France hopes to shake off ‘immobilisme’

French politicians are masters of nuance who choose their words carefully, so it is striking that both candidates in today’s presidential runoff election have talked a lot about a country in crisis.

“France is undergoing an unprecedented identity crisis,” says Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right candidate who is considered the front-runner. “Her model of integration has broken down, her social model is failing, her cohesion crumbles. A terrible doubt overcomes her. She has doubts about her values, her future, her identity, her vocation.”

Both Sarkozy and his rival, Segolene Royal of the Socialist Party, cite a long list of specific woes: Low economic growth. High unemployment. A burdened public sector that spends almost half its budget on salaries and pensions. Youth riots that revealed rage and alienation in the Muslim immigrant community. Declining French influence in Europe and beyond.

Nonetheless, the “crises” do not add up to catastrophe. France still has the world’s sixth-largest economy, a nuclear arsenal, a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and a muscular diplomatic corps. The transportation, health, education and cultural infrastructures are hard to beat. Most French families enjoy generous job security, vacations and retirement benefits.

A central nation

The problem is that society has slid into what the French call immobilisme, or paralysis. Voters see Sarkozy and Royal as strong, youthful leaders who will finally confront it. They expect the new president to reassert French power abroad and find a way to make structural reforms at home while preserving the system’s comforts.

“I think this is a moment of truth for France, and the reforms that it needs, based on the model of what is being done in Germany by [Chancellor Angela] Merkel and was done in Britain by [Prime Minister Tony] Blair,” said Michel Barnier, an advisor to Sarkozy. “France is historically, economically, geographically, culturally a central nation, but we have not known how to take advantage of that centrality. Our world has changed a lot and our diplomacy must adapt to the world.”

As voting began Saturday in French overseas territories, it seemed likely that Sarkozy would lead the way into that changing world. Voters thought he performed better than Royal in a televised debate Wednesday, according to the latest polls. He has never trailed Royal in the polls, which showed his lead stable or widening going into today’s runoff. During a media briefing Friday, an independent pollster all but predicted a Sarkozy victory.

“The runoff is easier for us pollsters to predict because we have the data from the first round,” said Brice Teinturier, director of the TNS Sofres firm. “It’s very hard to imagine a reversal of the trend.”

Royal’s chances for an upset rest partly on hope that overconfidence, combined with a long holiday weekend, could reduce turnout for Sarkozy. And she needs last-minute support from voters who backed centrist Francois Bayrou in last month’s first-round election. Bayrou, who finished third, said Thursday that he would not vote for Sarkozy. But he did not endorse Royal, and most of his party’s two dozen legislators in the National Assembly support Sarkozy.

Shaking off the past

No matter who wins, analysts predict a new direction for foreign policy.

Incumbent Jacques Chirac of the center-right Gaullist Party and his predecessor, Socialist Francois Mitterrand, concentrated primarily on foreign affairs. They both asserted independence from the United States, cultivated strong alliances in the Arab world and did not let rhetoric about the sanctity of international law stop them from doing business with unsavory regimes.

Sarkozy and Royal are likely to break with that tradition, said political analyst Francois Heisbourg.

“The fact that this is a generational change is overriding,” Heisbourg said. “They do not feel beholden to the Gaullist-Socialist consensus on foreign policy.”

Both leaders have taken interventionist, moralist stands on issues such as human rights abuses in Sudan, Chechnya and China. They are “equally tough” in opposing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Heisbourg said, though neither has said they would support military action.

Relations with the United States, which reached a nadir in 2003 when Chirac led opposition to the invasion of Iraq, are expected to improve. Although close cooperation persists in areas such as anti-terrorism efforts, Chirac’s ideological instincts and personal tension with President Bush prevented a full rapprochement, officials say.

Sarkozy is regarded as France’s most pro-U.S. presidential candidate in a long time. Barnier, who as Chirac’s foreign minister worked hard to repair the rift over Iraq, predicted that a Sarkozy government would bring a new attitude to transatlantic relations.

“We will have a friendly and frank relationship,” Barnier said. “We will have a warmer relationship. That’s not just because we really like the Americans, but because it’s in the interest of facing together the great challenges of the world.”

Sarkozy also is regarded as friendlier to Israel and less pro-Palestinian than previous leaders, though he says his Middle East policy will be “balanced.”

Overall, Sarkozy’s discussion of foreign affairs is frank and pragmatic; where others hold up the French approach as a model, he cites the prosperity of Britain, Spain and other European neighbors as examples for France to follow.

A Socialist apart

Royal, meanwhile, does not share the loud anti-Americanism of other French Socialists. But she remains closer “to the footsteps of Mitterrand and Chirac,” according to Pascal Boniface, a foreign affairs analyst.

France’s aspirations of projecting global power reside largely in its traditional leadership of the European Union, a would-be regional juggernaut plagued by division and dysfunction. The new president will have to repair the damage done in 2005 when French voters rejected the European Constitution in a referendum. Since then, the EU has drifted and France has lost influence.

Sarkozy plans to dump the lengthy, ponderous text and ask the French legislature to approve a simpler treaty intended to get the EU moving again. He also opposes Turkey’s membership bid, arguing that the EU must consolidate politically rather than add a country of 71 million people, most of whom live in Asia Minor.

Royal has charted a more difficult course. She wants to hold a new referendum on the EU and, despite widespread opposition in France, does not rule out Turkish membership.

The future of Europe is as much a domestic issue as an international one. But both candidates would devote more effort to issues that are clearly domestic. Previous presidents entrusted day-to-day stewardship to their prime ministers, Heisbourg said.

“Both of them have the instinct, and I think it’s the correct instinct, that what they do on the domestic scene will affect foreign policy,” Heisbourg said. “Foreign policy success will come with reform at home.”

The urgent test on the home front is economics. Sarkozy and Royal both vow to cut unemployment and stoke economic growth.

Sarkozy’s lead in the polls makes it likely that he will get a chance to execute a plan based on cutting taxes and bureaucracy, encouraging overtime and entrepreneurship, and enacting a Marshall Plan for unemployed youths.

Despite his feisty style, Sarkozy is a keen operator who will try to negotiate reform before he fights, his partisans say.

“Reforms will not be brutally imposed,” Barnier said. “There are certain ones that have been announced before the election, so there will be a mandate to carry them out.”

The gloomiest analysts say France requires nothing less than free-market shock treatment like the one overseen by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who stood firm during long battles between police and unions.

But, Heisbourg said, France doesn’t need such harsh medicine.

“That would be misreading the public mood,” he said. “The French do not have the same sense of chaos and decline as Britain in 1978.”

rotella@latimes.com

Times staff writer Achrene Sicakyuz contributed to this report.