Bernard Girard analyzes the Sarkozyan ouverture on his blog this morning. For those who don't read French, here is a summary of his argument. Why, Girard asks, has Sarkozy's ouverture succeeded where others have failed? The usual explanations--personal ambition of Socialists wanting to enter government, crisis of Socialist Party, tactical skill of Sarkozy--are all unsatisfactory, because politicians are always ambitious, the PS with 47 percent of the vote is not as terminally ill as some think, and Mitterrand was no less skilled than Sarkozy but failed at the same game. Instead, he proposes a diminution of the difference between left and right, so that crossing the boundary is no longer as unthinkable an act of treachery as it once would have been. So the question then becomes, Why has the boundary been blurred?
For Girard, the left is not defined, as BHL would have it, simply as "republican, laïc, anti-racist, and anti-colonialist." It also has to be "on the side of the popular classes, those who work, suffer, are exploited and alienated." What has changed therefore has to be sought in the popular classes themselves.
Girard begins this part of his analysis by asking why a significant fraction of the popular classes voted for the Front National. He prefers a "rational voter" explanation and finds it in a protectionist reading of the FN slogan "Les Français d'abord," which he reads not as a racist rejection but as a protest against outsourcing, capital outflows, etc. He then offers a tripartite typology of the popular classes: those who benefit from globalization, those who suffer from it, and immigrant workers (an increasingly large share of this social category), whose chief problem is not globalization but discrimination. Because of this fragmentation of the popular classes, Girard believes that the left has had difficulty formulating a unified message that makes sense to all three constituencies.