A GLIMMER OF HOPE IN FRANCE :

Chirac picks new prime minister (Elizabeth Bryant, 5/6/2002, United Press)

French President Jacques Chirac on Monday said that Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a little known, center-right politician, would replace Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

A provincial politician from the moderate Liberal Right party, known for his hands-on style of governance, Raffarin, 53, was expected to name his government quickly. [...]

Chirac's choice of Raffarin echoes his recent pledges to gather a grand coalition behind his centrist-right message -- and to respond to a disaffected electorate.

A former minister in Chirac's fleeting, 1995-97 government, Raffarin is a provincial politician and a strong supporter of decentralization.

In January, Raffarin published "For a New Governance," outlining his ideas on changing France's centralized system of governing.

Among other suggestions, he called for drastically paring down the number of ministers in the French government and handing more decision-making to the provinces.

France needs a lot more than mere decentralization, but that's at least a start. It's been popular to hammer the Left for the Le Pen debacle, because they couldn't muster enough voters for one of their candidates to finish second in the first round. But, since the Left is incapable of addressing France's core problems (declining population, failure to assimilate immigrants, declining moral values, protectionism, big government, high taxes, etc.), the bigger problem is on the Right, where Chirac's party needs to provide an anti-EU, anti-multicultural, anti-bureaucracy, etc., alternative to the nativists or eventually a Le Pen-like party will replace them as the dominant party on the Right. If Mr. Raffarin can act on some of his ideas, perhaps france can start rebuilding a responsible Right that is genuinely conservative. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 7, 2002 6:41 AM