“A New Deal or ‘Papandreouization’”
An interview with Emmanuel Todd
Emmanuel Todd, one of France’s most original social scientists, built his scholarly reputation on work tracing the influence of kinship systems and demographic patterns on political ideologies and social structures. A member of the French Communist Party as a youth, he became known to the broad public for his 1976 book The Final Fall, predicting “the disintegration of the Soviet sphere” based on a close reading of social and demographic trends in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Now housed at the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, he is a prominent commentator on French and international affairs. In this interview conducted in March, he offers his analysis of the current political moment in France on the eve of the May presidential election.
Seth Ackerman
In 2007, you described Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal as “candidates of the void.” Do you feel the same way today about Sarkozy and François Hollande?
Emmanuel Todd
Before describing the candidates, let’s describe the historic situation: In 2007, globalization was already looming, but the consensus among the elites of the Right as well as the Left was that, although it wasn’t pleasant, it was still manageable. Today, globalization is imploding, and the left-right equivalence along with it. Nevertheless, the notion of the void remains relevant in describing Sarkozy, with his fixation on money and his negation of France. His first term is summarized by its foreign policy: he went from alignment with Bush to submission to Merkel.
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