French President Francois Hollande’s term expires in 14 months, but ammunition is starting to pile up in the succession fight. The way the French political situation appears today could be hastily summed up as on the Left. Hollande has reached new peaks of unpopularity, dragging down Prime Minister Manuel Valls. An overwhelming majority of the French people do not support Hollande’s inaction and do not trust him anymore. A majority of socialist voters are also jumping ship, not to mention the Left that already disappeared a long time ago. A general feeling has arisen that the Left results — and division — will not allow it to keep the presidency, and the dislocated moves to organise a socialist ‘primary election’ will do little to change it.
Hollande has not yet made an official announcement whether he will run again or not, but there are many clues that he will. He should not announce his decision before December, when he may have to explain how 700,000 additional unemployed people emerged during his term. On the Right side, competition is widening with a new contender for the Republicans ‘primary election’ every passing day — there are 12 to date!
Former prime minister Alain Juppe still keeps the lead, followed by former president Nicolas Sarkozy, former minister Bruno Le Maire and former prime minister Francois Fillon.
Paris-based self-proclaimed soothsayers have declared that “Sarkozy is finished”. Juppe would then be free to conquer the Elysee Palace and would team up with someone such as Francois Bayrou in a kind of German-type ‘social-democracy’ to conduct a ‘peaceful reforming wave’ — which in the French language often means no ‘serious’ reforms.
There are other scenarios: Juppe finally declining to run (as in the 1995 presidential race between Balladur and Chirac); a much younger Le Maire making the French finally realise he is so smart he can be the only man for the situation; or a more reformist Fillon rising from the ashes of a legally-destroyed Sarkozy. A true picture, actually, might be significantly more complex.
Stubborn public debt
A starting point commonly shared is the worrying development of the French economy: the stubborn public debt, which remains at the same levels though the public deficit has stabilised; an unemployment curve unabated and insufficient production, notably due to labour laws.
The previous attempts by Hollande to tackle the issue ended in the usual way: a lame compromise making everybody unhappy, as the open field surrenders to the ‘deprivation of nationality’ project. The so-called ‘Al Khomri’ project (named after the Labour Minister Myriam Al Khomri) was supposed to amend an obsolete and intricate working code and relax a series of constraints aimed at boosting employment. The result was a horde of students who had never worked, demonstrating against the proposed compensation they could get in case of job severance. Still, such behaviour is less astonishing than former Minister Martine Aubry’s, ‘Lady of the 35-hour’ working week. Aubry continues talking about a concept that any sensible economist long ago declared totally insane, and which was a major reason for the French industrial decline.
Despite the weakness of the euro versus the dollar, which is supposed to enhance exports; a low cost of energy, supposed to boost production; and a low level of interest rate, which usefully neutralises the effect of the public debt, France is treading water.
Yet, there is another relevant issue, beyond the security environment, that a Paris-based, limited caste of intellectuals and courtesans seems unable to consider: the way France is deeply changing through its territories (rural and city desertification) and its population, now divided between who works and who is assisted, with a related growing anxiety.
A particularly centralised Paris press with formatted journalists is hardly in a position to point fingers. It was the same in Versailles in spring 1789, when a population became overwrought and something might well have happened from behind the corner. Why indeed wouldn’t a populist party such as the National Front take advantage of the Left and Right paralysis?
Marine Le Pen has been rather quiet for the last months. In the context of a diluting Europe worsened by the security environment, why bother taking the effort to convince people when events speak for themselves? Analysts explain that the equal split between Left, Right and the National Front ultimately serves the Right. Ultimately, no voter casts the final vote thereby overflowing the glass.
The next French president, to be elected in May 2017, will implement actions, some of which will be difficult to reverse. It is hoped every French voter keeps this in mind. The alternative is to wake up the day after with a kind of headache nobody would wish on his worst enemy.
— Luc Debieuvre is a French essayist and a lecturer at Iris (Institut de Relations Internationales et Strategiques) and the Faco Law University of Paris.
