollande is not a communist, but his election nonetheless foretells a sharp shift to the left in France and the deepening of Europe’s crisis of social democracy.

There is a certain fashionable cynicism which holds that Mr Hollande will soon tack towards the comfort of the centre-ground and govern without undue reliance on campaign pledges that were both

Those promises include a litany of unreconstructed old-left nostrums, ranging from new punitive taxes on individuals, banks, and businesses, to a further expansion of France’s vast public sector.

The warrant for such optimistic cynicism is scant. There is the all too apparent sincerity of Mr Hollande’s ideological convictions. He is a man who felt the need while campaigning to insist, ‘I am not dangerous’. His freely volunteered loathing of the rich is spoken with the asperity of true disgust. His capitulation to France’s unreconstructed trade unions was early and pre-emptive – being made as long ago as the early stages of the primary election through which he became the Socialist Party’s candidate.

François Hollande is a man who means what he says and his rise to the French presidency comes at a moment when there are exceptionally few restraints on how far the French Socialist Party may now push its agenda.


Victory: Exit polls show a victory for Socialist presidential candidate Francois Hollande, pictured with his wife

The party already controls many of the branches of French government. There are few institutional checks not already in the hands of his allies. In the hands of a resolute politician, the powers of the French presidency are almost breathtaking in their latitude. Most fundamentally, he has earned a mandate to do much of what France’s unreconstructed left he longed to do for years.

Aiding the ease with which Mr Hollande may now proceed to the introduction of punitive socialism, Nicholas Sarkozy’s presidency has marked the at least temporary destruction of France’s centre-right.

 
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