Le Defeat!

Okay my French is very limited, but the headline sounded funny. As Lee noted below, I applaud France for taking a few baby steps away from a socialist way of government. The socialist candidate Ségolène Royal was defeated by about six percentage points. The country is still basically a socialist republic, but new President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to move France in a direction that will allow employers more latitude about hiring and firing employees. This also was a protest vote about France's runaway immigration problem from what I've been reading. I'm actually going to link to a good column by EJ Dionne today about how a lot of countries lately have been voting out their "moderate" socialist governments(that's an oxymoron) in favor of more moderate semi-conservative ones. I still think Hillary's socialist agenda can win in the US in 2008 if we're not out of Iraq by then.