Politics and French Property

With an increase in the numbers of people wishing to abandon Britain because of the crisis and high-tail it to such places as France – lazing on the Riviera or tending vines in Burgundy – one wonders how the French property market will fare in the global turmoil.

Given the current nasty case of sterling-droop you will not be able to buy as much as before, unless the vendor is desperate to sell. And he probably will be. France brims with vast wrecks which need a fortune and will cost a bomb to run. Their owners have been desperate to sell for years but they haven’t been able to find anybody mug enough.

With sterling’s decline you’ll have to be content with buying just one crumbling chateau rather than two or three. It’ll probably be stuck in the middle of nowhere but what’s a thousand acres of mud to buyers of an insanely romantic bent? You might strike a good deal given that your chosen manoir has probably been on the market since Louis the 14th.

If you are thinking of doing a runner to France it would be wise to keep a close eye on the overall state of the economy and the extraordinary things which are happening to it.

When one looks at the dire state of the French economy – for years it’s been a joke in economic circles – it does seem oddly ironic that President Sarkozy has instructed the banks that if they do not stop behaving badly and begin lending again at sensible rates he will not hesitate to sack their management and bring them wholly under state governance.

Such actions are being mulled over by British politicians – and they are not all members of the far Left – who have lately been watching Sarkozy’s moves with great interest.

The French missed out on the Thatcher revolution. While self-serving trade unions,
over-manning and constant strikes in Britain were addressed and dealt with by the Iron Lady, such shenanighans continued to be tolerated by the French.

Then Sarkozy came to power selling himself as a pint-sized Thatcher: free enterprise was to be encouraged, the French economy freed up, liberated from the bind-weed of excessive trade union power; wild over-manning and restrictive practices would have to cease; national debt would be cut, state services pruned, the high tax regime reformed.

Sarkozy has had to moderate his tune because of recent global calamities. But his platform still makes for a curious mix: a politician elected on a strident free-enterprise ticket, intriguing in itself as France was – and many feel still is – fundamentally, in its marrow, a Socialist society – who is now toying with policies advocated by the Left.

So if you are thinking of becoming a householder in France take care and be inquiring. French red tape is still a nightmare. The tax system is still waiting for reform. Under Sarkozy reforms will happen if he’s given a fair chance. But like other leaders in Europe his hands are rather full at the moment trying to ensure the whole ship stays afloat.

If you want to start a business – say a bed and breakfast or converting a barn into a letting gite (wow! that’s original) or flogging property to fellow Brits (probably a bit of a dead loss in this climate) be warned. Talk to anybody who’s set up in France and most say the authorities treated them like aliens until their commercial and tax status was recognised.

There’s still something in the French character that feels people who want to be entrepreneurial and outside the provisions of state pensions and benefits are dodgy.
They don’t mean any real harm by it (though there is anti-British feeling in places colonised by Brits; the Dordogne springs to mind) It’s more to do, one suspects, with that innate sense of Socialism in France which still makes it quite different to Britain.

If Leftism could be applied in French finance – could it also, perhaps, be applied to property and its taxation? After all, that would only be reverting to France’s true political colours – and it would be ingenuous to think that the present crisis has not caused a serious second-look in France, Britain and elsewhere, at the ideologies of the Left.

The French as a nation have always been ‘political.’ It goes right back to the Revolution. They really care. Frenchmen – and not only intellectuals and intelligentsia - will sit and argue about politics for hours. All those little eateries in Paris, in Montmartre for instance, are abuzz with Sarkozy and his endeavours – and the effect Obama’s victory will have on French-American relationships in particular, and on the world in general.

Sweeping gains by Obama in the House of Representatives suggest that if not Leftism – certainly Liberalism – is back on the agenda with a bang. For British people imagining that life in France would be all best Burgundy and baguettes such profound changes in thinking and in the international psyche have taken on a new and vigorous pertinence.