With around 300,000 French residents, London has become the sixth-largest French city
It is a strange fact of political life in France that London has become a major campaign stop in a presidential election. If it was important for Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, it is even more important for François Hollande, who was in town yesterday. It is not just that there are now 102,470 French voters registered in the UK or that the number of French people living in Britain has risen every year since 1991. With around 300,000 French residents, London has become the sixth-largest French city. Nor is it that they are all traders who ply their cut-throat trade before the very altar of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, the City.
The majority are below the age of 40; there are more women than men; and one third work in the public sector, particularly education. These are the voters any future president has to attract. Hollande, the Socialist party candidate and frontrunner in the presidential race, was not on enemy turf yesterday in London, although expats generally vote for the right in their homeland. He was certainly addressing a wider audience, but one that has had every reason to be as jaundiced about Sarkozy's erratic, ego-fuelled rule as their compatriots at home. On the themes Hollande chose to address, a Europe that can provide jobs, growth and opportunity for the young, he preached to the converted.
Hollande had a little surprise up his sleeve this week, not least for his own team. Stung by the news that the average income of the directors of companies listed on the CAC 40 had risen by 34%, Hollande announced that he would impose a marginal tax rate of 75% on those earning more than €1m a year. The proposal, which would apply to only 0.01% of taxpayers, would raise relatively small amounts of money, but it is surely a better statement of intent than stripping bankers of their knighthoods. And what better platform from which to attack Sarkozy as the president of the rich?
Sarkozy is meanwhile trying to reinvent himself as the president of the people, talking up the perils to France of the euro crisis in his opening campaign speech in Marseille, and claiming personal responsibility for averting an economic catastrophe. This could still prove to be boggy ground on which to pitch his tent, with demonstrations growing in France and across Europe about the austerity programme Sarkozy and Angela Merkel have bound themselves to. Sarkozy still has to travel rightwards, to steal as many votes as he can from Marine Le Pen, before he can return in the second round to the centre ground from which Hollande will not, despite the rhetoric, stray. In all of these manoeuvres, Sarkozy's biggest problem is his past record as president. He is literally having to struggle with himself, and to win would still be a stunning reversal of his declining political fortunes. Hollande has been the frontrunner for so long in the polls (the gap may have started to close for the first round, but in the second round Hollande still retains a 14-point lead) that it is almost as if Sarkozy cherishes the role of underdog.
The campaign has got dirty, and will get increasingly so as Sarkozy sees that the only way he can get through is to blacken the name of his chief challenger. But the stakes in this election go further than France. They could only speak to each other through an interpreter when they met yesterday, but Ed Miliband has much to learn from Hollande, who is more charismatic, a better speaker, and has more experience controlling a fractious party.
A victory for Hollande, who has vowed to renegotiate the fiscal pact agreed with Germany, would mean Europe's second-biggest economy moving away from austerity and towards a policy of promoting growth. It will not be easy as Hollande, if elected, would still have to find €100bn in the next five years to plug the deficit. France has the highest levels of public spending in Europe and unemployment is at a 12-year high. Hollande's importance to Britain and Europe is the promise of a new approach. Even if it turns out to be too cautious, the "element" of change he talked of yesterday would still be welcome.