Is France walking on its head? The French maybe not, but their political elite, surely. The continued slide of French President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in opinion polls, which have seen their popularity tumble down to unprecedented levels, would confirm there has been not a day when they didn’t try to do worse than the day before.
Every field of governance looks like a nightmare, and fiscal issues take the lead. Everyone paying more taxes, including the so-called ‘lower middle class’ that was supposed to be spared. The old saying has become truer than ever: ‘Too much taxes kill taxes’. Despite the amazing hikes, less money is going into state coffers. Consumers spend less, decreasing indirect fiscal receipts for the state. Some highly paid executives and bright young individuals are fleeing, which is never good. More importantly, enterprises have stopped investing, because they do not know what their tax treatment will be and as a result, unemployment is on the rise.
Former president Nicholas Sarkozy was rightly accused of having one new fiscal idea everyday, whereas Hollande promised he would settle the matter for good. But the French are still waiting. Meanwhile, there is increasing nervousness about the fiscal pressure; especially when the government shows it doesn’t seriously consider the only workable alternative route, which is reducing current state spending.
On the security side, the least one can say is that the situation is not improving either. Sarkozy talked a lot and delivered little. Hollande doesn’t even talk. He leaves it to his Minister of Interior, Manuel Valls, who logically became the preferred minister for a large majority of French people. Valls does what he can but at least, he calls a spade a spade. It allowed him not to be humiliated as Hollande was just last week in public by an arrogant, barely literate Romanian teenager, to whom French immigration law had been applied strictly.
On TV, Hollande put on a dramatic show that even his staunchest followers found hard to support, including the French Socialist Party first secretary, who openly criticised the president. This pathetic episode will need more than four freed hostages to make people change their mood.
As to the other fields, credibility is not there either: See Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius recently declaring about Syria that “70 per cent of the territory was in the hands of the Free Syrian Army”. See Minister of Justice Christine Taubira insisting on a new law that even fellow socialists think will harm everybody but criminals — she anyway has now become so arrogant that she will not listen to anyone.
As for the alliance of Hollande with the Greens (their candidate got around 3 per cent of the vote in last presidential election), nobody understands why the political blackmail goes on, with so poor result. In the end, nobody it seems to listen anymore to Hollande, but America’s National Security Agency.
All that could just be another phase of French political life, and the first signs of a forthcoming alteration that would emerge next year with local and European elections. Yet, the thing is to know who benefits from Hollande’s troubles.
Obviously, not the moderate right. There are a few good reasons for that. First, the presence of Sarkozy pollutes the debate. He made his camp lose the presidency, the National Assembly and the Senate, but he wants to come back; his fans also want him back whereas many others just can’t stand him — and listening to him, one may guess they won’t change.
UMP party leader Jean-Francois Cope doesn’t cut it: why would one buy a copy when an original is on offer? Former premier Francis Fillon, beyond recent dangerous comments, still didn’t create enough momentum. Another former premier, Alain Juppe would be preparing himself — as he has been doing for the past 20 years.
As for the Centrists, they are as usual looking out for themselves.
This is where Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing National Front, comes in. She has been in ambush mode for years but doesn’t have to be anymore. She is simply winning snap elections, rising in opinion polls (38 per cent last week) and keeping quiet — others contribute to her progress. She has now positioned herself as a genuine alternative to “those who have governed in a similar way all these past years”. She is gaining new ground every passing day, including among the working class, to the despair of some surviving communists who were able for too long to imagine that the former ‘extreme-right’ was evil; and Stalin’s followers were nice guys.
Unfortunately, Le Pen also is a populist. Not as bad as the Left Front leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, but still a populist: That is, somebody who raises good questions sometimes but usually providing bad answers.
France has fantastic strengths to be able to cope with such a mean political class. One may simply hope some, including Hollande, realise it before next spring’s elections.
Luc Debieuvre is a French essayist and a lecturer at IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationales et Strategiques) and the FACO Law University of Paris.
