If, in their concern for French workers and farmers, the socialists' hearts are in the right place, those unworkable old ideas in their heads will finish them off. Socialism does not work. Unfortunately for France, none of its parties has a coherent policy to rescue the nation. Each has but a part of the answer. The communists are right in their opposition to giving up the franc for a European currency.
Conservatives are right to slash bureaucracy and privatize.
The National Front is right to demand a halt to mass immigration and in its belief that a rising European Union means the suicide of the French nation. The French conservatives' problems are hubris and ideology. He deludes himself. Chirac's crowd is in a word too snobbish and too elitist to put together a great coalition. It dominated U.S. politics until 1968.