President François Hollande is planning an amendment to the constitution to enable France to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages which protects and promotes regional language on the continent. The law change, which will require a three-fifths majority of French Parliamentarians at a special Congress, will fulfil a campaign pledge made by François Hollande before his 2012 election.
The move will meet bitter opposition from those who see it as undermining the “indivisibility” of the French Republic in which French is enshrined by law as the only official language. And even if the ratification plan is approved next year, it will serve to highlight just how few other constitutional reforms promised by Hollande the candidate have actually been delivered.
The socialist had vowed to usher in an “exemplary Republic” but his pledges to change the legal immunity status of the president, bring in proportional representation or give the vote to foreign nationals living in France have not materialised. Instead, with time fast running out before the countdown to the 2017 presidential elections – this is the “last window of opportunity” admits the Elysée – the final constitutional reforms of the Hollande presidency will be the ratification of the regional languages charter and, possibly, reform of the French judiciary's ruling body.
The issue of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, adopted by the Council of Europe in 1992, has been on the back burner at the Elysée for more than 20 years. In 1999 the right-wing president Jacques Chirac and his socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin signed France up to some of the charter's articles. But they abandoned ratifying it after the country's highest authority on the constitution, the Constitutional Council, ruled against it, fearing that ratification could put the very Republic itself at risk. Article 1 of the constitution states that “France shall be an indivisible....Republic”, while article 2 says: “The language of the Republic shall be French.” Since the Council's ruling ratification of the charter has required a constitutional change, which means the meeting of members of the National Assembly and the Senate at a special Congress and its approval by a three-fifths majority. No president has dared risk this up to now.
Yet during his campaign in 2012 François Hollande promised he would seek ratification, and it appeared as pledge number 56 in his election manifesto. A number of French parliamentarians with a keen interest in the issue were later encouraged to test the water and put forward a bill proposing ratification. On January 28th, 2014, MPs voted for it by a large majority, with 361 for and just 149 against.
Members of Parliament from the ruling Socialist Party (PS) supported the measure almost unanimously, with just eight socialist MPs voting against, including three from the left-wing Eurosceptic party the Mouvement Républicain et Citoyen (MRC) who traditionally oppose the promotion of regional languages. The bill also attracted support from most communist MPs, all green MPs, all but one MP from the PS's close allies the Parti Radical de Gauche and MPs from the centrist UDI. Even more interesting, from the government’s point of view, was the vote on the Right; 40 MPs from the right-wing UMP (now called Les Républicains) voted for the bill and 15 others abstained. Among them were MPs from Brittany in west France, Alsace in the north-east and the Mediterranean island of Corsica where regional languages are a significant issue. In all, when overseas territories are taken into account, France has around 75 regional languages.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Since that date the the bill has languished in an office at the French Senate. In any case, to be adopted it would need to be approved by a public referendum, an option ruled out by François Hollande. This is why he has chosen the route of a government-sponsored bill which does not require a referendum but instead the approval of a special Congress at Versailles, west of Paris.
President Hollande signalled his commitment to this in letters sent on June 1st, 2015, to the co-chairmen of the National Assembly working group on regional languages, the Brittany regionalist Paul Molac and Armand Jung, a socialist from Alsace. “In line with the commitment that I made to the French people during the presidential election, I want Parliament to allow the ratification of this Charter. A precondition of this is the amendment of the Constitution. The Congress seems to me to be the most appropriate route,” he wrote (see copy of letter below).
Enlargement : Illustration 2
A bill drawn up by justice minister Christiane Taubira was approved by ministers at the final cabinet meeting last week before the summer break and will be examined by the Senate then the Assembly in the autumn. The Congress itself is expected to be convened at the start of 2016. There is, however, no certainty that the measure will be passed. For one thing, MPs and Senators both have to approve an identical text; and the Senate is now under the control of the Right. “It's far from being a done deal,” admits an advisor to President Hollande.
It is true that France has only signed 39 of the charter's 98 articles - the least onerous ones – and the bill includes an “interpretative declaration” drawn from the Constitutional Council's 1999 ruling that limits the charter's scope even more. “But it will open up a passionate topic for French people,” says Bernard Poignant, an advisor to President Hollande and author of a 1998 report on regional languages. “All the old debates will re-emerge in a climate of raised emotions and reactions about people's identity.”
The 'exemplary Republic' has been forgotten
Indeed, during the Parliamentary debates in January 2014 there were lively exchanges which revealed some deep divisions about politicians' views of the Republic. The MRC MP Marie-Françoise Bechtel objected that the debate was descending into questions of ethnic identity, anathema for some traditionalist supporters of the Republic. The Radical de Gauche MP Paul Giacobbi retorted that opponents of the ratification were guilty of “Carolingian fantasies”, a reference to the Frankish royal dynasty that ruled much of what is now France in the 8th and 9th centuries, and of whom Charlemagne was the key figure. He was later held up as a man who helped shape French identity.
On the radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon from the Parti de Gauche is also an outspoken opponent of the charter. “It's the institutionalisation of sectarianism in defiance of the country’s republican identity,” he wrote in June 2015. On the Right the tone is every bit as lively. The Les Républicains (LR) MP and former advisor to Nicolas Sarkozy, Henri Guaino, recently told Mediapart: “The UMP [editor's note, now LR] MPs who voted to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages are not Republicans. But everyone squares it with their conscience as they see fit.”
Even Parliamentarians on the Right who support the charter might reject the new law out of political calculation. The president of the LR group at the National Assembly, Christian Jacob, has made clear that there is “no question” of voting for the constitutional change. “We're not here to hand gifts to Mr Hollande,” he said, in a reference to the approaching presidential election in 2017. Even the president of the centrist UDI at the Assembly, Philippe Vigier, has said that he considers there are “much more important things to sort out, such as unemployment”. He also points to the cost of holding the special Congress at Versailles, estimated at between 300,000 and one million euros.
“It's going to put pressure on [political] camps. Because voting for a bill [editor’s note, i.e. in January 2014] was no big deal. Now it gets serious,” says Hollande's advisor and friend Bernard Poignant. MP Armand Jung is more optimistic, saying there is “high hope that the debate will be able to remove remaining doubts”. He adds: “No, regional languages don't threaten the Republic, they are a source of richness. In any case it's the last window of opportunity. In a year's time we'll already be too caught up in the presidential election and it will no longer be possible to have a calm debate.”
The timing is also a potentially embarrassing one for the Right, too. For the bill will be debated this autumn in the middle of the campaign for the regional elections that place in December. In certain areas such as Brittany, Corsica, Alsace and the Basque country, the approach taken by LR candidates to the law change could have a major impact on voters. “François Hollande was waiting for the right moment to put forward the bill,” says Paul Molac, an MP for the Breton nationalist party the Union Démocratique Bretonne, and who sits with the green group of MPs at the Assembly. “The issue is pretty much sorted on the Left. And now it has the advantage of representing a banana skin for the Right; apart from Alsace, the regions most to the Left [editor’s note, and thus targets for the Right in the regional elections] are also those that are the most outlying [editor's note, and thus where regional languages tend to be stronger],” he adds with a smile.
Even if the charter gets over the Parliamentary hurdle, François Hollande will only convene a Congress if he is sure of getting the three-fifths majority required. He will not risk losing that vote. When Nicolas Sarkozy introduced constitutional reform in 2008 it only scraped through by two votes, which included the support of former socialist minister Jack Lang. And in any case, even if it does get passed, a law on regional languages will not disguise the bitter failure of the president to reform the country's institutions.
During his campaign François Hollande had pledged an “exemplary Republic” to mark his differences from Nicolas Sarkozy's unkept promise of an “irreproachable Republic”. Hollande wrote in his manifesto: “I want the next presidency to be about state impartiality, integrity on the part of elected representatives and a respect for counter-powers.” To back this up there were almost 15 separate proposals.
Some of those promises have never even made it as far as the cabinet. This is the case with the pledge to give foreign nationals in France a vote in local elections, to change the president's current immunity from criminal procedures, to remove the word “race” from the constitution, and to enshrine secularism and the separation of powers in the constitution. Other promises have been approved by ministers but have gone no further, as they were not likely to be able to command a Parliamentary majority. These include a promise to remove the automatic membership of the Constitutional Council for former presidents, enshrining the role of social justice in the constitution, getting rid of the Cour de la Justice de la République (a court of judges and Parliamentarians which tries ministers or former ministers over alleged offences committed in the exercise of their functions) and reform of the Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature (CSM) which oversees judicial appointments and disciplinary proceedings.
Only the last of these pledges is likely to be put forward for adoption at the special Congress alongside the charter on regional languages. “Two laws, that wouldn't be so bad,” sighs a close advisor of François Hollande.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter