Laurent Girard-Claudon
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The French diaspora isn't waiting. Emigrés are voting with their feet, and that has turned them into an election issue: almost 1 million of them have registered to vote in the two rounds, on April 22 and May 6, more than double the number in the last presidential election in 2002. Royal's Socialist Party briefly mooted whether to institute a tax on French who move abroad, but soon dropped the idea. For his part, Sarkozy staged a boisterous election rally in London in January, a first for a French presidential candidate, and urged the crowd of about 2,500 expats to return. "We need your work, your intelligence, your imagination and your enthusiasm," Sarkozy said, adding, "Seeing France from the outside, you can better see its defects and its weaknesses — and they are all the more unbearable for you ... But all over the world, I want the French to be proud again of France!"
Pride is one thing; reputation is quite another. The question of whether a new French President will be able to restore France's luster for this generation of exiles is a critical one — for those who have stayed as much as for those who have left. Interest in the campaign is running high in France itself, and many émigrés are following it closely. Jozan, the M.B.A. student in London, believes the stakes are significant. "The question is, do we have another five years' delay or do we take the bull by the horns and confront the big issues?" he asks. "It's fine to debate, but France needs a leader. It needs to adjust to a new world. If it wants to be competitive, it needs to move."
Others, looking home, see signs that make them hopeful. Olivier Pourquié, a scientist who moved from Marseille to Kansas City, Missouri, five years ago, is pleased that a younger generation of politicians is finally taking power in France. "Whoever is elected, it will mean an end to the gerontocracy. It's time to move to something more dynamic," he says. Pourquié left France out of frustration with the rigid state-funded scientific establishment — and because the American lab where he now works, the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, offered him a package of pay and perks that was four times what he was receiving back home. Yet he and his French wife are bringing up their young daughter bilingually and, he says, "I would come back as soon as I could. My country is France." First, though, "whatever government comes to power will have to do something quite dramatic to change the spirit."
Exit this way
Why have so many headed for the big door marked Sortie? France's gummed-up labor market is a key reason. Youth unemployment of 22% is easily one of the highest in Europe, both east and west, and it's not just school leavers with few or no qualifications who can't land a job. More than 7% of French university graduates in their late 20s are unemployed — one of the worst records in the European Union and about 50% higher than the E.U. average. Moreover, many of the jobs that are available to young people, even highly skilled ones, tend to be short-term and poorly paid. That's a consequence of a skewed labor market, which provides so much protection to full-time employees that firms are reluctant to hire people for anything other than temporary positions.
When biomedical researcher Keren Bismuth returned to France last year after completing the research for her doctorate at the U.S. government's prestigious National Institutes of Health in Maryland, one of the inconveniences she found was being put onto a series of three-month contracts rather than a permanent one. Finding work in London, Dublin, Montreal and other foreign cities, by contrast, seems much easier. Vladimir Cordier, an unemployed French graduate, got a job within five days of arriving at London's Waterloo Station on a one-way Eurostar ticket, and was so elated that he even wrote a book about his experience in 2005. Its title: Finally, a Job!