Restoration
By Laurent Joffrin
Libération

Wednesday 02 May 2007

    Testing events reveal men. And what better ordeal for a politician than a presidential campaign? The one that ends this Sunday will have revealed the true Sarkozy. Hence, this special edition of Libération, which is designed to give voters the tools to choose between two people who each incarnate a specific vision of the Republic. Curiously, it's the reference to the past that provides the most useful key to understanding the future Nicolas Sarkozy plans. And, still more curiously, this past - the one the UMP candidate has chosen himself - is symbolized by a date that we could have believed to be buried in the recesses of memory: May '68....

    One may criticize the events of that time and not always be wrong. But one thing about them cannot be denied: that pseudo-revolution was above all a revolt against a too-rigid, too-centralized and too-authoritarian government. By using those events as the scapegoat for France's maladies, Nicolas Sarkozy confesses his plan. Nothing more or less than a restoration. That's the principal criticism one may level against this unquestionably republican man: his concept of power and of government. Activist, interventionist, bridling against any opposition, allergic to too much freedom in the media or society, he wants to put an end to the open history of the late sixties that one part of French society has experienced as decadence and the other part as a liberation.

An authoritarian government? Perhaps. A strong government, in any case, that wants to act from the top of the social hierarchy to make a country that has up to now been recalcitrant to toe the line on neo-liberal globalization. A concentrated power that wants to hold not only government institutions in its grip, but also money and media networks. A government power, in short, acclaimed Sunday in Bercy at the great UMP* rally and rejected yesterday at Charléty during the reunion of the entire Left. What clearer choice in a month of May full of sunlight, fear and hope?

this theme of Restoration (aka Backlash, revanchism, etc)  is very strong at present in multiple countries.  always a powerful sentimental lever to move the electorate:  restoring the Good Old Days, restoring Order, Certainty, etc.  presumably it's an indicator of panic among the political classes:  only when they have nothing good to say about the immediate future do they turn to repackaging and reselling the heavily airbrushed past.

I would not be surprised to hear Sarko promise to make the trains run on time :-) although strangely enough (despite all that leftist anarchy, disorder, indiscipline, sloth, foreign influence and general long-haired goofiness that so frightens ultracons of all nations) most of them already are :-)

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...