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International Viewpoint #267 June 1995
Germany 14
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France under Jacq
By Christian Piquet
THE MAY 7 ELECTION of Jacques Chirac is a paradox. The right is victorious, but finds itself in deeper crisis than before.
As well as the presidency and the
Be right controls four out of : only won the support of 49.5% of those who bothered to vote. A record 6% of those who voted deliberately spoiled their ballot paper - presumably in protest at the lack of choice!
Jacques Chirac is the worst-elected president of France's Vth Republic. The scramble for votes by four competing right wing presidential candidates (see IV April 1995) demonstrated the incapacity of the right to find a replacement for the discredited neo-liberal model, and propose a project for the difficulties the bourgeoisie faces in the late 1990s. The origins of the crisis
The Vth Republic was founded by the and forced the implementation of policies for the rapid modernisation of the productive sector. The left was defeated, the right demoralised by the victory of the Algerian independence movement. Until
De Gal le was able to portant part of pulation. Since left the scene in one of his successors managed the same magic. Under Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard D'Estaing, the General's once omnipresent Gaullist party was obliged to invite liberal and Christian democratic currents to share power, inviting them in from the political wilderness where De Gaulle had put them in 1958.
In the 1970s Giscard D'Estaing tried to re-centralise the right as a modernising, "centrist' force, based on the salaried middle classes. But the economic crisis cut away at his potential base. And from the early 1980s the far-right National Front began to make
French President Jacques Chirac meets the people in Serran,
General de Gaulle. He united the squabbling bourgeoisie like a new
Napoleon Bonaparte. His speeches mixed populism, authoritarianism, the myth of
French grandeur, and the image of class co-operation and harmony. He imposed his will on a reorganised state machine,
Vive la revolution !
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International Viewpoint #267 June 1995 inroads among frustrated rightwing voters - particularly at the expense of the RPR.
All the fractions of the RPR and UDF tried to rejuvenate themselves, and to attract new elements and categories to their umbrella. Jacques Chirac experimented with a 'French Labour' policy after 1976, then with ultraliberalism after the 1981 election of François Mitterand. One of the inevitable results of this process was that the differences between the RPR and UDF became less and less important, and their electorate less and less distinct.
And yet, the right as a whole has had to deal with some very concrete problems. First of all, the liberal orientation taken over the last 20 years has provoked a series of disasters. These policies have not brought the economy out of the marshes. They have not even allowed any more than a small fraction of the capitalists
Fran (financial rather than industrial) to become significantly richer. But they have brought the country to the edge of a social crisis.
More fundamentally, liberalism has eaten away at the roots of the republican consensus. It has weakened several of the bonds which legitimate the state in the eyes of the citizen. Republican rule in France traditionally rested on the ideas of national interest, equality of opportunity and universal access to certain basic needs
- assured by the state if needed. The recent attacks on social security, the right to citizenship by residence and not just by descent, and the challenge to the separation of church and state — all this is stripping away the alibis which the state previously used to justity its actions.
The second major problem is the European Question'. Deregulation of the
ues Chirac ince various national economies will provoke important social tensions. At the same time, the axe of French European policy since 1990 has been to strengthen the bond with the (more powerful) German economy. This means tying the French Franc to the German Mark. It means accepting German-level high interest rates in a country with record levels of unemployment. It is hardly surprising that the whole "Maastricht' capitalist project is disputed within the capitalist class, and hardly surprising that there is only moderate popular support for further capitalist integration.
The third major crisis for the rightist government is the declining legitimacy of political parties and institutions as such. Across Europe, ruling parties, and the major opposition formations no longer represent stable fractions of the major social classes.
They have more and more difficulty shaping and guiding society. We can
'feudal"
see a new autonomy, with the unaccountable French regions dispensing huge funds. The citizen is more and more aware that the electoral game is based on different
'machines' promoting their particular king. The trade unions are hardly a shining example of a different kind of political life (see separate article).
The Vth Republic has exhausted its original energy. Its political balance and social foundations are rotten. The state in its current form no longer unifies the various tractions of capitalism. It is no longer a dependable instrument of coercion the social over movements. It no longer pretends to arbitrate between the social classes.
The president is not above, but in the front line of today's political conflicts.
He is likely to become one of the favourite targets.
In the April issue of International
Viewpoint we discussed the particular strategies and priorities of the various right-wing candidates. Chirac, the eventual victor, was the one who chose to occupy the centre-ground left vacant by a discredited left. This was the sense of his pronouncements that the left-right division was a thing of the past. It was also the motivation for his attacks on the
"bourgeois districts' and 'financial circles' which refused to see that France was suffering. And it was the justification for his conviction that "increased salaries are not the enemy of economic growth"
Nevertheless, Chirac in power will incorporate many of the values — and individuals of the unsuccessful conservative current of former Prime
Minister Edouard Balladur. Nor will he have failed to notice that, in the second round, the massive majority of the traditional left electorate chose the
Socialist Party candidate Leonel Jospin.
Behind the rhetoric, Chirac does not represent something new on the right. Nor has he made significant inroads on the centre left. The left in France is now talking about a social "third round' of the presidential election. Challenging this new president to respect his election promises. No hundred days grace for Chirac! * "After De Gaulle, the social base of the Gaullists was transformed. It became older and more feminised. But above all, the popular base disappeared. 42% of manual workers supported De Gaulle in 1965. Only 30% of them voted for Georges Pompidou in 1969. By 1973, their support was again that of a classic conservative party... Two parties were created, the Assembly for the Republic (RPR — 1976) and the Union for French Democracy (UDF - 1978). They shared the same social base, differing in terms of their electoral propositions. By 1978 the average conservative voter was an old woman. The overrepresentation of those more than 60 years old implies an underrepresentation of the productive layers of society - unlike the Socialist and Communist electoral base." Jean-Marie Donegani and Marc Sadoun, Histoire des droites en France, Gallimard, 1992 International Viewpoint #267 June 1995 5