Anyone who spends time in Paris comes away wondering why Parisians are so miserable. The capital city with the lowest smiles-per-hour ratio got gloomier during this election. I’ve lived here 10 years, and I’m a political junkie, but my overriding image of the campaign is of sour Parisians trudging past torn election posters in the rain.
The politicians all speak to French native pessimism. They ritually promise “to protect” the French from foreign capitalists, or from immigrants, or in the case of Nicolas Sarkozy, from both. The socialist François Hollande, who will probably beat “Sarko” in Sunday’s run-off, says: “Between protecting the privileged and protecting the children of France, I have made my choice.” Why are the French so scared and miserable?
At a glance, things aren’t bad. The world’s most visited country has a nice work-life balance, high productivity per hour, decent grub, oodles of foreign investment and trains that run on time. The average citizen lives to be 81. Oh, and France has what Adam Gopnik calls “the most beautiful commonplace civilization there has ever been”. Admittedly government debt is 86 per cent of gross domestic product, but that’s barely above Germany’s.