STATIST STASIS:

Forget who'll win in France. Change is a loser. (Craig Smith, May 5, 2007, International Herald Tribune)

IN the months leading up to Sunday's presidential voting in France, there was a lot of talk about breaking with the past. Don't bet it will happen.

The French are notoriously resistant to change, and any new president would be hard-pressed to deliver any dramatic departure from the way people here live and work and get along with each other (or don't).

MORE:
France's Margaret Thatcher (Seattle Times, 5/06/07)

Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, a former interior and finance minister, may well prevail in the mode of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who shook up politics for a generation. This run-off election could set another record for voter turnout, topping the 84 percent from the first round of presidential balloting. Those results were clear to a point: Candidates on the ideological fringes were dismissed, and the centrist-party leader finished a distant third.

Sarkozy was comfortably ahead of socialist Segolene Royal, but she has campaigned hard to portray him not only as personally cold and taciturn, but also as a hard-liner on law and order and immigration. She is not proposing to shake things up.