Is This the New Look of France?(World Affairs)

President Sarkozy has a lot of energy. But he is increasingly looking like a placeholder for whoever comes next.

In Paris this week I am shocked at the number of homeless people sleeping in the cold and rain in doorways of the richest arrondissements. Leave the Gare du Nord where the new Eurostar train sweeps in after its two-hour trip from London and you have to thread your way over beggars and the homeless, victims of the French indifference to expanding their economy. Indeed, the crisis in France can be summed up simply: a quarter century ago, the French economy was 15 percent bigger than Britain's and growing faster. Today, the French economy is 10 percent smaller than Britain's and is slowing down -- again. Some 400,000 of France's best business brains work in Britain. Some 400,000 of France's best scientific and technological minds work in the United States. Yet no one in France seems to question why their country drives so much of its best talent into exile.

Few answers are forthcoming either. When he took office this year, President Nicolas Sarkozy promised a radiant new dawn for a confident, modernized France. So far he is

not delivering. Despite his apparent victory over the unions last month, he appears to want an economic revolution without pain. On foreign affairs, his cuddling up to George W. Bush, and his bellicose rhetoric on Iran look curiously dated as America prepares to say goodbye to the Bush years and the intelligence community downgrades Iran's nuclear threat. Meantime, he has little interest or vision for Europe. His attacks on the European Central Bank, his plea for the EU to adopt protectionist economic thinking and his Islamaphobic hostility to Turkey are not far from some of the Euro-skeptic nationalist thinking of Labour in the 1980s or the Tories today. For now, French voters are cautiously endorsing the Sarkozy mini-reforms but the president knows it will take very little to convert street protests into regime-shaking anger.

This state of affairs presents an opportunity for an intelligent French left. Nearly 25 years ago I wrote a pamphlet entitled "French Lessons for Labour," which argued that Britain's out-of-power Labour party could learn from a Socialist France that created world-beating firms, embraced Europe and faced down Soviet bullying. Now France limps behind Britain, and Sarkozy calls Putin to congratulate him on rigging an election as the rest of Europe looks with concern at Kremlin autocracy. So while Labour in Britain should remain a reference point for any reinvention of the French left, such is the hostility to les Anglo-Saxons and contempt for Tony Blair on the part of the Paris left that there will be no young politician or intellectual writing a pamphlet entitled "English Lessons for the French Left." Instead of looking for what Labour has done right, French critics point to the number of part-time jobs in Britain as evidence of failure, failing to understand themselves that for a party of the left the only way forward is to put people back into work under almost any conditions. Instead of accepting Labour ideas, they look for mechanisms like working weeks of 35 hours to help combat unemployment, as if work was a fixed amount of time that simply needed reallocation. Instead of coming up with ideas, the left is fleeing France or becoming wrapped up in internecine disputes.

The closest France has to a top-class European social democrat -- Dominique Strauss-Kahn -- left French politics to become boss of the IMF in Washington. Able politicians from the political left, like Laurent Fabius or loudmouths like Arnaud Montebourg have been badly compromised by adopting anti-European positions over the EU constitutional reforms. French Socialists, meanwhile, still fondly believe their job is to teach the world how to understand France, rather than how to encourage the French to understand the world. Their candidate in this year's election, ...