The challenges ahead for France and the French people starting in 2012 are huge: a public debt equal to the GDP; 4 million unemployed people; €70 billion in external deficit, a vertiginous loss of competitiveness; an extraordinarily fast deindustrialization; uncertain energy and environmental choices; widening poverty; precariousness spreading to the middle class; not to mention other signs of decline: insecurity, obesity, addictions, corruption; and, in addition, immense European and global problems.
The presidential elections debate will have to address seriously all of these issues, valorise the assets of France and choose the best ways to implement them. For this to happen the two main contenders will have to meet the challenge.
We know the name, the strengths and weaknesses of the champion of the right: Nicolas Sarkozy. Now remains the choice of the candidate of the left.
The Socialist primary, which will appoint him, has at least the merit to exist. And even if there was no discussion on national security issues which will be the main concern of the next president, it made it possible to understand that five out of the six candidates can aspire, or will be able one day, to aspire legitimately to the Presidential Office.
In order to choose the best today, among those who have the competence, a single criterion seems to prevail in these difficult times: his ability to bring together; that is to say to be in empathy with the country, to understand those who have conflicting interests, to unite the French, to engage them in confidence in a project worthy of their History.
According to this criterion, a candidate imposes himself, in my opinion: François Hollande.
I do not choose him because he is a friend: other candidates equally are; or because he has worked with François Mitterrand, in the opposition as early as 1980 and at the Elysée, starting in 1981.
But because he is the best unifier: the other candidates decide, cleave, antagonize. Each in their own way, they have all chosen to build by what distinguishes them from another part of the left and the country. And even those who pretend to be a unifier, are not; or are not in a situation to be one.
This ability to bring together must not deprive the candidate of the will to decide quickly, which will be also essential: to bring together is not to procrastinate. Francois Holland seems to me to be out of the six the one who has most thought about the requirement of the office of president: the duty, after much listening, to decide alone and quickly.
It remains to know, when the time comes, his program. It should be realistic, fair, bold, courageous. It shall certainly not be a catalog of impossible promises and compromises with pressure groups, but a project, clear, placing France in the necessary progress of European integration, while protecting its identity and its conception of social justice. It should rethink a model of development, now out-of-date, and make of democracy, transparency, debt reduction, employment, health, school and competitiveness, the seven major projects of his mandate.
Next May, it is on this basis that the French will judge him, facing a formidable opponent, who will not lack arguments, and who can boast of having learned a lot while leading France in some very difficult times.
We will talk about all this again.