--Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

Yesterday, France voted massively for change; the right kind of change.

The French people elected conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy with the best score since de Charles de Gaulle, a historic score on a historic turnout. Nicolas Sarkozy waged a strongly right-wing campaign, talking tough on everything from delinquents to idle welfare recipients, to immigrants who make no effort to integrate, to taxes to the 35-hour work week.

Any observer of French politics would have called him crazy for campaigning the way he did. He doesn't just think the French should get back to work; he said it! He doesn't just think, like everyone who has had to deal with them, that youth who steal and mug are scum; he said it! Only a year ago such talk would have been unthinkable for any mainstream candidate. He would have been pilloried by the left-leaning media and cognoscenti, deemed unseemly to be associated with, and thrown in the dustbin like so many others. Yet not only did Nicolas Sarkozy talk tough, he never apologized for it.

In other words, this election has been significant because Nicolas Sarkozy, unlike conservative-in-name-only Jacques Chirac, was the first credible candidate in about 25 years to run on a truly conservative platform, and that strategy has been vindicated with a landslide win. This election has been significant because I wasn't even born when Jacques Chirac ran for president for the first time, and finally he leaves politics for good. And oh yes, this election has been significant because all candidates have invested heavily in new technologies.

In short, this election has been significant because politics here will never be the same again.

Yesterday night, I lived a little bit of history. And I know it's only the beginning.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is the secretary general of Impulsion Concorde, France's premier right of center think tank for students and young professionals. He is also the editor of its influential blog, impulsionleblog.com. He lives in Paris, where he attends law school at Pantheon Assas University.