There is less to France’s choice than meets the eye
Don’t be fooled by the country’s apparent polarisation over Sarkozy and Royal, says Patrick Marnham. The ancien régime of the French state will survive this presidential election
Paris
Every nation has its rituals. In Britain, when the head of state opens a flower show, she drives up, alights, puts on her spectacles and reads her speech. But Britain is an anachronistic monarchy. In the Fifth Republic they order things differently. First the police close the surrounding streets 24 hours earlier. Then uniformed workers with security clearance erect scaffolding and a stage. Then they drape the stage in crimson velvet and hang up an escutcheon and nail down a red carpet. And finally a police van drives up with sniffer dogs and a throne an authentic gilded, high-backed, bronzeencrusted fauteuil straight from the repositories of the Elysée Palace — and the dogs sniff and the throne is carried out of the presidential van and placed reverently in front of the attendant microphone. And the crowd gathers behind the distant steel barricades and waits for the helicopter.
And why not? In France the president is a far more important personage than a constitutional monarch. He or she is the head of the executive, hiring and firing the prime minister, taking all the credit and little of the blame, living in splendour en famille for five years at public expense and, above all, incarnating his or her people. General de Gaulle put it with his habitual brevity: ‘Le president est l’homme de la nation’. So the choice of this potentate is a far more significant moment in the national subconscious than some vulgar general election. And the voters relish their moment and take their time over it and spread the whole business over two weeks.
The first round is a national wish-list when anyone with 500 elected sponsors can join in. This year, twelve candidates entered the ring and last Sunday 12 per cent of the voters chose Jean Marie Le Pen’s Front National, while a further 10 per cent chose one of the five available candidates from the extreme left, two of whom are self-proclaimed Trotskyites. Hidden in this figure was the historically pathetic percentage of 1.93 per cent voting for Marie-George Buffet, candidate of the once-mighty Parti Communiste Français, the greatest political force in postwar France. The death of Boris Yeltsin from a heart attack on Monday has been attributed by local satirists to his learning MarieGeorge’s score. The Greens managed a derisory total of 1.5 per cent. At the end of Sunday’s first round, ten candidates had been eliminated and the remaining two, who face a run-off on 6 May, apparently represent a very British choice between Right and Left; Nicolas Sarkozy of the outgoing government’s neo-Gaullist UMP has promised to make the economic and social reforms that will secure the country’s prosperity in the age of globalisation. Ségolène Royal of the Socialist party is the first woman to reach the second round and is seen as the champion of l’exception franVaise, the French model of a high-spending, centrally directed system that has given France superb public transport, long-term job security, high pensions and excellent state schools and public health facilities, as well as high levels of unemployment and a truly horrendous level of public debt. For 30 years successive governments of Left and Right have provided themselves with a fictitious 0 per cent national credit card and gone on a spending binge as though there would be no day of reckoning. Sarkozy says it is time to stop. He is wooing the voters with promises of full employment.
Ségolène plays on her opponent’s reputation as a tough minister of the interior and says that Sarkozy is a threat to democracy and republican values. The choice seems to be as straightforward as that, but the argument over economic and social reform has raged throughout the campaign, occupying the same prominence and passion as the British devote to carbon footprints. Both candidates lead chaotic and baroque private lives but — despite the best efforts of Jean Marie Le Pen — these have played no part in the campaign.
Sarkozy is better placed after the first round, with a five-point lead in the vote and a stronger reserve from the centre and the extreme right. But the outcome of the second round will be decided by those who voted for the man who missed the bus, François Bayrou, a Catholic farmer who has refounded the centre-right UDF, and who at one point looked as though he would supplant the glamorous but psychologically rigid and authoritarian Ségolène Royal as Sarkozy’s challenger. The seven million disappointed electors who voted Bayrou are now being courted by both sides. The pollsters are under pressure, since these people are a new phenomenon. Are they leftists who feared Sarkozy but thought that Ségolène was unelectable, or rightists who reject socialism but regarded Bayrou as a more conciliatory figure than Sarko? Predictions are complicated by the tendency in the first round for many to vote for the most obscure and complicated reasons. Several Sarkozy supporters have let it be known that they voted Ségolène because they knew that if Bayrou got through he would wipe out their hero. National Front voters are often former supporters of the PCF, attracted by Jean Marie Le Pen’s notable talent for stream-of-consciousness attacks on the bourgeois elite that runs the republic; they may now vote for Ségolène. Meanwhile many Trotskyites, in their eternal quest for the pre-revolutionary situation, will be voting for Sarkozy on Sunday week.
At the risk of appearing cynical, one could argue that there is a lot less to the final choice than meets the eye. Jacques Chirac, the outgoing president, a lifelong Gaullist and right-wing champion, is well to the left of Tony Blair on social and economic policies. Will Sarkozy, if he is elected, really abandon the French model and inflict the radical surgery needed if France is to compete in the world market? He will certainly try; but manifesto promises to reduce the tax burden on overtime, make mortgage interest tax-deductible and guarantee minimum public services during a strike may not be enough to tempt back the 300,000 French economic refugees of South Kensington who, it is said, make London France’s seventh largest city.
Ségolène Royal talks of a gentler pace of reform and she is trying to forge a coalition with Bayrou. Meanwhile her party leadership, known as les elephants, have never forgiven her for her success last November in winning the nomination, and are biding their time. They loathe the idea of reform. Last week Jacques Attali, one time sherpa of François Mitterrand and first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, spoke for them when he wrote that, far from switching to an Anglo-Saxon free market economy, France should follow its own destiny and protect the French model. ‘The rest of the world criticises us because it is jealous,’ he concluded. The argument may be elephantine, but it is undoubtedly a winner with the millions of French voters who depend on the French state, and who may yet sabotage Mr Sarkozy’s best efforts to lead them towards the world economy.
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