Français : Francois Hollande – Mardis de l’ESSEC (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The French have over the years been unwilling to make difficult economic choices, change with the times or ” bite the bullet”.
For too long, they have imagined that they can remain in bucolic rural splendor, ignoring the need to be competitive and imagining that people like the Chinese, the Japanese and the South Koreans would always” eat someone else’s lunch” but never theirs.
That unwillingness has translated into weak leaders, burning lamb carcasses, lorry blockades and the sort of militant trades unionism that we used to see in the UK with Arthur Scargill and the miners strikes of the 1970’s and 1984.
The weak leaders seem collectively to be more concerned about their love lives, mistresses and scorned girlfriends than in running the country and telling the French people some home truths.
These are that there is no free lunch, that productivity has to rise and the world does not owe France a living.
Hollande is a particularly vain example of this breed of useless and vacuous politician and whilst he should be replaced,the entire country needs an” attitude refit” as well.
France therefore needs radical reform and a shakeup of the way it always awards top posts to people from the Grande Ecoles in a form of self fulfilling death wish.
Policy produced by these people is logical, seemingly flawless but fails to get the job done.
The uselessness of the hapless Hollande should not give us any cause for complacency in the UK because we have our own version of walking uselessness in our holiday-making Prime Minister, who is good at making speeches but very little else.
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