Dartblog

I called up the BBC World Service homepage to see news of the French presidential election and, viewing this article about the ongoing voting, was struck by the lead paragraph.

France is reporting record turnout as voters choose between socialist Segolene Royal and conservative Nicolas Sarkozy for their next president.

It struck me as oddly disjointed. On the one hand, you’ve got a socialist candidate. And on the other… a conservative? That does not make much sense, given the policies of the two candidates. It is true that one of the adjectives that might describe Segolene Royal is socialist, and one that might describe Nicolas Sarkozy is conservative. But once you’ve established one candidate as the socialist, then the laissez-faire small-government alternative is best referred to as liberal, not conservative.

I imagine that is a lingual exportation of America’s; we remain one of the only places in the world where politics takes place entirely within the demesne of liberalism. That’s why we can point at one man—John Kerry—and call him a liberal and another—George Bush—and call him a conservative. We are already agreed that both are liberals in the basic sense of the word. In France, there is no such common ground. Illiberalism not only exists, but is quite popular. Since that is the case, it seems that the BBC would do best by referring to Ms. Royal as the socialist and Mr. Sarkozy as the liberal.