EDF is the state monopoly electricity company in France. It owns numerous private power companies around the world, especially in the UK. President Chirac proposes to keep EDF as a nationalized company at least until 2004 and to refuse foreign competition in France (the Socialists agree).
However, an interesting dissident is Nicolas Sarkhozy (Minister of the Interior and successful Mayor of the Paris suburb of Neuilly). He is reported as saying privately:
“I’m for the privatisation of EDF, but it’s not possible right now because we don’t know what it’s worth.”
The report appeared in Le Canard Enchaine, so it probably wasn’t an intentional leak on the part of the Minister.
One of the failings of the French libertarian/classical liberal politicians is that they don’t have a model for change that includes tackling unions and re-assuring voters about crime (most French libertarians talk of cutting public spending on police forces). What the ASI and Tim Evans refer to as “Micropolitics” and creating incentives for the bureaucrats to go along with reform is alien to French libertarians: they’re divided between executing them or sacking them without a pay-off.
Nicolas Sarkhozy is a conservative in a more Thatcherite mould: horribly compromising with corporatism at least 60 per cent of the time, but who also knows that the left is the common enemy.
It will take some sort of coalition between people like Sarkhozy and the French liberals to get reforms moving in France. The more I look at the French scene the more I feel the lack of a French Freedom Association and a French Adam Smith Institute. Their students could use a Paul Staines too.
