It gives Socialists another opportunity to demonstrate the delusional nature of their policies and to toss fistfuls of gravel into the gears of the machinery driving Europe toward an anti-democratic unity. Europe's political class has arrogantly fostered unification over the heads of increasingly unpersuaded peoples. Chirac called early parliamentary elections to get a mandate for overdue austerities. But they are being justified with reference to the move to a single European currency, itself a large step toward political union. In France, where statism is the civic religion, the welfare state is increasingly incompatible with the welfare of the state and of society.
Government is big and weak, failing to propitiate proliferating client groups.
Thus the welfare state, which was supposed to produce social solidarity, produces pandemic irritability, as when angry truckers block the nation's roads or angry farmers herd pigs through Paris. Now benefits must be cut and state-run enterprises submitted to market discipline by privatization. Reason requires this. So does the Maastricht Treaty, and there's the rub. It is bad enough to have to do disagreeable things.