French President Nicolas
Sarkozy’s action-packed six-year term has ended in
defeat at the hands of Socialist challenger François
Hollande.

Hollande, who ran on pledges to raise income taxes,
took a little less than 52 percent to Sarkozy’s little more
than 48 percent in the runoff election. 

Hollande has promised to raise income tax rates from 41 percent
to 75 percent. He has also pledged to accelerate the departure
of French troops from Afghanistan. His election comes at a time
when unprecedented levels of public debt coupled with work-averse
political cultures are threatening to break up of the
eurozone. 

France’s unemployment rate is at a 13-year high of 10 percent
(handy comparison
with other countries, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics). The
country’s inability to manage its debt led Standard Poor’s
Ratings Services in January to lower France’s triple-A debt
rating. 

Although France remains among the less-stricken economies in
Europe, the resiliency of its bureaucracies make it
impossible for the country to control the growth rate of public
spending. The European debt crisis has made dissolution of the euro
an attractive option for inflation-happy governments eager to
abandon the transnational movement and return to local
mismanagement and socialist immiseration. 

Although Sarkozy’s defeat is being depicted as a repudiation of
free-market economics, he was never a
particularly good friend
of the free
market.
He was, however, a reliably entertaining
political presence who may have slightly widened the scope of
allowable political opinion in France. This included his
introducing the cocktail of Carla Bruni into the mix of
international politics. Predictably, model/actress/singer Bruni is
now being blamed for his downfall. France24 denounces the outgoing
first lady as the “worm in Sarkozy’s mouldy apple,” while the Daily
Mail posts photos of Bruni looking “disheveled”
(i.e., still better put together than 90 percent of the population
of Planet Earth).