Vive le France!

Yesterday, the French had the first round of their presidential elections and there's a lot of things to like about the French political system.

In France, the winner of the popular vote becomes president as opposed to the cumbersome electoral college system that gave the election to a second-place finisher like George Bush in 2000 and almost did the same thing again with Kerry in 2004.

Presidential run-off are another good idea. Whatever the outcome of the Sarkozy/Royal run-off, France will have a president who gets a majority of the votes in the second round. To the contrary, the U. S. has had several recent elections where the winner did not get a majority of the votes (1992, 1996, 2000). American presidents would have more democratic legitimacy if we also had a presidential run-off.

The substance of French politics is even better. French conservatives are more to the left than the Democrats while the Socialists are a genuine left-wing party. Like most European countries, France skews much more to the left than the United States. At the same time, there were major political candidates from the right and the center. Thus, everyone in France had a real choice and everyone had a real reason to vote. Maybe that's part of the reason why 84% of eligible voters voted in France compared to the 60% peak in the U. S. That makes France a much more democratic and representative government than the U. S.

Not that I would want the French to invade us in order to bring "real democracy" to this country.

One more thing. The French right clocked in at 11% of the vote and looks to be a declining force as Jean-Marie Pen gets into his upper seventies. Right-wing politics in France has never recovered from the double blow of right-wing collaboration with the Nazis during WWII and the brutal, pointless colonial war in Algeria.

Unfortunately, it's probably going to take more than our embarrassing failure in Iraq to take the American right down that low.

But we can always dream.