<http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v416/n6883/full/416771a_fs.html>
The success of the extreme right in the first round of the French presidential elections serves as a warning to all responsible citizens — scientists included — not to disengage from the political process.
A cartoon on the front of Le Monde said it all: an airliner with the face of extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen crashing into twin towers labelled Jacques Chirac, the centre-right French president, and Lionel Jospin, the socialist prime minister. That the latter two men would defeat the 14 other candidates in the first round of France's presidential elections was regarded as a foregone conclusion. The news that Le Pen will run head-to-head against Chirac in the second round has rocked French society to the core.
Le Pen's strong showing does not mean that France is seriously flirting with government by the extreme right: the combined vote of the mainstream right and left will keep Le Pen from office, and hand victory to Chirac. Rather, the first-round results are the manifestation of a widening gap between the French people and its ruling political class. Turned off by a campaign in which neither mainstream candidate engaged in a meaningful debate on such issues as France's future in Europe, many citizens registered a protest vote for a minority candidate, or simply stayed at home.
The shock of finding Le Pen's name on the ballot paper for the second round presents both a danger and an opportunity. There is a risk that protests against Le Pen will spill over into violence, playing into the extremists' hands. More optimistically, the shock wave could shake France out of its slumber, and displace the uninspiring faces that have dominated the French political scene for three decades. The humiliated Jospin has already said that he will quit politics.
Needless to say, policies on science and innovation were largely absent from the electoral debate. Yet they are key to the economic and intellectual future of any modern country — and France's staid, bureaucratic and inefficient research system is in urgent need of attention. Today's scientific enterprise needs a flexible, highly mobile workforce. The French system, in which most scientists are civil servants who can spend their entire careers attached to one research unit, is ill-equipped to provide this. French science needs a postdoc system to encourage mobility between research groups; universities need a shake-up to encourage more productive interactions with the public research laboratories that they host, plus an injection of funds to free scientists from long teaching hours; and research labs need to be lifted from the treacle-like bureaucracy of French public administration.
Once Le Pen has been seen off, French researchers have everything to gain from re-engaging with the political process and putting science back on the agenda. Responsibility for science policy lies not with the president, but with the prime minister's government, and the parliamentary elections that will determine who forms that government will take place in June.
Recent governments of left and right have not served French science well. In the mid-1990s, the right slashed budgets. And while the socialists restored funding, they have let the underlying problems of French science rumble on. Jospin's first science minister, Claude Allègre, realized the need for reform, but his undiplomatic style and poorly thought-through plans delivered little beyond a series of rows with the organizations he was seeking to change. His successor, Roger-Gérard Schwartzenberg, has avoided such conflicts. But that is about the sum of his achievement.
France deserves better. The country's scientists should now play their part in putting in place a government that is up to the task of leading one of Europe's great nations in the twenty-first century.
===== Kevin Dean Buffalo, NY ICQ: 8616001 AIM: KDean75206 Buffalo Activist Network http://www.buffaloactivist.net http://www.yaysoft.com
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