Having in sum insured his intellectual supremacy

The financial storm swept away the beautiful assurance of the French right. It appears below the time where the leaders of the majority could boast of having carried on the left a triple victory: that of the values, ideas, projects. Having, in sum, insured his intellectual supremacy. Before the summer, right exultait occupying master the ideological ground left for two decades to the left. The Prime Minister, François Fillon, could openly claim this "victory" - here. In fact, one year after the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, success seemed consumed, judging by the impressive series of emblematic reforms without causing more reaction on the part of the social body anything like, in any case, with the emotion has to re-entry, 2008, by the Edvige file: incitement to "work more to earn more" through fiscal overtimeconversion of the tax on capital investment in SMEs, quasi-suppression of the rights of succession, autonomy of universities, establishment of a minimum service in transportation, special reform of pension and, even, amendment of the rules of Trade Union representativity and the conditions of validation of the agreements.

Regardless of that, in practice, some leave a taste of the unfinished, is that all acted as ideological markers, estimated in the majority. Add to this the failure of the mobilizations against the unravelling of the 35-hour, and you understand that, facing a full fog left, the head of State could, beginning of July, be judged in a position to mock on these strikes, "person in France only sees" more. Fanfare Much more than that, the expression of a strong conviction, to a profound break at work in French society. In the text of the motion for the Socialist Congress of Reims, the Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë sees also the "gloating to see the relative weakness of social movements and the absence of political opportunity to challenge, the morgue of an arrogant right satisfied to win the ideological battle against us".

What is it First victory of an "ethical" own Nicolas Sarkozy, who takes place cement in a program to the muddled ideological lines. This ethic is based on rather conservative references such as labour, merit and responsibility, supposed to oppose a culture of assistance, acquired rights and laissez-faire. But the intellectual influence of the right, until the crisis was, also, décomplexé liberalism, assumed the name of "modernity". Certainly not without contradictions and complexities. During his presidential campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy quite cloven "financial capitalism", "walking on the head", that "speculators rather than entrepreneurs" to be, a posteriori, suspected of opportunism in his critique of the origins of the crisis. Since his election, he was shown enough statist for example in marrying Suez to gas of France or even by entrusting the monitoring of the competition authority to powers but clearly placed under the responsibility of Bercy for not to deny completely in speaking today at the heart of the banking system. But Nicolas Sarkozy too placed at the heart of his project and, sometimes, but not always, its action the creation of wealth prior to redistribution, the competitiveness of enterprises, lower taxes and control of public spending for not reconciled liberalism, whether be social, with the right.

The first Secretary of the Socialist Party, Francois Hollande, does there not erred, which launched in the majority, Wednesday, October 8, during the parliamentary debate on the financial crisis: "indeed, which collapsed today, it is a part of what you call the ideological battle, i.e. economic liberalism". Jean-Marc Ayrault, President of PS members supported the same analysis: "we had the impression that the ideas of left, regulation, were beaten in the face and that liberalism had won the battle of ideas; "today, this page is turned." The crisis is not only financial, economic, or social, she is also ideological. And, from this point of view, it forced the two camps to reinvent itself.

To the right, for more than a year, much drove the lands of left up to him borrow the principles of the reform of the audiovisual and those of the revenue of active solidarity, the prospect is indeed not virtual could lose part of its identity. Nicolas Sarkozy has argued, as he did on 25 September in Toulon, that "the financial crisis is not that of capitalism", but that of his excesses, the majority in power is indeed forced to rebalance suddenly his vision of the intervention of the State on the market. And this is measured already to the reaction of the "liberal" more difficult to unify the majority that did the presidential project of 2007 in which each could be found.

For a majority now deprived of its ideological victory, the risk is also to be confined in the handler function that was its specificity before intellectual molt started on the rubble of the Socialist defeat in 2002. Fortunately for her, tenors of the PS, which had been the last few months most path to economic liberalism, deserted the ground at high speed. The market economy "The debate is behind us," wrote Bertrand Delanoë before the summer in his book-"the audacity". After the summer, he returned to.