Jacques Faizant would have captured it perfectly! Were the great cartoonist still with us – and had he deigned to turn his talent to yet another presidential campaign, having covered them all since the inception of the Fifth French Republic in 1958 – he might well have depicted his impish ‘Marianne’ bikini-clad in the pose of a seaside siren on the Côte d’Argent, contemplating the waves while a lovelorn lifeguard bearing a strong resemblance to Nicolas Sarkozy gently but persistently puts the question: ‘What’s it to be then, sweetheart?’

In a democracy, every election is a moment of truth for a nation. Despite what too many candidates, most of the pollsters and much of the press might think, an election is by no means a beauty contest: it is about choosing a pilot. And what lies ahead on the flight we are about to board is not exactly a clear blue sky.

Entre nous it’s time to tell it like it is. We have fallen behind. We have squabbled and we have prevaricated. We have seized on the first available pretext for failing to respond to developments. The world is changing before our eyes and all we can say is ‘Hang on a minute. Don’t harass us!’ In the face of rising unemployment, some bright spark came up with the idea of paying ourselves more for less work, so of course we gave it a go! The USA and the UK are out-performing us but it’s all down to nasty Anglo-Saxon ultra-liberalism and we don’t want any of that, thank you very much! As for the Chinese economic boom – well, what do you expect if they pay their workers peanuts?

How many times since 1981 have we opted for the presidential candidate who could most eloquently diagnose our condition, while prescribing the easiest and most painless treatment? Should we now be surprised, therefore, after repeatedly applying sticking plasters, to find we have a badly infected wound? What began as an economic plight, then turned into social breakdown, has become a full-blown national crisis, and we can no longer pretend to ignore it.

We can no longer turn a blind eye to the fact that, while all this has been happening, other countries – not just in Asia or across the Atlantic, but right next door in Europe – have doggedly battled through and have ultimately succeeded, where we have merely feigned success.

At the end of the 1970s the UK, stuck in a rut after 20 years of Labour bureaucracy, decided to get back to work. Mrs Thatcher initiated and came to symbolise the renewal, but what is truly remarkable is that Tony Blair has been pursuing the selfsame economic policy for the past 10 years: he has had no hang-ups about doing so and the result speaks for itself – the UK has overtaken France.

In the early 1980s the Netherlands was crippled by the oil crisis. Then, in 1982, employers, workers and parties of both Left and Right concluded a historic agreement in Wassenaar, prioritising competitiveness and jobs, even at the cost of a temporary wages freeze. Average earnings in the Netherlands today are 25% ahead of those in France, and the country has a trade surplus close to that of China!

With the collapse of the USSR, Finland lost its major market and within two years the national income had slipped by15%. When the country joined the EU in 1995 it was on its knees. Just five years later, in 2000, per capita income in Finland had outstripped that of France. The Finns had completely refocused their trade towards the west, abandoned old forms of production in favour of new technology – Nokia’s global success being the shining example – and made their education system, at both primary and secondary level, the best in the world.

Twenty years ago we used to feel rather sorry for Spain, with its unemployment rate twice our own. In the last decade, however, Spain has created 6.5 million jobs: more than France, Germany and Italy combined! Spanish groups are buying up English airports, Scottish gas companies, American banks and even some Chinese ones. For the past two years, Spain’s unemployment rate has been lower than that of France and it is still falling.

As for poor old Ireland, when it joined the EEC in 1973 it had the lowest revenue in all of Europe. Its young people were leaving for London and New York in order to escape poverty. But then the pride of the Irish began to stir. For 15 years now the Emerald Isle has had a growth rate similar to that of China, and it tops the league table for investment in new technologies. In 1998 its per capita wealth overtook that of France, and in 2002 it outstripped Denmark. Low and behold, Ireland has now become the EU’s richest country: not only is it holding on to its own keen young workforce but it is also attracting top-flight technical personnel from Europe and the USA.

And what of Germany? We took consolation for many years from the fact that our own halting growth rate was at least superior to the snail’s pace of our largest neighbour. The effort that Germany invested in reconstructing the former GDR defies the imagination: over 18 years it devoted an annual 4% of its GNP to the task. Having succeeded, it then turned its attention to revitalising ageing industries – and while we have been grumbling about the strong euro hitting our export trade, Germany has clawed back its position as the world’s leading exporter, well ahead of both the USA and China.

As all this was going on, we made it a point of honour – in the name of the glorious ‘French exception’ – not to study the methods working so well elsewhere, even though we lacked the courage to forge a new path of our own. The results are damning. In 2006, within the European Union, France ranked 26th out of 27 on growth, 26th out of 27 on unemployment, 26th out of 27 on tax and social security deductions, 27th out of 27 on length of the working week, 24th out of 27 on jobs for the over-60s, and not much better on youth unemployment!

The message from these figures is the same one illustrated by the example of other countries and by our own successes in the past, the same one shouted from the crisis-stricken streets of our urban ghettos and known to all those of our fellow citizens who quietly struggle through from day to day: it all comes down to courage and willpower. So let’s stop deluding ourselves! We are in a deep hole and we need more than placebo politics, more than soothing words and spoonfuls of syrup for every ill, and more than idealistic appeals to forget our differences.

When asked recently by an English newspaper to comment on the election campaign, the non-aligned mayor of a small French town with a knack of mirroring national voting patterns had this to say: ‘Several of the candidates have prepared good campaigns, but Nicolas Sarkozy is the only one who has prepared himself to govern France today.’

So come on, Marianne. What’s it to be, sweetheart?

Alain Lamassoure, 10 February 2007