ANGLO-AMERICANIZING THE FROGS:

Right-thinking French woman plots revolution (Matthew Campbell, 6/18/06, Sunday Times of London)

AN ambitious young Frenchwoman whose fight against trade unions has earned her the nickname Mademoiselle Thatcher is to stand for parliament at the start of a political career which she hopes will revolutionise France.

If elected next year, Sabine Herold, the darling of the French right, will become the country’s youngest MP so far at the age of 25.

In March, Herold helped to launch Liberal Alternative, a political party that already has representatives in 150 French towns and cities. She hopes that it will soon have several MPs.

“People are hungry for change,” she said in an interview last week. “But none of the traditional parties on the left or the right offers any prospect for a break with the past. We want to create a new generation of politicians to be able to change France.” [...]

“I like what Margaret Thatcher did in Britain,” she acknowledged, noting that France’s unions still enjoy the disruptive power that has not been seen in Britain for more than two decades. “The unions in this country should be made more accountable. They are not even obliged to reveal the source of their funding.”

In her view, neither of the main candidates in next year’s presidential election will be able to shake France out of its stagnation and energise its outmoded economy.

No matter how much Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative interior minister and most likely candidate for the centre-right, promises a “rupture” with the past, he has a strong dirigiste streak, complained Herold, referring to the French tradition of big intrusive government.

It seems unlikely she could win, unless she were to couple the Amer-English economic model with more continental nationalism, but even the French seem to be figuring out, after a mere two hundred and twenty years, that their model is alternatively homicidal and suicidal.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2006 11:38 AM