The Vegetating Catastrophe

George Walden writes in today's Times of London about France. He appropriates the term vegetating catastrophe, coined by French author, Louis-Ferdinand Céline to describe the Soviet Union and applies it to what he sees in France. Whoever wins the election there will have a terrible fight to try to change the French economy and political landscape.

As a foreign student at the ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration) I learnt how to make policy presentations to prime ministers by giving them three options. But what if there are four, some joker asked. “When you have no more than five minutes,” the instructor replied, “not only will you find that there are always three, but the first and the last will be phony choices, and the middle one will be the only option.”

To me Ségolène Royal and François Bayrou seem non-options, and Nicolas Sarkozy the single choice. Yet what could he do, if elected? The country’s problems can be summed up in one dispiriting phrase: les droits acquis — acquired rights. Handing them out is electorally sweet, taking them back virtually impossible. Think of our own NHS: a Stalinist bureaucracy promising everyone everything free, which many politicians and professionals know can never work, but which popular sentiment makes untouchable. Apply that immobilisme to whole swaths of French life and you can see the new President’s predicament.

With typical chutzpah Jacques Attali, former head of the Bank for Reconstruction and Development, disagrees, claiming that we are all simply jealous of the French quality of life. “A kind of communism that works,” was how a French sociologist once described his country. Anyone who has landed at a stylish, efficient airport, driven on an exquisitely cambered motorway, taken the TGV, or pondered how high taxes, better services and a relatively small income span can go together, knows what he meant. But it was a French author, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who once described Russia as “a vegetating catastrophe”, and for all its charms and successes vaunted by Attali, that is how France sometimes feels.

Unfortunately for the French people, their "kind of communism that works" doesn't actually work in the real world. Only in the minds of the governing elite is it a workable system. But having voted themselves bread and circuses, it will be very hard to get the French people to give up the daily matinée. Read it all, it's actually depressing, but it is a good analysis of what faces whoever wins the election.