Equality

An election has relegated the French president to the attic of the Fifth Republic. The dominos are still falling among those who happened to be in power when the recession hit. Could the same thing happen in November to Obama in the United States, where hope has given way to disillusionment? Monsieur Normal, with his colorless look of a Scandinavian prime minister, has revived the hopes of social democratic parties in Europe, who in him behold (or is it a mirage?) the end of the drought. Will the colorless Romney be the calm force that prevents Obama’s reelection?

Hollande has only needed to promise a change in the style of governing, and a new sort of realism in Europe, to form a front of rejection to an EU that only speaks German. The new president, like Rajoy, has looked away from the severity of the crisis and spoken nebulously of new growth, without overly heavy sacrifices, for a France still satisfied with itself. Is this a familiar message? He speaks of a market-correcting social-democratic state, whose mission it is to show that it can do more than manage budgetary rigor with some measure of social sensitivity, belying the shameless, cynical assertion that left and right, united in running the system, are an unbeatable combination.

Two days before the mob stormed the Bastille, Louis XVI is said to have asked La Rochefoucauld: “Is it a revolt?” “No, sire, a revolution.” What happened in France on May 6 is in no way revolutionary, though people may feel it is, in the bipolar heritage they have in France. It is not like the arrival of the Popular Front in 1936, or of Mitterrand in 1981. Yet, together with the elections in Greece, it increases the uncertainties in the EU, and brings the cradle of democracy nearer to an exit from the euro. Europe is under the pressure of extremes, with echoes of the Weimar Republic as the populist extreme right gains a parliamentary voice. If the traditional parties, the last firewall, fail, or co-opt the extremist line, as Sarkozy did, then what is left?

With the suggestion of opening the Keynesian public faucet, even in homeopathic doses, forcing a reluctant Germany to loosen its grip, France and the EU align themselves with the US. Merkel stands in the way of a European New Deal, the massive public investments used by Roosevelt to mitigate the Depression — of which Obama attempted a pale replica early in his mandate, and can now claim that he prevented a worse recession by bailing out the banks and the motor industry.

Sluggish economic recovery and stubborn unemployment in the US may complicate Obama’s reelection. He has to prevent the election from being a plebiscite on his service record. Romney, who has already called on the whole right wing, including the Tea Party to unite, driven by gut rejection of a black president, will try hard to produce this referendum on a president burdened with a $1.3-trillion budget deficit. Deficits matter: even a superpower cannot live beyond its means. Obama hopes to wrest the center from the Republicans, playing the champion of the middle classes against the “thinly veiled social Darwinism” of his adversaries — led by a risk-capital entrepreneur who confuses a country with a company, determined to annul the states as social equalizer, and to see to it that secretaries go on paying more taxes on their wages than executives on their assets.

In a search for clear options, Obama has sounded a trumpet: “It’s equality, stupid!” In just a few words: “I think that same-sex couples should be able to get married,” he provoked Romney’s answering call for a constitutional amendment to enshrine intolerance. A narrow majority of Americans approve of same-sex marriage. Obama, accused of lack of audacity by his own partisans, has emerged from the closet of prejudices, in what the New York Times has called “the greatest civil rights battle of our time.”