How has President François Hollande fallen so low in popularity? That is the political question on everyone's lips. There are many different answers, some of them hypocritical. The most virulent responses come from those groups that were already hostile to Hollande before his election on May 6th, 2012, even if they voted for him simply to get rid of incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy. But the sheer volume of the opposition and the doubts about President Hollande nonetheless lead to a second question: can the economic “turnaround” that the president is promising today really take place and revive his fortunes?
In reality, he will probably need more than a “turnaround”, and not just an economic one. It will need a Golden Age. A Renaissance. It will take a new era, a resurrection, the kind of economic recovery that has been dreamt of by all presidents in the middle of a crisis since Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in the 1970s, but one which has never materialised. No head of state has ever emerged unscathed from such a level of unpopularity, apart from those periods of “cohabitation” where the president and prime minister are from different parties and it is the latter who takes the flak over the economic situation.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
HATED BY THE RIGHT
As far as the Right is concerned François Hollande was wrong not to have carried out the “reforms” that he is putting forward today from the very start of his presidency. These reforms include the lowering of employer payroll contributions and a reduction in state spending. In their view he suffocated the country by crushing it in taxes before putting the nation in an oxygen tent with a “responsibility pact” that has come too late.
The Right, however, is suffering from amnesia. Ever since the parliamentary elections of June 2012 and even more clearly since his speech on Bastille Day, July 14th, 2012, President Hollande has embarked on the policy which he is now merely expanding upon. From the start he signed a European Union treaty that as a candidate he had promised to reject; and from the start, or almost, he agreed to a rise in value added tax – TVA in French – that he had previously opposed. In the early weeks of his presidency he also rejected the “great tax reform” that he had been promising in the spring of 2012 before his election. And from November 2012 he first announced then implemented recommendations in the Gallois report on business competitiveness that employer payroll charges should be cut. This was in line with the dogma on the importance of “labour costs” that he had previously opposed.
In fact, the Right has poisoned every debate, whether economic or social, such as the proposed criminal law reform by justice minister Christiane Taubira – which has been accused of all manner of failings even though it has not yet been enacted - and the law enabling same-sex marriage. The Right is not critical of François Hollande's record, it is appalled by his very presence in the Elysée. And each “concession” accorded by this “left-wing” president, each pledge acceding to the Right's demands, merely adds fuel to this rejection and hatred.
A more useful approach would be for the Elysée to abandon further measures designed to appease the Right, in order to win its agreement or at least its neutrality, and instead to notice that “reaching out” to the Right has merely led to ever-greater demands. This approach has simply been regarded by the Right as an encouragement to unleash further actions and protests in the hope of winning yet more surrenders.
In fact, Hollande's presidency has met with the standard, tribal hostility from the Right that was encountered under the governments of Léon Blum, prime minister in the 1930s, President François Mitterrand in the 1980s and 1990s and Lionel Jospin, prime minister in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is an automatic opposition by a Right that contests the very legitimacy of the Left, even a markedly watered-down form, to exercise the power that it feels belongs to it. But Hollande himself has increased this antipathy. He has boosted the opposition by giving into it without a fight. It is remarkable how the more the socialist president has taken ownership of the vocabulary of economic liberals, on “structural reforms”, on “labour costs” and on “state spending”, the more he has tightened France's purse strings and the more the Right has accused him of being soft and overly reliant on the state. It is as if this conciliatory president has made his situation worse by not showing any resistance. Or as if, by trying to be flexible in his approach, he has merely strengthened his opponents, to the point where he is branded a “soft touch” when he gives way, and a “dictator” when he sticks to a decision.
ABANDONED BY THE LEFT
In these first two years in office Hollande has not pursued an even-handed approach; he has boosted his opponents but has failed to unite his supporters. He has exasperated the Right while turning the Left against him. Like his predecessors he has encountered the usual ritualised resistance from some on the Left – something which dates back to 1920 and the Tours Congress which saw an historic split in France between, broadly, the communists and the socialists – but he has made them angrier. The mistrust of the “left of the left” towards the “social-democrats”, who have traditionally been denounced as “social traitors” or even “social bastards”, is not something unique to the last two years, but it is now widespread, reaching a section of the green party the EELV and an ever-growing part of the parliamentary group of the Socialist Party.
Of course, François Mitterrand was elected despite an intense campaign from the Communist Party, which in those days was strong enough to attract the support of one in five voters and which accused him of “turning to the right”. And certainly Lionel Jospin suffered the same type of attack despite introducing the 35-hour working week, universal health insurance for all and the civil union known as PACS. But under Hollande the clash between the moderate and radical left has gone much further. He has not just suffered the usual attacks from his opponents on the Left who say they are disappointed by him, as if they had placed all their hopes in the “captain of a pedalo” (1). Hollande has also made an already inevitable sense of disillusion so palpable that it has spread to his allies, the greens, as well as to a large number of his own MPs and senators.
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1. In an interview in November 2011, well before the 2012 elections, the hard-left Front de gauche presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon memorably described his socialist rival François Hollande as a “capitaine de pédalo” in a “saison des tempêtes” meaning the “captain of a pedalo” in a “season of storms”.
Now what?
As a candidate Hollande did not promise much, and certainly no revolution, but now finds himself potentially without an absolute majority in Parliament after the announcement of his 50-million-euro responsibility pact, which was only approved by 32 votes, with 41 socialist MPs abstaining. The vote shows that not only has Hollande lost the Melénchon left – which never believed in him – and dismayed the communist left – which never liked him – he has also seen the back of the greens and upset a fifth of his own socialist MPs.
But where has this scepticism which has turned into irritation and, indeed, open opposition come from? For neither his personal political story – in many ways Hollande is the political heir of former EU commission president and pro-European Jacques Delors – nor his promises (there were not many) could really have led anyone to think that he would behave like anything other than someone of the centre-left. If there were any misunderstandings about what Hollande would stand for when in office it doubtless stemmed from his speech at Le Bourget, near Paris, in January 2012 during his campaign. On that occasion Hollande went down well with his audience by conjuring up an adversary – finance – and promising to resist it, to the extent of finding “another way”. France, he said, would never allow others to dictate its policies.
After the parliamentary elections in June 2012, though, it turned out that France wasn't resisting anything at all. After a few rhetorical flourishes on July 14th over the fate of the PSA Peugeot Citroën car-making plant at Aulnay-sous-Bois, near Paris, the president decided he would no longer have an adversary. In a stated desire to listen and to bring about national unity, he yielded to liberal economic demands, by incorporating its vocabulary on taxes and compulsory social contributions as if, little by little, the enemy was no longer “finance” but had now become the “payslip”.
The “alternative voice” which was supposed to have been France's, and which would have spoken with and through countries from southern Europe, ended up incorporating the famous TINA message of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s: “There Is No Alternative”. It has reached the point where François Hollande is no longer expecting his salvation to come from his own polices but from a global economic recovery that will kick-start Europe and provoke in France the “turnaround” that the president has recently been talking about.
The man who once promised to resist has become the man who wants to be the model pupil so he will be rewarded by “economic circumstances” when the results start to show. He is the man who now wants to depoliticise the debate in 2014 and to reduce it to technical issues, having raised up political hopes in the spring of 2012. This is the great equivocator, the man who chooses as his new prime minister Manuel Valls, who is reputedly a master technician but who is also widening the gap between Hollande the candidate and Hollande the president.
Does his gamble have any chance of working? In other words, can the president of the Republic re-establish himself thanks to an economic “turnaround”? Nothing can be discounted, but it seems highly improbable. The economic crisis in France has lasted a long time, it has been spoken about since 1973 and the days of the oil crisis. One can even ask if the crisis is a passing event or a permanent state, a state of disorder – or perhaps the natural orders of things. And one can wonder if talk of the “end of the crisis” is a reasonable hope or simply a children's story.
At each of his rallies during his victorious campaign in 1981 François Mitterrand showed a short and cruel film. It featured his opponent Valéry Giscard d'Estaing though today it could equally apply to Hollande. In the film the president, who looks more and more defeated each time, announces every six months that the “light at the end of the tunnel” is in sight. In fact what was in sight was the incumbent president's own political exit.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter