France's political system is crumbling. What's coming next looks scary
Marine Le Pen has the centre-right in her sights. And Hollande has no clue and little hope
7 June 2014
Last week President François Hollande, following his party’s
humiliation in the European parliamentary elections (his Socialists won
roughly half as many seats as the National Front), decided to cheer
himself up. He left Paris and travelled to Clairefontaine to mingle with
France’s World Cup football squad.
‘If you do win the World Cup final on
13 July,’ he told the
millionaire players (most of whom avoid Hollande’s taxes by being paid
outside France), ‘you will deserve a triumphant welcome. But we will not
be able to give you the reception you will deserve, because the
Champs-Elysées is already booked for the military parade of
14 July!’
Ed Miliband could hardly have put it more lamely. Having uttered his
words of feeble encouragement, the least effective national leader the
Fifth Republic has endured bumbled back to the scenes of economic
devastation and ministerial panic that mark France’s political landscape
today.
If the British recovery from the recession has been slow, in France
it is nonexistent. The latest figures show that the Socialist
government’s policies — almost exact replicas of the ‘two Eds’ (Miliband
and Balls) approach the Labour party wants to implement in Britain —
are a complete failure: economic growth in the first two years of
Hollande’s administration has been 0.8 per cent, whereas the British
economy has grown five times faster in the same period. The latest
figures show current growth at zero per cent, and the forecast for the
rest of the year is not much better.
France’s employment figures are even worse. When Hollande was elected
in May 2012 on an anti-austerity ticket (‘-Another way is possible,’ he
promised), he said he’d cut unemployment within 18 months. Instead, it
has risen by 15 per cent to a scandalous 3.3 million. He said he’d help
mend the finances by slapping a 75 per cent tax on the richest. He got
his way, eventually, but figures last week show that French tax receipts
are collapsing. Footballers and Gerard Depardieu are not the only ones
moving abroad and declaring taxes elsewhere. Hollande is demonstrating
anew that high taxes redistribute people, rather than wealth. One might
think that this could be the ideal moment for France’s conservative
opposition, the UMP, to lay the foundations for a right-wing victory in
the presidential elections of 2017. Unfortunately, the UMP is in an even
more distressed state than the government. It has no leader, it has no
programme and it lacks even an agreed means of selecting its next party
president. Mired in scandal and shorn of purpose, the UMP could be on
the verge of breaking up.
The implosion of Hollande’s main opposition is worth studying,
because it shows how France’s politics is in an even worse shape than
its economy. The UMP was founded in 2002 as a means of uniting the
‘republican right’ (that is, the Gaullist RPR and the centre-right UDF)
against the growing popularity of the extreme-right Front National, led
by Jean-Marie Le Pen. The UMP remained in government for the next ten
years until the election of François Hollande. Following that setback,
the party held a ballot to elect its president and this election was won
by a Sarkozy supporter, Jean-François Copé.
A savage internal battle then broke out between Mr Copé and
former prime minister François Fillon, since, according to Mr Fillon, Mr
Copé had rigged the ballot that won him the leadership. This struggle
only ended last week when Copé, the party president and chief bruiser,
was forced to announce his resignation. This had become inevitable since
he had been named in a police investigation into illegal overspending
during President Sarkozy’s failed re-election campaign of 2012.
Some £9 million of illicit funds had been concealed by the use of
forged invoices. Questioned on national television last week, Mr Copé’s
right-hand man — who had to sign all the receipts — burst into tears.
Mr Fillon is a very different personality to Mr Copé. His wife is Welsh, his brother is married to his wife’s sister (
vive l’entente cordiale)
and he displays every mark of the gentleman. Furthermore, despite
having spent five years as Nicolas Sarkozy’s prime minister, he is seen
to be honest. But sadly this may not be the fastest means of reaching
the top in the Fifth Republic. And notwithstanding the fact that he has
finally shafted his agile rival, Mr Fillon still faces serious
competition for the leadership of the French right.
First there is Alain Juppé, also a former prime minister. Juppé is a
veteran Gaullist, one of the long-standing ‘barons’ of French politics.
But ten years ago, his political career suffered something of a setback
when he received a 14-month suspended prison sentence for misuse of
public money. On being convicted, Mr Juppé resigned as mayor of
Bordeaux, but his ever-forgiving voters re-elected him two years later.
In his defence, it was said at the time that he had simply been carrying
the can for Jacques Chirac’s corrupt system of financing his own
political career.
The other candidate hoping to save France is of course the former
president Nicolas Sarkozy. Despite his constant denials, Mr Sarkozy is
still very much a player in the political game. Some might think that
with his one-time campaign manager under police investigation for
illegal use of electoral funds, Mr Sarkozy, too, might be under a bit of
a cloud. But his supporters scoff at the idea. In France, it is the
presidential campaign managers who do the dirty work, and whatever it is
they do, it should never be traceable to their principals. A recent
opinion poll showed that, for two thirds of voters, the 2017 candidature
of Nicolas Sarkozy is both ‘undesirable’ and ‘probable’.
Currently, Mr Sarkozy and his close associates are under
investigation in no fewer than five other criminal matters, the most
serious of which concerns the selling or trafficking of public office,
contracts or honours. In this case, it is believed to centre around
allegations of either threatening or bribing judges, including members
of France’s Supreme Court. As part of their inquiries, the investigating
authorities have tapped Mr Sarkozy’s telephones and grilled his senior
staff members for weeks on end.
Even that may not be Sarkozy’s biggest problem. In March, he
discovered to his horror that one of his closest associates, Patrick
Buisson, had been secretly recording their private meetings during his
five years in the Elysée. Buisson may have hours of recorded
conversations, covering everything from base political manoeuvring to
state secrets. Meanwhile, Sarko’s allies are doing everything they can
to block the possibility that either Mr Fillon or Mr Juppé could become
the UMP’s presidential candidate in 2017.
For French voters looking for signs that a more effective government
might be on the horizon, the disintegration of the UMP must be deeply
depressing. It leaves Marine Le Pen’s National Front as the only
successful political formation currently in good order. Her victory in
the European parliamentary elections, when her party quadrupled its
score in comparison with the 2009 European elections and topped the poll
with 25 per cent of the vote, was very much a personal triumph. Under
her leadership, the party has changed tack, downplaying the racism that
characterised her father’s era and emphasising policies that are
designed to attract traditional left-wing voters.
It is an error to regard Marine Le Pen’s party as being right-wing —
and somehow repugnant to left-wing voters. Le Pen rails against
globalisation and free trade, against ‘American tax-dodging
multinationals’ and the French employers’ association. She wants a high
minimum wage, tariff barriers, and a preference in employment, housing
and social benefits for French citizens over European or international
immigrants. Were such policies ever introduced, France would cut its
links with the developed world and drift off into some imaginary
national paradise of its own invention.
But that is not how matters are viewed by people trapped in the
depths of a recession with no apparent way out. This is why the National
Front picked up an astonishing 43 per cent of the working-class vote,
against the Socialist government’s figure of 6 per cent. Marine Le Pen
has said that she will now make the dissolution of the UMP her top
priority, and if she keeps up her momentum she will make it to the final
round of the 2017 French presidential election.
All this has implications far beyond the borders of France. The 24
MEPs (one third of the French contingent) that Le Pen is sending to
Brussels are mandated to leave both the euro and the European Union. Her
triumph would dismantle the Franco–German axis, the historical motor of
the EU. The German chancellor has already said that her chief concern
for the future of Europe is the state of France. And little wonder:
France is at a crossroads. If it cannot emerge from its economic
doldrums, France will join the dysfunctional Club Med countries —
leaving Germany alone to hold the EU together. This would be a task even
beyond Frau Merkel’s abilities.
France is no stranger to such crises. The Fifth Republic was founded
in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle when France was threatened with a military
coup and was on the verge of civil war over the decolonisation of
Algeria. It is a measure of the current desperate state of French
politics — a failed government, a corrupt and squabbling opposition and a
rampant National Front — that the public debate now includes a growing
discussion of a new constitution, the abolition of an executive
presidency and the forced revival of parliamentary democracy. The
abolition, in other words, of the Fifth Republic itself.
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated
7 June 2014
