It is a measure of how low expectations have sunk that France’s Socialist Party (PS) is celebrating after winning scarcely more than a third of the seats in the country’s newly elected National Assembly. Pollsters had been forecasting electoral oblivion; instead, the PS merely received a drubbing at the hands of President Sarkozy’s victorious UMP.

In the near term, Sunday’s results are good for democracy: every government needs a strong opposition to hold it to account and curb its excesses. When parliamentary opposition is puny, critics are more likely to take to the streets instead.

Paradoxically, though, the Socialists’ relative success may harm their longer-term electoral prospects. Had the PS done disastrously badly, the pressure for reforming the party would have been overwhelming. The path would have been clear for it to follow in the footsteps of its counterparts in Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain and become a modern – and thus electable – social-democratic party, along the lines suggested by Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

There is still hope. But Sunday’s results risk fostering the delusion that an unreformed PS can win in 2012 and thus help the party’s dinosaurs to stifle much-needed change.

A Socialist ought to have been a shoo-in for the presidency this year. With President Chirac discredited after 12 years in office and the outgoing UMP government deeply unpopular, French voters were aching for a change. Yet it was Nicolas Sarkozy, a long-time minister in that administration, who seized the mantle of change, while Ségolène Royal stumblingly embodied the status quo.

The Socialists have not won a legislative election since 1997, a presidential one since 1988. The Left’s combined share of the vote in the first round of this year’s legislative election was its lowest since the Fifth Republic began in 1958.

It would be a big mistake to intepret the second-round bounce as a Socialist revival. More likely, it reflects voters’ second thoughts about granting UMP a crushing majority, combined with fears about the new government’s ill-timed and poorly explained proposal to hike VAT.

If the Socialists are to stand a chance of winning power again, they must embrace reform. The long-term health of French democracy depends on it. After the marginalisation of François Bayrou’s centrist Modem party, only a modernised Socialist Party can pose a viable alternative to the UMP.

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You have to give it to Greenpeace: their speedboat stunt at the G-8 summit was truly spectacular. If climate-change campaigners ever tire of trying to save the world, a lucrative career in Hollywood surely beckons.

But just as Tinseltown must conjure up ever-more dramatic special effects to capture jaded audiences’ attention, media-savvy protesters have become victims of their own success: high-jinks that only recently might have captivated viewers scarcely cause them to bat an eyelid these days. Greenpeace’s coup de théâtre this week is simply the exception that proves the rule.

Even violent protests do not have the impact they once had. When a WTO meeting turned into the Battle of Seattle back in 1999, many sensed a turning point: veteran campaigners felt rumblings of 1968, while a younger generation of revolutionaries dreamed that global capitalism might crumble as communism had done a decade earlier.

When a protester was killed by riot police at the G-8 summit in Genoa in 2002, the anti-globalisation campaign claimed its first martyr. But despite their scale and violence, the riots in Rostock last weekend had lost much of their power to shock.

The Iraq war is no doubt partly responsible, both because the anti-war movement has absorbed much of the energy that was once devoted to protesting against globalisation, and because it has inured people to seeing much worse carnage on the news each day.

But perhaps the biggest reason why people switch off during the now-ritual protests at the G-8 is that the protesters themselves never concede that they achieve anything useful.

For the second year running, I have been invited to participate on BBC World’s Have Your Say programme to discuss the G-8. Each time, the substance of the debate was not what the G-8 was doing but whether the G-8 served a purpose at all. And each time critics queued up to say that the G-8 was a pointless talking shop. Why, then, should people care about the protests?

Undeniably, the G-8 is flawed: Canada is a member but not China, Italy but not India; grand ambitions have to be watered down to reach a consensus; governments often do not follow through on what is agreed.

But the G-8 is not useless. If it did not exist, it would need to be invented.

It is surely helpful that Presidents Putin and Bush met and tried to defuse the growing tensions between Russia and NATO. It is important that G-8 governments reaffirmed their commitment to help Africa tackle AIDS. And by putting global warming at the top of the G-8 agenda, Germany’s Angela Merkel has successfully pressured President Bush in to taking the first step on the long road to a post-Kyoto agreement.

That is a bigger achievement than Greenpeace’s eye-catching, but ultimately vacuous, stunt.

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