SARKOZY

Well, what do you know. The French hold an election. It comes at a generational turning point in the history of the Fifth Republic. A war is raging in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Sudan and lapping the tonier shores of the Seine. A doddering old Gaullist is on his way out. A young and beautiful socialist is offered to les peuple. The French greet this situation with the highest turnout of voters in memory. Practically everyone goes to the polls. And whom do the French elect? Why, none other than George W. Bush himself.
That is an exaggeration, sans doute. But Nicholas Sarkozy's election is part of a pattern that puts an end to the "Old Europe" on which Secretary Rumsfeld once remarked, the Europe in which President Chirac sought an entente with Chancellor Schroeder to counterbalance Prime Minister Blair's Atlanticist ties. Mr. Sarkozy will join the new German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and Gordon Brown, who is poised to succeed Mr. Blair, as European leaders committed to a strong relationship with America. How are all those Democratic Party pinky-in-the-air U.N. admirers who wailed about Mr. Bush's alienating of Europe going to explain this turn of events? No doubt a victory by Ségolène Royal would have elicited an outpouring of talk about how Europe had just given a rebuke to the policies of the Bush administration. Mr. Sarkozy represents a "rupture," to use his own term, with Gaullism as it had come to be practiced by Mr. Chirac. The president-elect's default position on international affairs is not only not anti-American, but one could even call it pro-American. His views on Israel and the Arab world hearken back to the socialists of the Fourth Republic in the 1950s, who understood threats to France as emanating chiefly from the Arab world and viewed Israel as an ally.