Senior Fellow Newt Gingrich

It is time for some strong medicine for American conservatives and it does not get any stronger than this: if Republicans are going to have any chance of victory in 2008, they need to learn a thing or two from the French.

That's right. The French.

For Republicans in Washington, the election of Nicolas Sarkozy is significant not because he is a conservative but because he was a part of a deeply unpopular incumbent government. For those who are willing to learn, Mr. Sarkozy's win shows that it is possible to produce a decisive national decision in favour of more conservative reform when voters are faced with a choice between ideological failure on the left and bold solutions and bold leadership from a newly redefined right.

Going into the election, the parallels between the incumbent French government of President Jacques Chirac and that of President George W. Bush were hard to miss. Mr. Chirac, who had been twice elected to serve a total of 12 years in office, was very unpopular. Frenchmen were tired of the Chirac government. The contest was just what the 2008 contest in the U.S. is shaping up to be: a classic "change" election.

But the opposition on the left, the Socialist party, failed completely to capitalise on this desire for change. It nominated Segolene Royal, who proved herself to be the candidate of the status quo, not of change. Most significantly, Ms. Royal was committed to keeping all the bureaucracies that were failing and all the policies that were creating unemployment.

Still, with the incumbent conservative government so unpopular, the left would normally have been expected to win the election. But the conservative candidate, Mr. Sarkozy, won decisively because he is an aggressive, different kind of French political leader. He was able to overcome his association with the Chirac government by being a different kind of French politician. He proved himself as a tough, confrontational leader--a man who was not afraid to stand up to the French establishment that Mr. Chirac represented.

In the campaign, Mr. Sarkozy not only argued that the French have to work longer hours, he called for an incentive for them to do so: no taxes on wages earned from working overtime. Critically, he said the people must obey the law. Finally, he insisted that you could come to France if you wanted to learn to be French.

This might not sound like much to the American political ear, but in a country that routinely accepts the burning of up to 15,000 cars a year by hooligans who, according to the elites, are simply "expressing their desire to disrupt society," this was a jarring message. In a country that was very proud a few years back to have the first mandatory 35-hour work week in history, campaigning for tax breaks for overtime work was nothing less then transformational. The outcome of the contest proved that a majority of the French believe that without the kind of changes Mr. Sarkozy was calling for, France's stature and standard of living would disappear in a wave of lawlessness and economic decay.

As for the opposition in the French election, much like the U.S. Democratic party it is trapped by its commitment to big labour, big bureaucracy, high taxes and social values people do not believe in. Every time French voters seriously looked at Ms. Royal and the kind of politics she represented, she lost ground. The result was a surprising and powerful upset by Mr. Sarkozy--a victory by a centre-right reformer, a member of the unpopular ruling party, who came to personify change.

Here is where American Republicans really need to pay attention. In France, voting for change meant voting for the party in office, but not the personality in office. And voting to keep the old order meant voting for the opposition, not for the incumbent party.

If Republicans in the U.S. hope to win the presidency next year, they had better find a candidate who, like Mr. Sarkozy, is prepared to stand for very bold, very dramatic and very systematic change. Not only that, but they had better make the case that the leftwing Democrat likely to be nominated represents the failed status quo: the bureaucracies that are failing, the social policies that are failing, the high tax policies that are failing and the weakness around the world that has failed so badly in protecting the U.S.

As Margaret Thatcher would say: "You have to win the argument before you win the vote."

Newt Gingrich is a senior fellow at AEI.