At the French Socialist Party’s congress in Poitiers this weekend, Prime Minister Manuel Valls was received with thunderous applause. During his speech on Saturday, there was no drama, and no jeering. At one point the audience of party faithful got to their feet during Valls’s tribute to François Hollande, who he described a s “a grand president”.
But beyond the projected image of unity, the display of the party’s support of government and the insiders’ talk of Hollande’s belief in his possible re-election, there was little debate and even less clues to what the government’s political programme will be during its remaining two years in office. There was no explanation of how, why and by who Hollande might be re-elected in 2017, prompting Socialist Member of Parliament Christian Paul, on the left-wing of the party, to call it ‘the mystery” of the socialist presidency.
Skillfully swiping at the Right, the prime minister’s speech ticked all the boxes the socialists hold dear. “I respect the Socialist Party and I love the socialists,” he told the audience. “I have been a [party] activist since 1980 and I know what I owe you […] Let’s be proud to be on the Left, let’s be proud to be French.”
“There is no personal adventure, there are only collective accomplishments,” he insisted, in a reference to speculation about his own ambitions ahead of general and presidential elections in 2017. “You can be sure of my loyalty to the president.”
Throughout, Valls received strong applause, including when he congratulated his interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve on the deportation from France last week of the father of Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah after he had arrived illegally in the country several days earlier.
He announced the continuation of economic reforms, notably to stimulate small- and medium-sized companies and the progressive introduction of direct tax deductions on earnings (as opposed to the system of yearly tax declarations currently in place). But there was little else to be learned about the government’s agenda for the remaining two years of its five-year mandate. “It was a Valls-ist speech from beginning to end,” commented one government minister, whose name is withheld. “He wanted to show that he’s no longer the ugly duckling nor he who scored 5% during the [2011 Socialist Party presidential candidate] primaries. For the rest, it was neither the time nor the place.”
The only objective of the congress in Poitiers was to demonstrate a party united behind the principal broad policy motion (Unite! Succeed! Renew!), submitted by Valls and the party’s first secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, but there was no question of launching a new policy line, nor of opening up dialogue with other forces among the French Left. The latter were largely absent for Valls’s speech this weekend, save for Senator Jean-Vincent Placé, a pro-government member of the EELV Green party, former Communist Party leader Robert Hue, who supported François Hollande’s 2012 election campaign, Jean-Luc Bennahmias, a left-leaning member of the centrist MoDem party, and representatives of the MRC party founded by maverick former socialist Jean-Pierre Chevènement.
The congress was something of a reflection of the style of François Hollande’s presidency, a catalogue of skillfully-devised bits and bobs with which all the currents of the party could find their place, in an attempt to bide time before the elections in 2017. Members of Hollande’s inner circle are convinced that the electorate do not want government policies to swing to the Left, but rather that they be more effective. “I want the Left to be generous, effective,” said Valls on Saturday. Behind those words is the continuing hope that the slow and shaky return to economic growth will at last become a solid one, allowing for a fall in unemployment.
Hollande has staked his political future on a fall in the jobless rate while he is in office, having publicly pledged that he would not run for a second term in office if he did not succeed in this. For him, all other issues are secondary, and the months ahead a waiting game for the hoped-for turnaround.
Hollande aides see tight contest with Sarkozy
Hollande’s allies are braced for a difficult few weeks ahead. The so-called ‘Macron law’, a series of largely business-friendly economic reforms driven by economy minister Emmanuel Macron, will on Monday return to the National Assembly, the lower house, for its final passage through parliament for approval. In the bill of law’s first presentation to the National Assembly (before its appraisal by the Senate), the government, fearful of a defeat at the hands of socialist rebels, overrode a vote by Members of Parliament by controversially using a constitutional tool called the ‘article 49-3’. Valls has not excluded again using the ‘49-3’ decree (which automatically triggers a parliamentary vote of confidence in the government) to push the bill into law. That and other bills of law (notably new security measures that include the introduction of arbitrary mass surveillance powers, but also a reform of labour laws) are likely to again bring out divisions with the party and to dilute the image of unity projected at the congress in Poitiers.
But more immediately, it was former socialist economy and industry minister Arnaud Montebourg who on Sunday upset the cart with a scathing attack on government policies in an op-ed article co-signed with centre-left-leaning banker and press owner Matthieu Pigasse and published in the weekly JDD. In the article, Montebourg, who lost his job last August after leading an outspoken revolt against the socialist government’s austerity programme, denounced the government’s “absurd” execution of economic targets set by the European commission, which he said was “a gigantic” boost for the far-right Front National party. Calling for an end to austerity measures and tax breaks for the less well-off, the article warned that “numbed, we are walking straight towards disaster”, and questioned whether it was “still possible to save” the Socialist Party’s term in power.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The government is likely to detail its programme for the rest of its term in office in September, following the Socialist Party “summer university” conference in La Rochelle at the end of August and before the nationwide regional council elections in December. “It will be determined during the summer by the president and the prime minister,” commented a source close to Holland, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “France, the nation, the homeland, the subject is how the Left reacquires them,” said the source.
That “question” has already begun to be outlined by Hollande, in speeches following the January terrorist attacks in and around Paris and at last month’s ceremony for the introduction of WWII Resistance heroes to the Panthéon, the resting place designated for those deemed (by the French presidency) to be outstanding figures of the nation. The president and his government have been criticized for manipulating a so-called ‘spirit of January 11’ (see here and here), a reference to the massive marches across France in defiance and outrage over the January attacks.
For several months, a number of the president’s aides have focussed on making the notion of ‘the Republic’ a central plank in the socialists’ future election battle with the principal party of the conservative Right – the former UMP, which last month controversially renamed itself The Republicans (Les Républicains). Hollande’s close allies appear convinced that he can still win a second term of office in 2017 if he succeeds in the tactic of putting himself across as the guarantor of the republic and its founding values, as a sort of father figure based on the late socialist president François Mitterrand’s successful re-election campaign in 1988.
“There will be the stunted Republic of the Right, reduced to [issues of] order and security, and ours, attached to the triptych liberty, equality, fraternity,” commented one government advisor, who did not want to be named.
But set against that upbeat talk is the fact that the Socialist Party is moribund, and the Left is split, while a part of François Hollande’s electorate has now become totally disaffected. This was demonstrated in recent local elections, in which the socialists suffered a resounding defeat, and when a disturbing switch of the socialist vote to the far-right was observed in some regions. The social makeup of Hollande’s remaining supporters is now something of an enigma.
Even the president’s staunchest supporters are uncertain that he still has sufficient credibility to allow him to be re-elected. Some have hope that Hollande, just reaching the second of the two-round election, in which just two candidates are left for the knockout vote, narrowly scrapes through. The scenario they envisage is a tight contest in which his opponent is conservative party leader and former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who loses by a small margin because of the deeply ingrained animosity still held towards him by a section of the electorate. But even that scenario is unconvincing: while Sarkozy is clearly hoping to be the candidate of The Republicans, he faces a tough battle against conservative rivals in the party primaries next year, and is also threatened by a series of judicial investigations into corruption scams in which he is implicated.
“In due time, François Hollande will be able to hold up leftist elements of his track record, like the tiers-payant généralisé [editor’s note: the ending of the requirement for patients to pay doctors’ fees upfront before refunding by the social security system], against a backdrop of a threatened republican arc [of social guarantees], while hoping and banking on a durable [economic] recovery,” confided recently to Mediapart one of Hollande’s inner circle. Another of his close entourage commented: “To win in 2017, it would be sufficient for him to be a little less rejected than Nicolas Sarkozy was in 2012.”
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse