Gender change would do the French good

Up north we quickly got the mes-sage that France is and always has been a kind of father figure for the rest of Europe. Paris is mission control when it comes to political gravitas. We got it. Yet it has been hard not to notice that for years now this most senior of European nations has been behaving in a way which betrays signs of confusion, if not full-blown dementia.

Take the French presidential elections. Will they bring changes? Whom would we like to see as the cock of the Gallic muck-heap? Does it even matter? A question provoked by Ségolène Royal’s campaign, which kicked off with 100 mutually contradictory promises.

In any normal European country this would have been taken as an unusually long suicide note. But in France bouncing political cheques has a long history. It is known as ‘rhétorique politique’, which sounds more grown-up and also goes down fine with voters.

Nicolas Sarkozy has a cornucopia of promises, too. He will abolish estate and gift taxes as well as company taxes, make people work longer hours, slash the num-ber of ministers in his cabinet and cane habitual offenders. Something like that.

The horse-breeder François Bayrou seems to be a clever guy. He has taken the tractor as his political logo and is driving it around, giving his word that he will appoint a moderate socialist as prime minister if he gets to the destination. Voilà: an unusually coherent French politician of the centre. Bonne chance!

In France no one is making the yahoo noises this farrago deserves. The presidential campaign speeches bring to mind a vulgar Nordic expression: if it is cold and you pee in your pants it won’t keep you warm for very long.

So it is a pretty tense and exciting contest, with some interesting issues. For example, the French press suggests that Royal is too pretty for female voters. Some even maintain she is not as bright as she is beautiful. But can she rely on a solid core of male voters?

Maybe. The analysts are divided. But there is clear unease about letting a French woman take control. Are they so different from women elsewhere as to be almost a different species? If not, then why not give Ségolène her chance at the wheel? Up north we started having women presidents and party leaders years ago. Some were real daisies, others had more homely looks; no one has so far caused a political train wreck.

So perhaps it is time for the French to make the gender revolution. While they are about it, they might accept that globali-sation is an even more obvious reality than climate change and that getting bad-tempered about EU enlargement or institutional reform will not make the nasty men go away indefinitely. Scandinavians would be impressed by that.

By the way, did I really see a poster in which Ségolène poses as the revolutionary nymph in Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People? If it does not exist, it should. You could call it Socialist Royalty Leading the People.

Up north we quickly got the mes-sage that France is and always has been a kind of father figure for the rest of Europe. Paris is mission control when it comes to political gravitas. We got it. Yet it has been hard not to notice that for years now this most senior of European nations has been behaving in a way which betrays signs of confusion, if not full-blown dementia.