Can France be Saved? So asks Michel Gurfinkiel in this month's Commentary Online. His analysis of the symptoms and causes of France's prolonged social and economic malaise, as well as the prospects for her recovery, struck this reader as fair, informed, and insightful. The symptoms include "demographic upheaval"

But the French population as a whole is aging: in 2005, almost one-fourth of the population was above sixty, while citizens between the ages of twenty and fifty-nine—i.e., those whose labor supports the rest of the population, either directly or indirectly—amounted to just 50 percent.

and "immigration shock"

Six million legal immigrants, 90 percent of them from the Islamic lands of the southern Mediterranean or from sub-Saharan Africa, have entered France over the past 30 years. ... The immigrant and post-immigrant community is estimated today at more than 15 million. It is much younger than the native French population, and it tends to have a much higher birthrate.

Among the causes are the "disintegration" of the nuclear family, the collapse of the Catholic Church, "the feminization of the teacher corps", the deterioration of the university system (not a single French academic institution ranks among the world's top 100 universities), the loss of farmers and farmland, a vanishing middle class, spiraling crime rates, and looming bankruptcy:

In fact, the true public debt amounts to something like 2.7 trillion euros, or 130 percent of GDP. Marseille warns that it may double over the next fifteen years. This is on the scale of the debt of the Ottoman empire in the late 19th century.

But chief among the culprits, Gurfinkiel contends, is the decades long march of statist policies, policies advanced and reinforced by enarchs- graduates of the presitigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA):

The post-1958 Fifth Republic went much farther, embarking on large-scale industrial schemes that blurred most distinctions between state-run and private companies. The latter became so dependent on government contracts as to behave like de-facto divisions of the former. Some government contracts were also tailored to help favored private companies against their competitors. ... One need not be familiar with Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom to surmise that such comprehensive sway over a country will gradually become counterproductive, and worse. The more absolute their power, the more the enarchs have tended to run France in their own interest, while assuaging the citizenry with bribes of all sorts. One such bribe, rhetorical but no less effective for that, has taken the form of nationalistic posturing, usually directed against the United States; a favorite slogan of the enarchs is that France’s mission is to uphold and protect a superior continental civilization based on the welfare state against the Anglo-Saxon model of “predatory” free-market capitalism. Structural problems—an aging population, swelling immigration, the public debt—have been ignored.

The challenges facing a would-be reformer are succinctly summed up in the question that ends the piece.

But suppose a reforming, anti-statist president were actually elected. Who would assist him in carrying out his declared program, when enarchs and other state servants are all there is?

Commentary

Excluding stopovers in Charles De Gaulle Airport, I have spent a grande total of fewer than seven days in France. Thus, I can offer no additional insight into its malaise or what it would take to overcome it. That said, I do find two things notable.

First, the moderately pro-American, front-runner Nicolas Sarcozy appears remarkably Reaganesque in the above photo. Reagan, as well as his ideological soul mate, Margaret Thatcher, were acolytes of Austrian economist Friederich Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom. I've been re-reading Hayek a great deal these days and what now ails France strikes me as just what he described in painstaking detail over 60 years ago.

It is equally notable, at least for those of us old enough to remember, that Sarcozy inspires the same vitriol from his political rivals that the Great Communicator and the Iron Lady did.

Finally, I would note that CNN International, BBC World, and Al-Jazeera International all are loathe to mention Sarkozy's front runner status. Instead of mentioning that he has been leading every opinion poll of late, they continue to emphasize the number of undecided voters. While I have no empirical basis for saying so, were the photogenic Segolene Royal I suspect the reporting would be quite different.