Final countdownfor France and its politics of change

WorldView:There was one telling exchange between French presidential candidates Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal during Wednesday's television debate. "I will be the president of what works," she said. To which he replied: "People don't vote for us to complicate what works, but, on the contrary, to fix what doesn't."

That contrast between pragmatic adjustment and radical surgery is the form taken by this contest between left and right. It reflects a wider-running confrontation between reformist social democracy and radical neoliberalism in a specifically French context.

They were talking about civil service reform. Royal said that as president she would transfer staff between government departments to optimise efficiency. Sarkozy argued that because departments are autonomous with separate budgets this would not work and would have to be fixed another way. He wants to see civil service numbers reduced as part of a programme to liberate private productivity and reduce public debt.

"We've got to reconcile the country with the idea of capital, of success, ambition, promotion," Sarkozy said last November. Yesterday, Royal warned that such a programme threatens violent social conflict if implemented in the way he demands. It was a final appeal to the "anybody but Sarkozy" feeling animating the French left.

In Testimony, his book published in English last year, Sarkozy writes: "I'm not trying to be provocative for the sake of it, but trying to wake people up in a way that's urgently needed." He goes on: "The French are not afraid of change. They're waiting for it. It's politics that has gradually become sclerotic, predictable and rigid over the last few years, not society."

And in a revealing observation about his relations with outgoing president Jacques Chirac, he says: "We're not irritated by the same things. He gets irritated with liberalism, the Americans, certain CEOs, and people who disagree with him about Europe. I get irritated by the lack of steadfastness, hesitation, unkept promises, the refusal to see France as it is, and conventional wisdom."

Sarkozy is an unabashed admirer of the US economic and social model and sympathetic to many of its foreign policy positions, notably on Israel and Iran (though not Iraq). If he wins tomorrow in the second, and final, round of voting to elect France's next president to replace Mr Chirac (and his victory is the likely outcome), the rest of the world will have to pay close attention to his ideas and programme, as well as his powerful ego. It is striking that so unusual a figure should have commanded such a following.

He is quite different from Chirac, not really a Gaullist and typical of traditional French policymakers only in his willingness to protect French interests by state protectionism. During the campaign, he has tacked towards the far-right agenda on national identity and immigration, playing down his earlier enthusiasm to address minority exclusion issues.

Sarkozy is so hated in the banlieues (the parts of suburban Paris and elsewhere peopled mainly by immigrants) that he dared not go there, Royal points out. Should they erupt again following his victory, or should trade unions mobilise to oppose his policies on the 35-hour week and more flexible labour markets, he and those around him are quite prepared for a fight, indeed spoiling for it. There is a clear class and regional profile to this; the great majority of higher earners and richer regions supported him in the first round, whereas Royal's base is decidedly among the average and lower paid and poorer areas.

The French have a tradition of violent reform, partly because their parliamentary system is so weak. Direct action takes the place of representative democracy to achieve structural reform; but the outcomes of such conflict tend to stick and achieve a rough legitimacy. In the last two weeks, Sarkozy has railed against the 1968 generation of radicals as the source of much that is wrong with the country. He yearns for an alternative settlement in 2007-2008.

Whether he gets it will depend on tomorrow's result - but also on next month's legislative elections. It remains to be seen whether a Sarkozy presidential victory is confirmed by a right-wing majority in the National Assembly on June 17th. Voters could take fright at Sarkozy's triumphalism and elect a Socialist majority, leading to another period of cohabitation like that between Chirac and Lionel Jospin, the former prime minister and leader of the Socialist Party. This would be a disaster for Sarkozy's programme of radical change, blocking it legislatively and making for serial political impasse at home and abroad.

It is also striking that, in various ways, Royal has looked more defensive during the campaign compared with Sarkozy's radicalism. This came out in their exchange on civil service reform. Her programme is replete with plans to adjust existing employment and welfare schemes by addition or subtraction so as to temper economic change by social protection. It is a gradualist and grudging accommodation with globalisation and Anglo-American neoliberalism much more in keeping with French conventional wisdom than Sarkozy's.

It has been difficult to classify Royal's policies in relation to other European social democrats because of the specificity of France's socialist tradition. She has defended aspects of Blair's third way - but has not associated in public with him at all. Her mentors have been the Spanish and Italian prime ministers, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Romano Prodi, along with Jacques Delors, the French socialist former president of the European Commission, and the moderate Dominique Strauss-Kahn from her own party. She has clearly distinguished herself from the left wing of her own party and been willing to adopt Clinton/Blair policy triangulation techniques vis-a-vis Sarkozy - but not to the point of explicitly rejecting socialist in favour of social democratic norms as Blair did in 1994-1996 and the German social democrats back in the late 1950s.

From the Anglo-American perspective, this reluctance to depart decisively from the socialist inheritance has been her undoing. It explains why most voters who backed the centrist François Bayrou in the first round will not transfer to her.

French left-wingers dispute this analysis, saying Royal's lacklustre and centrist campaign has demoralised traditional left-wing voters, disoriented working-class ones and failed to capture right-wing ground from Sarkozy. Her only hope is to surf on the "tout sauf Sarkozy" (Anyone But Sarkozy) coalition. Tomorrow will tell.