A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

The Economist seems to think that France is on the verge of a major personality shift:

HOSPITALISED presidents make the French uneasy. François Mitterrand hid his cancer behind false medical reports for over a decade until his first operation, in 1992; he died four years later. Georges Pompidou's cancer became public only after his death from it while in office. So the news that President Jacques Chirac was to spend a full week in hospital, after a “small vascular incident” in the brain which affected his vision, prompted much speculation about the 72-year-old's health. If the problem is as minor as officials say, in formal terms nothing should change. But, symbolically, everything has.

Even before his hospitalisation, Mr Chirac had become politically enfeebled after the French rejected the European Union constitution in May. At the same time, his new prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, has been growing in stature. This week, that impression intensified, as Mr de Villepin chaired the weekly cabinet meeting usually presided over by Mr Chirac. More than ever, the Chirac era seems to be drawing to a close. And two of the men competing hardest to offer a fresh alternative are from his own Gaullist political family: Mr de Villepin and Nicolas Sarkozy, an ambitious interior minister, and head of the ruling UMP party.

Since politicians returned from their summer break, the pair have been competing to upstage one another. In a speech last week, Mr de Villepin unveiled a new phase of reforms, including the promise of income-tax cuts in 2007. Mr Sarkozy replied with two separate speeches this week, launching his own raft of proposals, and declaring that “nothing, and nobody, will stop me going all the way”. At the party's summer school, in front of the television cameras, Mr de Villepin kept Mr Sarkozy waiting in a beachside café while he jogged along the sand and dived into the ocean. Until recently, it seemed the popular Mr Sarkozy had no credible rival on the right. No longer. One poll this week put Mr de Villepin's popularity as a potential 2007 presidential candidate at 57%, second only to Mr Sarkozy, at 63%.

In political style, the two men could scarcely differ more. Mr de Villepin is aristocratic, polished, a diplomat. Mr Sarkozy is pugnacious, plain-talking, a lawyer. Conventional wisdom has it that their politics are wide apart too. Loyal to the president whom he served for seven years as chief-of-staff, Mr de Villepin is his political heir. But Mr Sarkozy, who backed a rival candidate against Mr Chirac in 1995, has always marked his political distance from the veteran Gaullist. Yet a close look at the two politicians' speeches this week hints at something new: Mr de Villepin has begun to steal some of Mr Sarkozy's clothes.

Breaking taboos in a welfare-cushioned society, the prime minister declared that he wanted to “restore the value of work” and “make work pay”; Mr Sarkozy talked of the need to “make work central” and to reward “the France that gets up early in the morning”. Mr de Villepin vowed to crack down on welfare fraud and to balance welfare “rights and obligations”; Mr Sarkozy insisted that there would be “no rights without equivalent obligations”. Mr de Villepin said he would end heavy taxes that “discourage work and damage the attractiveness of our country”; Mr Sarkozy called for a limit of 50% on combined personal taxes and insurance contributions. Both promised help for the middle class.

To be sure, these similarities are quite differently wrapped. Mr de Villepin says he wants only to “set the French model straight”, whereas Mr Sarkozy intends to “reinvent a new French model”, that “breaks with the past 30 years of traditional political life in this country”. Yet the trend is nonetheless striking. Already, Mr de Villepin has introduced a new, more flexible two-year employment contract for small firms, addressing the problem of labour-market inflexibility that Mr Sarkozy so often bemoans. And he has declared himself against Turkish entry to the EU, another of Mr Sarkozy's pet positions—in line with public opinion but against Mr Chirac's (and hence France's) position.

The article then goes on to wonder whether France is ready for the kind of change heralded by Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain when she ascended to power in 1979. Nicolas Sarkozy seems to think that the country is indeed prepared. I presume that de Villepin thinks so as well--else why would he be trying to steal Sarkozy's issues and thunder?

Of course, if de Villepin is successful in stealing Sarkozy's issues, he may water them down as well should he ascend to the Presidency. And by doing so, he may kill off the chance for major reforms in France.

This is a very consequential time indeed. We should be paying more attention to what is going on in France. It may go a long way towards definining the future of the European Community's evolution--not to mention having some impact on the nature of the transatlantic alliance.