[DVO]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I am with you -- hope Royal wins. The "conservative" candidate won't be able to make any real changes -- he'll merely slow the inevitable. France needs to become a serious object lesson for the world's economies -- the sooner and the more dramatic the better. Get the pain over with ASAP and get a new generation of people who have a different take on government and socialism.

[/ QUOTE ]
I agree. I call this the "Jimmy Carter Effect".
Elect a moron that throws your country into the toilet so that the people get pissed enough to elect a 'radical' conservative. A typical French 'conservative' makes John Kerry look like Milton Friedman. Better to let the French socialist tank France so that the French people will wake up... Then perhaps the French can elect a French version of Ronald Reagan.

France needs to hit bottom before they cure themselves...

[/ QUOTE ]


No way the French people wake up in the scenario described. We (the U.S.) had a history to draw upon in 1980 that the French completely lack. Never have they embraced free markets and individualism the way we had, for long stretches, prior to 1980. After the Carter debacle, we had some 60% of the population, with some vague sense of our history, ready to give it another go. The French have no such imbedded DNA.

France is in trouble.