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Thread: French-German Border Shapes More Than Territory

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[quote=XIAOBAIHE,460735]If re-elected, Mr. Sarkozy proposes a national referendum to approve a more flexible labor market, featuring a German-style apprenticeship. He wants to allow more part-time work, like the Germans, and to subsidize more jobs for youth and raise the value-added tax to reduce the cost of social-welfare charges for employers, as the Germans do, too.

His Socialist opponent, François Hollande, rejects most of those ideas, preferring more traditional Socialist responses like more state spending on education and job creation. Many French admire the Germans but do not want to emulate them.

“We appreciate their rigor and discipline, but that’s not all there is in life,” said Alexandre Boer, 52, who works here in Sélestat with young people facing long-term unemployment. “We’re not in 1945 anymore. That was also the German model.”

Mr. Sarkozy and Mrs. Merkel have had a strained relationship, but it has improved markedly in the pressure cooker of the euro crisis, and Mrs. Merkel once had plans to campaign for him. But she appeared to back off recently when it seemed that her open support might hurt Mr. Sarkozy more than help, by wounding French pride and making him look like a supplicant.

Nevertheless, Mr. Sarkozy is betting that the problems in the French economy, where youth unemployment is 23 percent nationwide and exports are declining, are so profound that voters will overcome their deep-seated reluctance and be more receptive to at least a variation on the German model. But it is not always clear what that would entail, and whether the French would ever stand for it.

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