For the next five years, the president of France will be Nicolas Sarkozy, a true conservative — or, at least, as conservative as a French politician can realistically be. He speaks very little English, but has the courage to admit that there are things in England and America that France would do well to emulate. Until now, that kind of courage would have been lethal for any French politician. He also dislikes, openly, the dominant political correctness and believes that gangsters, illegal immigrants, and arsonists are not basically nice people or “victims,” but that they must be dealt with — notions all certain to give “progressives” palpitations.

By winning 53 percent of the vote with a very large (85 percent) turnout and against the white-dressed, Socialist-hope Ségolène Royal, Sarkozy is provoking something of a cultural and political earthquake in a country where economic and cultural decay has long been disguised as progressivism.

That France is economically the “sick man of Europe” is hard to argue with, considering its 9-percent unemployment (25 percent among youths), enormous public debt, high taxation, and slow growth. While all that was essential for Sarkozy’s victory, especially as his rival offered nothing but expensive platitudes and unaffordable promises, the cultural impact of the result deserves special notice.

The delusions exhibited by the French elite have been astonishing. Illegals parking themselves in the middle of Paris? The intellectualoids show “solidarity.” Anarchic gangs of hooligans rioting all over in 2005? It is Sarkozy’s fault for calling them “scum,” repeating one of the victim’s epithet. Any attempt to establish order and increase citizen safety? “Repression” and violation of “human rights.” Not surprisingly, when Sarkozy attacked the noxious legacy of May 1968, claimed by the dominant elites of the Left, he touched a sensitive cord, and for this he was attacked with venom.

One of Sarkozy’s most debated ideas was the creation of a ministry of “immigration and national identity.” In a country which, largely due to its own neglect, but also because of irresponsible neighbors like socialist Spain (which recently legalized some 700,000 immigrants), has lost control of its borders, that is a logical move. France is a country where illegal immigrants are routinely called sans papiers (undocumented) and regularly demonstrate noisily in support of their “right” to be there, to have a job or public housing, and to send their children to public schools. It is also a country which has seen its immigrant population, mostly Muslim Africans, grow exponentially to over six million –almost ten percent of the total population.

Hence Sarkozy, already as interior minister in the outgoing Chirac government, asked for “chosen immigration,” based on French economic interests, as opposed to the current abuse-ridden system. That, of course, brought on his head the righteous hatred of self-proclaimed “human rights” and “anti-racist” NGOs — but also attracted millions of votes.

For the first time in decades the real French Right found a voice, especially after Chirac’s twelve years of de facto legitimization of the Left’s mentalities, if not all of its programs. Le Pen’s National Front used to be an alternative, but a very poor one: It could not win and slipped far too often into primitive xenophobia. By assuming some of Le Pen’s legitimate grievances, including defense of national identity against uncontrolled immigration and political correctness and support for law and order, Sarkozy both marginalized the National Front and offered a legitimate alternative to it. That is why Le Pen’s petulant call for abstention did not work.

François Bayrou’s “centrist” candidacy was more an expression of fear than a real choice. Those disgusted with the decline of France and with the Jurassic program of the Left, but afraid of too sharp a change, voted for him in the first round. However, the fact that virtually all deputies of Bayrou’s party supported Sarkozy in the second round suggests they realized that, when forced to choose, their voters would mostly go right. Bayrou refused to vote for Sarkozy and thus expressed personal resentment at the cost of his own electorate.

The Socialists and Ségolène Royal have to deal with the most serious damage. She became the candidate because the rank and file of her party refused substantive change and believed that a new face and her gender would be sufficient. Neither the new face, even surgically improved, nor her gender (40 percent of women voted against her) proved to be enough — and her steadily moving Left in substance while making vague concessions to Bayrou managed both to alienate the radical fringes and to cool further the already lukewarm support of the traditional Socialist leadership — the “elephants.”

The leftist fringes were big losers, and none more than the Communists, whose first round candidate obtained a pathetic 1.9 percent — less than half the 4.5 percent of the Trotskyite Olivier Besancenot. The coming legislative elections in June may well see the Communist party put out of its misery for good, with its losing most of its deputies and the right to have its own parliamentary group. That will be an important further step toward making France a normal European country. The eco-vandal José Bové (1.3 percent in the first round) and the equally pitiful ecologist candidate did, and could do, little to help Royal. There is now a chance that the Socialists will finally modernize and, like their colleagues in England, Germany, and elsewhere, will decide to live in the real, market-oriented, and globalized world — but don’t hold your breath.

Sarkozy is, by French standards, unusual. Not only is he the son of a Hungarian immigrant with a decidedly non-Gallic name, but he never studied at the traditional factory of elites, the École Nationale d’Administration (Royal did). More significantly, unlike his original mentor, Jacques Chirac, he has — and actually believes in — some ideas, and thus is direct and clear. That makes him scary to some, and brought accusations of “brutality” from his rival, as well as threats of post-electoral violence from the hooligan-infested banlieues, the half-educated high school and university students, and the leftist fringes.

More serious is the threat from the Communist/Socialist unions, capable of regularly derailing any attempt to reform the sclerotic pension program, public employment, and labor legislation, mostly due to the weak will of governments and a public used to regular strikes, no matter they are. The unions have good reasons to fear — Sarkozy has some terrifying ideas regarding their interests: secret elections for union leadership, guaranteed minimum public services during long strikes, and the de facto abolition of the 35 work hours a week. In most other countries those ideas would be old hat, but France is indeed different, and that makes Sarkozy look positively Jacobin to the unions.

Which brings us to his alleged “pro-Americanism.” Unlike the French establishment, especially the intellectual elites, whose dislike for all things “Anglo Saxon,” from economic common-sense to Disney, is as old as it is genetic, or Chirac’s adolescent confusion between French identity and opposition to Washington, Sarkozy’s attitude is rational, polite, predictable, and mostly grounded on real French interests as he sees them. He is a believer in global warming, agricultural subsidies, and some protectionism — no great change there. On the other hand, he does not believe, as Chirac did, that French interests in the Middle East or opposition to Iran’s nuclear ambitions necessarily implies dislike toward Israel (he has some Jewish ancestry); he is not cozy to the increasingly assertive Russia; and he will certainly continue the already close, if quiet, counterterrorism cooperation with Washington.

All of which causes one to wonder, how could such moderation and common sense be seen as revolutionary? Only in France.

– Michael Radu is senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center on Terrorism and Counter-terrorism.