The presidential elections
The first round of the presidential elections will for the Republic (RPR), France's major be fought between the current prime minister conservative party. After 14 years of Socialist
Edouard Balladur and the Mayor of Paris Jaques Party president Francois Mitterand, the left is
Chirac. Both are members of the Regroupment discredited and divided.
Internationa/ Viewpoint #265 April 1995 by Christian Piquet
Since the end of 1994 social exclusion has been at the heart of the electoral campaign. In the search for votes, both conservative candidates have pointed the finger at 'groups of financiers' and the bourgeois districts,' and called for solidarity with "those citizens marginalised and excluded'!
The Socialist Party, the instigator of policies which pushed unemployment up to 3 million, and condemned a further 10 million people to life in insecurity on the edge of poverty could hardly disagree. Indeed, they were enouraged by public opinion polls to take a position further to the left than either Chirac or Balladur.
The country is on the verge of an explosion and none of the parties which have served as the standard bearers of liberalism over the past 20 years will be able to ignore it. As the editor of one of the right-wing daily newspapers commented, 'nowadays, wealth is less fascinating than it used to be.... Even the Members of Parliament have have understood this virtuous evolution of and more dependent. The debate divides the wealthy and reflects the difficulties encountered by French capitalism in a context of fierce competition. Some rightwing leaders and the main industrial employers' organisations show a clear preference for a protectionist economic policy, with nationalist overtones.
Another result of the long term social is the
CriSiS progressive draining the base of of support for the traditional parties.
Their growing distance from the people combined with their inability to meet the challenges of the depression has deprived them of any real influence in the drawing
¡of up programmes, largely confined to groups of experts. Party policy national government procurement contracts. This corruption blossomed after 1992, when a law on decentralisation and deregulation set up more-or-less artificial regions, not controlled by parliament, and with colossal sums of money under their control.
According to political scientist Yves
HÉ!
À LA QUEUE,
COMME TOUT LE MONDE public opinion."3 Political Disturbance
"Get to the back of the queue! " (Chirac and
The Maastricht agreement on Balladur to Socialist Party candidate L. Jospin capitalist integration of Europe is being ripped to shreds. As the director of Figaro recently wrote: Even though the Maastricht Treaty has been adopted by the 12 nations, it will neither deepen nor enlarge Europe. It is null, void and irrelevant. At a time of mounting unemployment, the new Balkan war and the democratisation of the former "people's democracies", Europe expected something other than a two hundred page hotchpotch of jargon.'4 This is a remarkable turn-around in a country where, only two years ago, an overwhelming majority of the political elite was pro-Maastricht.
The new concensus seems to be for a two tier European Union, centred around a hard core of France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. But this presupposes close links with Germany, on which the French economy is proving itself more is increasingly based on a short-term analysis of opinion poll results. The result of this long process is that the two most popular presidential candidates are both men with a reputation for independence from their party's adminstrative bodies. A Moral Disturbance.
Corruption is now widespread in political and economic life. While the crisis has not yet as deep as in Italy, three ministers from the Balladur government and a number of big bosses. The charges concern false accounting on public procurement tenders and fictitious invoices from Party-controlled consulting companies, thanks to which the dominant structures in the Socialist and conservative parties collected bribes from industrialists in exchange for approval of local and
Meny, Unlike the Italian system of local government in which the executive is weak and divided, dependent on the central apparatus and thus vulnerable, the elite of French local government make up the backbone of the system... The local executive sees itself increasingly as entrepreneur - more concerned with results than with observing standard methods and practices. The obsessive search for efficiency, the lack of any division of power at a local level, the concentration of power and resources, all this obscure the fact that democracy can not be reduced to an election every five or six years's A Cyclone on the Right
The candidacy of the current Prime Minister Edouard Balladur seems to answer the need to reorganise the
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! 5
France: Presidential elections
International Viewpoint #265 April 1995 reactionary camp. He is supported by the core of the French Union for Democracy (UDF), a confederation of Liberal and Christian Democratic movements founded by ex-president Valerie Giscard D'Estaing and a sundry collection of members of the more right wing Regroupment for the Republic (RPR).
The theme around which these movements came together has been perfectly summarised in the report of a commission headed by Alain Minc and presented by the state Planning Commission. This report sets out three great ideas. Firstly that it is impossible to return to the policy of a strong Franc and competitive disinflation so left is no longer a serious competitor in the presidential race. And yet, until 11 December 1994, the most popular man for the position, in the eyes of the public, was a Socialist Party leader - retiring leader of the European Commission Jacques Delors. In a recent book®, Delors committed himself to the liberal conversion of French social democracy, Delors advocated an alliance between the "moderate" wing of the Socialist Party and the Christian Democratic movement, on the basis of policies basically similar to those of Balladur. In this scenario the Socialist party's candidate, Leonel Jospin, is currently third in the polls.
Signs of a split in the socialist party are increasingly evident.. One wing of the party might take up the banner of the 'modern Left," accepting a form of liberalism that it would seek to soften. Michel Rocard has already set the agenda: 'the reality we face is that of a field of ruins. Our chances of winning the next presidential election are currently very weak and everybody knows it. The Socialist Party has long since lost its power to build but has kept its power to destroy. We are responsible: it's our fault. We don't have the truth any more'.
In reaction to this 'new realism,' there
JE VOUS ASSURE
Si ON iNVERSE LES TUYAUX central to Socialist Party policies
CANE CHANGE since 1983. Secondly that it is
RiEN DU TOUT essential to lower labour costs rapidly, by reducing employers' social costs and opposing any claims for salary increases in the state or private sector. Thirdly that France should adopt the
German proposal of a European hard core of politicaly and economically integrated leading countries.
These policies represent an important strand in bourgois strategy for several years to come. In consequence, the right could be a growth in the tendency in the Socialist Party, led by the current First Secretary, Henri Emmanuelli, that wants to reinforce a traditional social democratic identity by inviting militants to talk socialist'. The crisis could equally give rise to a populism that would be just as devastating for the labour movement. In the European elections of last June the leftpopulist "Radical" list headed by the businessman Bernard Tapie gathered around 12% of the vote. Now bankrupt and implicated in a large number of scandals Tapie may well have to give up all his election mandates. This has not stopped him claiming to follow the same
"Relax!" the tubes won change anything l is obliged to define itself as for or against these policies.
Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac continues to vaunt the virtues of liberalism, but also wants to go back to the promise of a 'social contract'. The motivation of the Chirac camp seems to be to reestablish the RPR as the dominant force on the fractured French right, and to return to the populist policies which built real grass root support for the RPR in the 1950s and 60s.
If Chirac fails to rally a credible opposition to the conservative liberal Balladur project, a radical, nationalist and protectionist Right could emerge. Among those poissed to lead the "hard' right are Charles Pasqua, the Interior Minister, who sees himself in the populist tradition of original Gaullism, or the aristocrat Philippe de Villiers, who's ultraconservative, Catholic fundamentalist movement won 12.3% of votes in the 1994 European elections, and who can count on the support of one wing of the far-right National Front. A Field of Ruins on the Left
The disagreement on the right has come so far out into the open because the
, says Mitterand. Party would give way to an Americanstyle Democratic Party.
But by throwing in the towel on December 11th, Delors confirmed that the conditions for such a possibility do not exist. The new centre that he calls for does not have any adequate social base in a society where crisis has generated widescale exclusion and marginalisation.
Having emerged weak and drained from years of business manoevers, the Socialist Party can not afford to cut itself off further from the world of work for fear of loosing what is left of its real 'capital". And in any case, the institutions of France's Fifth Republic tend to create two large, opposed political blocs, and stunt the development of any 'third force'9 Delors could have taken the risk, and argued for the complete overhaul of the political structure. But he knew he had no partisans to hand.
The traditional Left is now back at square one. The leaders of the Socialist Party have not proposed any credible programme, and have shown themselves unable to get over the disastrous results of two terms of President Mitterand. The path: "The French people want the power that a tiny aristocracy confiscated to be returned to them. If you don't listen to the force of their arguments you could be on the sharp end of the arguments of their force [...] They wanted to exclude me and this is a wonderful political gift because I have no objection to becoming the leader of the excluded 10
In the words of Jean-Marie Colombani, director of Le Monde: *Between a divided Right that might make a 'clean sweep' and an orphaned Left open to the risks of adventurists and demagogues, reform might well have to be put off to later, bypassing the presidential election. Given the current state of the country, this would be a serious mistake: the social situation does not allow for delay'." * Notes 1. Speeches by J.Chirac et E. Balladur respectively. 2. Figures provided by charity organisations. 3. Le Figaro, 20 December 1994. 4. Franz-Olivier Giesbert, La fin d'une epoque, Le Seuil. 5. Le Monde, 30 September 1994 6. La France de l'An 2000, published by Odile Jacob. 7. Inprecor, September 1994 8. J Delors, L'unite d'un homme, published by O Jacob. 9. The alliance between the Socialists and a party from the Right under the Fourth Republic. 10. Le Monde, 21 December 1994 11. Le Monde, 13 December 1994