What Does the French Election Mean for French Stamps

Francois Hollande just beat Nicolas Sarkosy for the French presidency. Such political events do have philatelic repercussions though not in the way that most collectors think. It doesn’t matter much in the short run who is the President of France when evaluating the effect on the market for French stamps in the United States. The policies of the two leaders may be very different (or they may not be), but it will take years before the economic impact trickles through to the philatelic market. What does matter though is publicity. Had Sarkosy won, as an incumbent, the story would have gotten little press and soon been forgotten. But Holland is a Socialist, running against a Conservative and though the terms mean something quite different in France than they do in the United States, this election will be big news for a few days. And it is the news aspect of the story rather than what really happened that will have philatelic impact. The market for stamps is thin. Sure it looks to us like there are lots of French lots for sale on EBay all the time, But, if a few thousand general collectors turn to the France pages of their albums and decide to fill them this month because of the increased visibility of France in the news, those France lots will be mopped up in no time into collections, where they won’t be seen again on the market for decades. We have seen this phenomena recently with the stamps of Greece as a result of their constant economic travail, and we saw this with Japan and the nuclear reactor incident and Indonesia and the tsunami. News drives interest. Now if we could just get some interesting news developments at the UN.

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