It is one of those rare moments in politics. A stupor has taken hold of the government, paralysed ministerial offices and led to the strangest rumours. Ever since the dramatic confession by Jérôme Cahuzac on 2nd April that he does have an undeclared foreign bank account, the government has been “in limbo”, to use the expression of someone close to President François Hollande. The head of state, who went to Morocco on a state visit in the middle of week soon after the Cahuzac story broke, has had the weekend to reflect. Called upon by all sides to act, the president, who campaigned on a pledge to create an “exemplary” Republic, is said to be about to announce new measures to cause what has been described as a “cleaning up shock” to French politics.
According to several sources, the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault is “very determined” to launch a “quite severe” clean-up of political life, based on the principles of “strictness and transparency”. The premier spoke with the president of the Republic on Sunday evening and the first measures are expected to be approved at Wednesday's Cabinet meeting. The government's measures will cover the fight against tax fraud, corruption, preventing conflicts of interest, financial transparency - which will be imposed on parliamentarians and ministers - and penalties for any transgressions. The prime minister has announced that all ministers will have to declare their financial assets by 15th April.
The government is also seeking to work with European partners to tackle tax evasion and tax havens. These are plans that have so far been met with suspicion in France but which are now likely to be viewed favourably in the light of the Cahuzac affair. “The current context will allow quite tough measures to be passed,” says one adviser. The talks about the details of the various plans continued late into Sunday night.
The executive is also considering a major reshuffle. For the moment that option has been publicly ruled out by François Hollande. But the idea is gaining ground among some Hollande supporters. “I'm arguing for a ministerial reshuffle, we need to have a streamlined government in the coming weeks,” says MP Gwendal Rouillard, who is close to defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, speaking on an online debate held by Mediapart. He wants a “combative government” that is focused on the issues of industry and jobs.
At the Elysée François Hollande has been present at several meetings that have raised this possibility, but presidential advisers are themselves divided on the issue. Some consider that a reshuffle will not do anything other than give the impression of caving in to panic, and that it would punish ministers who have not done anything wrong and who “have even worked quite well up to now”. In support of their argument they say the political explosion caused by the Cahuzac affair has, at one stroke, crystallised all the various discontent and grievances in public opinion. The radicalization of those who oppose same-sex marriage is, they say, yet further proof of this.
Other advisers, however, believe that a tighter team, together with significant measures to clean up the world of politics and tackle tax havens is the only way out for a government that is seriously weakened. Some senior figures in the Socialist Party (PS) who have wanted a reshuffle for several weeks have personally backed this point of view.
However, it seems that everyone is prepared to condemn their colleague the finance minister Pierre Moscovici, who has been under attack for a week and who was already being heavily criticised even before the Cahuzac affair. Many judge him to be “burned”. The minister spent the weekend justifying once more his role in launching a preliminary administrative investigation into his junior minister in January – two weeks after a preliminary judicial probe began into the affair – leaks from which appeared to “clear” Cahuzac. “I was used,” Moscovici told Mediapart.
The minister has so far not convinced the opposition, for example the president of the National Assembly's finance committee Gilles Carrez. The UMP MP wrote to the minister on Friday asking “why the demand for information [editor's note, from the Swiss authorities] only asked about the possible existence of an account at UBS bank”. He also asks “why this demand concerned only UBS branches in Switzerland [and not in Singapore]” and also why the finance ministry had been happy just to ask about the period from 2006 to 2010. The MP's counterpart in the Senate Philippe Marini has written in similar terms. Moscovic has replied to them and insisted in a press release that there was “absolutely no kind of concealment or complacency in the handling of this case”.
Party activists 'lynched'....'attacked'
But members of the ruling PS are aware that the political earthquake caused by the Cahuzac affair targets the president of the Republic above all. “It's as if there were no other lightning conductor,” notes one senior socialist figure. The president alone has to face the growing number of questions on and surrounding the Cahuzac affair. For example on Sunday several Swiss media outlets reported that Jérôme Cahuzac had unsuccessfully tried to deposit 15 million euros at a Geneva-based bank in 2009 - a suggestion that the former budget minister's lawyer later claimed lacked credibility.
The toxic atmosphere is contaminating the president’s own party. On Sunday (see Tweet above) the chief of staff of the PS's first secretary Harlem Désir described Cahuzac's attitude as being like that of Jean-Claude Romand, an imposter who notoriously killed his wife and children when his secret life of 18 years was about to be exposed. Meanwhile MPs who returned to their constituencies at the weekend talk of party activists being “lynched” and “attacked in the markets”. One socialist MP said: “As a result, some of our people are so angry that they want to travel up to Paris with pitchforks!'”
People from all political persuasions are now urging François Hollande to take unprecedented measures. On Wednesday it was the president of the centrist MoDem party François Bayrou who was first off the blocks in launching a national petition calling for a law to clean up public life that would be backed by a referendum. The EELV presidential candidate last year Eva Joly is calling for an “urgent plan against scandals and corruption” in a country which she believes is “on the edge of a major crisis”. This idea was seized upon by former UMP minister Laurent Wauquiez who has called for a “clean up campaign”.
On Friday Jean-Luc Mélenchon, co-president of the radical left Parti de gauche, called for a major demonstration on 5th May in favour of changing France's constitution to replace the current Fifth Republic with a Sixth Republic. This would have the effect, he says, of “purifying the absolutely unbearable political atmosphere” and subjecting it to a “major sweeping up”. The idea was taken up by the French Communist Party. “The inaction of the government in the face of a political crisis confirms to us that we cannot stay as we are,” the party's national secretary Pierre Laurent told Le Monde. “We have to mobilise to demand a change of direction.”
“We are at a complete dead-end, can you imagine being able to continue for four years with a president so discredited from a democratic point of view?” asked Front de gauche Paris councillor Ian Brossat during a debate on Mediapart on Friday. “We will not get out of a democratic crisis with a few announcements or a facelift for our institutions. People don't believe political statements at all...the question of a Sixth Republic is going to have to be raised.” To do this would require a dissolution of Parliament and the creation of a Constituent Assembly to create the new constitution.
Last Friday PS first secretary Harlem Désir was at Limoges in the centre of France, an old socialist stronghold, for his first political meeting since the Cahuzac affair broke. Faced with activists thrown into confusion, he raised the idea of a referendum, which has also been supported by several socialist MPs, including Olivier Faure, who is close to the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, and the PS number two Guillaume Bachelay. Désir's idea is to submit to a vote by the people those ideas already announced by Hollande, plus a plan to stop politicians from holding more than one political office at a time. This last measure is close to the hearts of socialist activists but one which some socialist MPs and senior regional figures do not adhere to themselves. “When you see that we can't even tackle the question of holding more than one political office ...I'm staggered, it's simply impossible to defend,” PS MP Barbara Romagnan told Mediapart.
For her part Romagnan, a close ally of social economy minister Benoît Hamon, who is on the left of the party, would like to see a referendum “on holding more than one political office, including conflicts of interest” as well as on MPs' expenses whose “usage can be totally discretionary”. She adds: “We have to know how [the expenses] are used. As we don't know we foster this idea that people are cheating, and that discredits the political classes.”
However, there is a problem about the idea of a referendum. François Hollande, who has bitter memories of the no vote in the 2005 referendum on a new European constitution when he was first secretary of the Socialist Party, is extremely mistrustful of them. “A referendum doesn't seem to me to be relevant at this time, we have better things to do,” says Hollande-supporting MP Gwendal Rouillard.
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English version by Michael Streeter