The loss of France’s triple A could, If we get it right, become some great news. It could provide the small stimulus, needed to make us finally understand the gravity of the situation, become indignant against it and refuse to comply with it.
In this holiday season, when the conversations with family and friends will multiply, the time is right to lay the foundation for future projects. Everyone, at one time or another of this fortnight, will look back over the past 12…
So, we are told that European democracies would die soon. They would have passed, at best, under the control of technocrats from Brussels or Frankfurt; at worst, under that of markets. And all this, of course, would be the fault of the euro, the European Union, the banks and many other people. Not ours.
The worst thing that could happen to France at the moment is to be at the start of a presidential campaign and to have a president eligible for reelection. While the French State must take some really serious decisions, political elites will be at each other’s throats for six months on programs made obsolete day after day by a rapidly changing situation.
When the daughter of the founder of L’Oreal, Liliane Bettencourt requests that her guardianship and the management of her assets, imposed by the judge, be not placed under the control of her daughter Francoise, but rather left in the hands of only one of her two grandsons, Jean-Victor Meyers, it is not only another episode in the endless drama which tears apart one of the richest families in the world.
We will probably succeed in avoiding a disaster. After resisting for so long, to please the banking lobbies, we are going to set up, after much delay the minimal mechanisms to withstand for a time the crisis. Without solving anything in substance, because we will not address the root causes, which is the absence of a global rule of law.
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…
It is not in financial matters alone that this presidency of France is characterized by great unrest, followed by a long period of inaction, continually justified by the supposed complexity of the situation, perfected at the end of mandate by the rediscovery of the initial problems and an avalanche of speeches on the urgency of doing something.
