Americans live to work, while the French work to live. That's the cliché, and it's time to retire it. The message from France's voters this week was: The vacation in Martinique will have to wait. First, we'd like to work.
That's the real story of this election. The French have elected a former Rothschild investment banker who evinces no sense of guilt about his elite pedigree, capitalist profession and market-friendly economic inclinations that include tax cuts for corporations and an easing of the 35-hour workweek.
And no wonder. The French are desperate. Jobs were the No. 1 election concern, ahead of terrorism and the migration crisis. As of March, the unemployment rate was 10.1 percent. Youth unemployment: 23.7 percent. These figures would be shocking in the midst of a recession.
But this is France seven years into a recovery. The last time the growth rate surpassed the 3 percent mark was 17 years ago.
What ails France? The facile answer is to cite forces beyond French control: bureaucracy in Brussels, the currency straitjacket of the euro, the European Central Bank, the dark winds of globalization. Marine Le Pen specializes in this sort of blame-shifting, which is another way in which she and Donald Trump are kindred spirits.
But the French can thank their lucky stars for reasonably stable money, the ECB's bond-buying spree, and membership in a Union that allows French job-seekers a chance to find work in higher-growth economies--including an estimated 300,000 in Britain alone.
A more honest account of France's travails starts--and pretty much ends--with what the French often call their "social model." France ranks first in the OECD's tables for government spending (57 percent of gross domestic product, tied with Finland) and welfare spending (31.5 percent). As of 2014 the total tax take was second only to Denmark's.
This isn't just a tax-and-spend model of government. More like tax-spend-cosset-strangle. At least until the outgoing government of President François Hollande managed to ram through some modest labor-market reforms last year, the French labor code ran to more than 3,000 pages.
The code is designed to make firing a full-time employee as difficult as possible, which makes hiring them that much more unlikely. As the New York Times' Adam Nossiter reported last year, "90 percent of jobs created in France" in 2015 were "unstable, poorly paid and short term."
None of this is a mystery to a majority of the French, though it often eludes credulous foreigners who extol the benefits of the French model without counting or being subject to its costs. The French twice elected conservative presidents--Jacques Chirac in 1995 and Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007--on the strength of promises to pare the state. Twice disappointed, they turned to the Socialist Hollande in 2012, but his flirtation with soak-the-rich policies was short-lived.
(Recent polls have been cruel to the president, but like Germany's Gerhard Schroeder, he will be remembered as one of the more courageous economic reformers in recent history, if perhaps only because he had so little politically to lose.)
Now that Emmanuel Macron has won, his challenge isn't simply political. It is also pedagogical. Le Pen has offered him a relatively easy ideological foil, given how thoroughly tainted her party is by xenophobia and anti-Semitism.
Yet it's one thing to make the abstract case for openness, competitiveness and globalization in the face of a bigot. The harder climb will be to press for changes that inevitably take things away from people.
The paradox of France is that it is desperate for reform--and desperate not to be reformed. It wants the benefits of a job-producing competitive economy but fears relinquishing a job-protecting uncompetitive one. A Macron presidency will have to devote its intellectual and rhetorical energies to explaining that it can be one or the other, but not both.
What has failed in France is an idea--about the role of the state. Macron's challenge is to show the French there's a better one.
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Bret Stephens is a columnist for the New York Times.
Editorial on 05/11/2017