France's fringe take the Pyongyang option

Kim Il Jong doesn't know this but the facts of life are liberal. A country can't buck markets or isolate itself from globalisation. If it does it will, as George Walden put it on Saturday, slowly vegetate. So Nicolas Sarkozy's reasonable poll leading is a relief. But look at this: some 9% of the electorate voted for the Pyongyang suicide option by backing Besancenot, Laguiller, Buffet, Schivardi and Bove, a motley collection of Trots, Communists and hard-leftist anti-globalisers. I know that most people will find it utterly disturbing that 10% backed Jean-Marie Le Pen; I however find it just as gruesome that a similar number of voters supported that tested-to-destruction, bloodstained, braindead ideology of Communism. The Trots need to read this article and go see The Lives of Others.

If we accept that Sarkozy, Royal and Bayrou are members of the reality-based community (I have doubts about the latter two), it still means that a quarter of the French electorate decided to take a holiday from reality and set their face against the liberal facts of life. No wonder France is in trouble.

Robbie Millen

Comments

[David Moss]

What about us, we free market persons, with our belief in an invisible hand? Is that rational?

Not to mention buying lottery tickets and reading horoscopes.

The French tried hard, harder than us, to elevate reason to the point of being worshipped. It didn't work. Just ask Robespierre.

They got the vote out yesterday. Let's see what we manage on 3 May.