Monsieur Hollande

Gerhard Schroeder Dept: Did he really mean it? Had the vanilla pudding candidate gone radical? Bond traders worried, driving up the price of French debt in anticipation. A stark cover of The Economist warned of The rather dangerous Monsieur Hollande. , according to Globe and Mail. Now he was talking a kind of socialism that seemed to have skipped the market-friendly reforms of the 1990s entirely and returned to the earnest postwar years of government-mandated employment and central-planned projects, to the Mitterrand years of nationalized industries and banks, of central-planned state projects, of a decidedly chilly relationship with the Anglo-American powers of the Cold War and from the man who is very likely to become the next French president when votes are counted Sunday night, this was a seemingly radical statement, suggesting a repeat of the jarring regime change France experienced in 1981, when the country became something of an ideological island. Diplomats and foreign politicians scratched their heads. Only the previous year, when Mr. Hollande emerged from the Socialist Party backroom to seize the leadership amid the sex scandal engulfing the party s popular reformer, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, they had declared him a reform-minded moderate, a compromise seeker, a figure sometimes likened to Tony Blair or Gerhard Schroeder, the centre-left leaders who had blended a free market with social investments in Britain and Germany at the turn of the century. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.