Europe's Right in Disarray

"Much can change in five years. In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy, a man who forged his reputation as a dynamic no-nonsense Interior Minister, was viewed by many as France's best chance in a generation to break away from the country's hyper-interventionist economic policies and the left's suffocating monopoly of French cultural life. Now, however, Sarkozy has been discarded by France's electorate in favor of one of the driest socialist career-politician apparatchiks ever to ascend to high office in Europe."