It is a disturbing mark that Segolene Royal enjoys little support from the media and politicians in the UK. Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be their preferred choice. Downing Street, unsurprisingly, is backing him: Tony Blair prefers the right as always — Silvio Berlusconi,

Jose Maria Aznar, Angela Merkel, George Bush.

Political consensus appears to be that only the right can sort out political problems. The preferred choice, thus, is either a party of the right or a party of the left led by a leader of the right. In this judgment, two criteria reign supreme. First, is the party or candidate prepared to adopt Anglo-American neoliberal economic principles? And second, are they willing to adopt a more pro-American foreign policy? It is no surprise that neoliberal thinking still

predominates.

The British Labour party under Blair embraced the central tenets of Thatcherism and has presided over an extremely long boom. It is rather hard to explain the continuing attachment to pro-Americanism at a time when US foreign policy stands discredited. Two European nations emerged with credit from the Iraq disaster: France and Germany. Both had the courage to withstand the Bush administration and oppose the US-led invasion.

Bush and Blair stand condemned by their own publics and face imminent political extinction. The ability of the French establishment, right and left, to think independently of the US for the past half-century is to be commended in contrast to the supine pro-Americanism that has long characterised British foreign policy thinking and which reached its nadir in 2003. In that same year, France led the opposition within the UN and refused to allow it to be used as a tool of Anglo-American policy. While the US and Britain were committed to the idea of a unipolar world, Chirac upheld the principle of a multipolar world.

France faces a very different choice in this election to the two preferred by the political consensus. With an ethnic minority community of a similar size to that in Britain, France can seek either to include them on a new basis or demonise them and blame them for the country’s problems - and build a new political majority with race at its core. The most dramatic expression of the former possibility was the multiracial French team that won the World Cup in 1998 and the extraordinary reception that it received in France. The polar opposite of that moment was Sarkozy’s condemnation of the riots in November 2005 as purely a criminal matter to be repressed by brutal force.

Western Europe is becoming diverse, especially France and Britain. That process will continue apace. The ability of our societies to embrace all races and cultures will be crucial to their future stability, security and success. The alternative is the “Sarkozy route”, which has all too many parallels elsewhere in Europe, not least in the Netherlands: repression, ghettoes, gated communities, rampant racism, the exclusion of ethnic minorities from mainstream society, a form of low-level civil war. — The Guardian