FRANCE:François Fillon reformed pensions. Longer working hours are next, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris
It is a sign of French presidential candidates' desperation to perform well in the first round of the election on Sunday that their campaign committees are urging Tupperware-style home meetings to watch rallies on the internet, in the case of the socialist Ségolène Royal, and yesterday un grand footing ("a big jog") beneath the Eiffel Tower to show support for the right-wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy.
Jogging, like Mr Sarkozy, is associated with the US. It requires individual effort rather than teamwork, and performance. Sarkozy's adviser and favourite jogging partner, François Fillon, also talks about "effort" and "performance". Like Mr Sarkozy, he is ruthless and has a razor-sharp brain.
As minister for social affairs in the 2002-05 Raffarin government, Mr Fillon braved demonstrations by millions of French people to oversee the partial reform of the French pension system, the only reform accomplished in the last five years of right-wing rule.
Unlike Mr Sarkozy, whose temper tantrums are legend, Mr Fillon gives the impression of unflappable, icy calm. French media describe him as the man most likely to be France's next prime minister, though Mr Fillon refuses to discuss his nomination. "Every time the French think we're already handing out positions, we lose points in the opinion polls," he explained in an interview.
Nor is anyone's future secure in the court of Emperor Sarkozy. Close friends are chewed to pieces for slip-ups in interviews. Mr Sarkozy has promised to form a small government of only 15 ministers, half of them women.
That leaves only seven or eight positions for dozens of long-toothed male politicians. "Sarkozy has promised some ministries to two or three people," says a source close to the outgoing prime minister Dominique de Villepin. "If he wins, there's going to be a lot of blood on the floor."
Mr Fillon knows how vicious French politics can be. President Jacques Chirac unceremoniously dumped him in a cabinet reshuffle in 2005. "The only thing that will remain of Chirac's record will be my reforms," he predicted bitterly at the time.
After pushing through the pension reform, Mr Fillon wanted to press on. He accuses Mr Chirac of lacking the political courage to confront street demonstrations. "We started. Everyone got scared, and we stopped," he sighs.
Mr Fillon says he joined the Sarkozy camp in 2004 "because he was the only one who understood that we had to break not only with the way France was governed by the left, but the way it was governed by the right as well."
In an effort to stop frightening the French, Mr Sarkozy now talks about a rupture tranquille (calm break) rather than a rupture full stop. Mr Fillon would rather drop the tranquility.
"I think the break should be radical," he explains. "If we don't radcially change the way we govern this country, the crisis will only get worse . . . France is surrounded by European countries who have been more on the ball, who have made reforms and reached full employment. France knows all that, but never takes the necessary decisions."
Messrs Sarkozy and Fillon seem to believe they are wiser and more worldly than their fellow citizens, that it is their duty to force the foul-tasting medicine of economic liberalism down the throats of the recalcitrant French. "The strength of Nicolas Sarkozy is knowing how to impose solutions on questions about which society is extremely chary," explains Mr Fillon.
Statistics quoted by the probable future prime minister show that France's decline is real: "At the beginning of the 1980s, France was the 9th richest country in the world on a per capita basis, and the 10th richest in terms of the development index, measured by indicators like health and education," he says. "Today, we're 17th in per capita wealth, 16th in human development. We have really regressed."
The root cause of this regression, Mr Fillon says, is that the French simply don't work enough. He blames the left for lowering the retirement age and reducing the working week to 35 hours, then propagating the myth that the country could nonetheless prosper. The idea that dividing work into ever smaller parcels would create work for everyone has been proved wrong, he says. "If you take the total number of hours worked in France, divided by the total population, we work 20 per cent less than the Spanish, 30 per cent less than the British, and 40 per cent less than the Americans," he claims.
If Mr Sarkozy is elected on May 6th, Mr Fillon says, "his first act will be to propose a way out of the (European) crisis to other European leaders." While seeking consensus on a shortened constitutional treaty, at home Mr Sarkozy will immediately push through legislation treating juvenile delinquents as adults, and eliminating taxes and social charges on overtime hours - a tall order for what could be a long, hot summer.