Our friend Robert Agostinelli, reflecting on yesterday’s elections in France, and on Charles Cooke’s recent NRO preview piece, sends these thoughts straight from Paris. The nutshell: The French may have grown weary of Sarko’s tune, but Monsieur Hollande’s Socialist Opus will have them cringing:

The French political landscape is indeed particular. However, Charles Cooke’s NRO preview of yesterday’s presidential election voting gave our Gallic “allies” a touch too much credit. The truth is that all 10 presidential candidates were various shades of red.
#MORE#President Nicolas Sarkozy is in deep trouble for this precise reason. When he won election in 2007, he did so with a winning formula known as “the rupture” — a for the first time a presidential candidate appealed to the combination of core relative conservative base and the working class of France and its children. The head of France’s popular conservative political party (UMP, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire), candidate Sarkozy offered a break with the “diregeste” lockstep of government centralization, state ownership, and intrusion in the private sector, and a break with the corrosive nature of the powerful and unbending service civil (the trolls and eunuchs who feed off free enterprise and are the backbone supporters of the grand lie of pension and work rules known as the “contracte sociale”).
Sarkozy promised to reform this system to avoid bankrupting the nation. His was an appeal to reward work and effort, bring back those that had fled France, and, most important, give the children of France an opportunity for a better life.
The Interior Minister from 2002-04 and again from 2005-07, he was a man of law and order. And he had a real affection for America. He spoke to the joint houses of Congress of the deep appreciation of the sacrifices made by our nation to free France from the boot of Nazi tyranny. This was a break with the flagrant USA-disdain espoused by his predecessor and former mentor, Jacque Chriac.
The normally cynical French voters believed that “Sarko” would deliver and thus, on May 6, 2007, gave him a mandate predicated on this promise. On election night he said “I will restore the value of work, authority, merit and respect for the nation.”
That was then. Today, with the results in from Sunday’s first round of presidential voting, the electorate’s disillusion with Sarkozy is deep. They resent the failure of his promised relief, and the UMP leader’s eventual (as President) leftward lurch in governing. This is a likely fatal flaw – it precisely contradicts the reason why he was elected. His promised pension reform effort was largely superficial and then later diluted further. His expected assault on high taxes and business regulation stagnated and ultimately led to tax increases and other growth-killing enclosures of the state.
While episodically strong against terrorism, Sarkozy waned here as well. Initially backing action in Iran, he withered, and in Afghanistan he has joined the bandwagon of retreat. On Israel he was admirable – at the outset. But soon he joined the illiberal elite chant of blaming Israel for the amnesia and weakness of the West to address the region’s real culprit, Iran.
On the economic front he has been woefully weak. It was never his strong suit. His two finance ministers also were out of their depth with the combined national and European Union economic problems. A self-described pragmatist, he chose to blend a sort of popularism and anti-globalization, and coupled it with a witch hunt of industrialists and banks. It didn’t work, and the weight of all the layers of Sarkozy forced his administration to collapse onto itself.
He groped for culprits where none existed, something more suited to Marxists and Socialists, not an allegedly conservative head of state. Far from reassuring the working man, Sarkozy’s actions – from his personal life to the broken promises of the politician – isolated him. Hence his second place result yesterday.
And yet, through all this, he still remains with a chance.
Francois Hollande, the Socialist candidate who led the first round of voting, is grotesquely ill-equipped for this office. This is a man deeply ingrained in that hypocritical philosophy of the French left where they govern hard left while being extreme gauche caviar in their daily lives. Think “limousine liberal.” Full of self hate, they resent the failure of the Soviet project. As for the Anglo-Saxon world, their deep disdain is tempered only by their socialist affinity for Barrack Obama.
On foreign affairs, Hollande and his comrades view Israel as an annoyance, and pacifism as the purest form of existence. On economics, their resentment is fully unleashed by demanding the near eradication of the “monied interests” (never mind that most of these have long ago surrendered residence in France). They expect the central bank to fund their dreams, and are suspicious and accusatory of all financial institutions. Indeed, it is the “faceless world of finance that is the enemy of France,” so Mr. Hollande insists.
The decision for the French is, whether due to their anger and resentment, they will oust President Sarkozy in the May 6th run-off, or, if they will select Hollande, thereby destroying any means of reasonable national salvation. If the consequences of a Presidente Hollande overcome their disappointments , French voters can begin to build anew and give Sarko an opportunity to redeem himself by restoring and enacting those proposals that the electorate previously (and heartily) endorsed when it elected him president in 2007.