OPINION:
With the recent commencement in France of the socialist campaign for president, Francois Hollande confirmed the shallow, phony discord of the self-hating political left.
With nary a constructive policy for growth or betterment of the French people, Mr. Hollande once again demonstrated the class warfare that has made France an irrelevant and fractured nation-state.
Full of apathy and anger in a constant state of envy, the nation is bewildered in its search for a path forward. Mr. Hollande, a man with zero accomplishments to his name, who has run nothing in his adult life, is as close to irrelevant as one can be (unless, of course, you compare him to Barack Obama).
France is nearly bankrupt. It has long lived the lie of the “contracte sociale,” which has created an unsustainable fiscal burden on its people. This entitlement mentality has led to a no-growth, no-opportunity, high-debt environment; hence, the resentment, fury and confusion of a people saturated with policies better made for Mao and Lenin.
This circumstance has been compounded by the rise of the Islamists in France. The population explosion in the country of North African Muslims, the majority of whom believe in a Shariah-based state and have no intention of integrating, coupled with the low birth rate of native French has a frightening effect. This, along with the rise of secularism, is a lethal brew.
Into this cauldron comes the banal, doe-eyed Mr. Hollande. Instead of addressing these realities he creates a bogeyman from nothing; his “true adversary” is the “world of finance.” That, along with the “new aristocracy ” of “today’s super-rich,” will be the focus of his ignorant, polemic wail rather than the real culprits of France’s demise.
The enemy of France is of its own making. It is a fiscal and regulatory circumstance that destroys job growth and penalizes creativity and entrepreneurship. It is the attendant work ethic that comes from demotivation and a lack of business opportunity. For the record, there are very few “super-rich” left in France, for these very same reasons.
Proposing increased taxation and higher regulation in such a country, as Mr. Hollande would do, is selfish and suggests a play at pure politics. But this has been the way of the left since the Bolsheviks first stimulated the “proletariat” to destroy themselves from within. It is pure tyranny at work and will only lead to France sinking into a state of further irrelevance and danger.
Today, France is at best a nice museum. Mr. Hollande’s vision for it will destroy even that quaint artifact of Western civilization.
ROBERT F. AGOSTINELLI
Paris
Please read our comment policy before commenting.