as read in this week issue of The Economist...
"(...)Mr Sarkozy was elected last year on a promise to get the French back to work, to allow them to earn more, to end the welfare culture and to encourage risk and reward merit. But recently the president has sounded a different note. He has declared that "laissez-faire capitalism is over" and railed against the "dictatorship of the market". He is setting up a "strategic national investment fund" to take stakes in French companies so as to protect them from foreign predators. His prime minister, Francois Fillon, has threatened to nationalise banks unless they lend more to companies. And Mr Sarkozy has also pledged to create 100,000 state-subsidised jobs of just the sort favoured by a former Socialist government, which he denounced vigorously during his election campaign.
This lurch to the left has not gone unremarked by real socialists. Martin Schulz, German leader of the Socialist group in the European Parliament, has congratulated the French president for "speaking like a real European socialist". It was a taunt that the president chose, uncharacteristically, not to dismiss. "Have I become socialist?" he wondered. "Perhaps." The ambiguity is such that some on the left now see a need to reclaim their ideology. A testy Pierre Moscovici, a French Socialist, insisted to the newspaper Le Parisien recently that "No, Mr Sarkozy is not a socialist. He is a communist in disguise"
Part of Mr Sarkozy's enthusiasm for state intervention can be explained by the financial crisis. With even the Americans and British bailing out companies with public money, the state is back in favour in the least likely places. The word "French", which during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was sometimes employed in America as an abusive synonym for "spineless", is now more likely to be used to mean "socialist". When Jim Bunning, an American senator, heard that the government had taken control of two big American mortgage lenders he said he felt as if he had "woken up in France". In some ways, indeed, Mr Sarkozy is simply returning to French interventionist tradition, with the economic crisis providing a ready excuse. (...)"
Source and full article:http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=12607041
Exactly not the type of leader we need, not now, never
"(...)Mr Sarkozy was elected last year on a promise to get the French back to work, to allow them to earn more, to end the welfare culture and to encourage risk and reward merit. But recently the president has sounded a different note. He has declared that "laissez-faire capitalism is over" and railed against the "dictatorship of the market". He is setting up a "strategic national investment fund" to take stakes in French companies so as to protect them from foreign predators. His prime minister, Francois Fillon, has threatened to nationalise banks unless they lend more to companies. And Mr Sarkozy has also pledged to create 100,000 state-subsidised jobs of just the sort favoured by a former Socialist government, which he denounced vigorously during his election campaign.
This lurch to the left has not gone unremarked by real socialists. Martin Schulz, German leader of the Socialist group in the European Parliament, has congratulated the French president for "speaking like a real European socialist". It was a taunt that the president chose, uncharacteristically, not to dismiss. "Have I become socialist?" he wondered. "Perhaps." The ambiguity is such that some on the left now see a need to reclaim their ideology. A testy Pierre Moscovici, a French Socialist, insisted to the newspaper Le Parisien recently that "No, Mr Sarkozy is not a socialist. He is a communist in disguise"
Part of Mr Sarkozy's enthusiasm for state intervention can be explained by the financial crisis. With even the Americans and British bailing out companies with public money, the state is back in favour in the least likely places. The word "French", which during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was sometimes employed in America as an abusive synonym for "spineless", is now more likely to be used to mean "socialist". When Jim Bunning, an American senator, heard that the government had taken control of two big American mortgage lenders he said he felt as if he had "woken up in France". In some ways, indeed, Mr Sarkozy is simply returning to French interventionist tradition, with the economic crisis providing a ready excuse. (...)"
Source and full article:http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=12607041
Exactly not the type of leader we need, not now, never
