Since the launch of his campaign to become next year’s presidential candidate for the French conservative opposition party Les Républicains, former French prime minister Alain Juppé has developed tactics that have more than a passing resemblance to those current socialist president François Hollande employed in his bid for power four years ago. There are the same words, the same opponent, and the same aim.
Hollande promised a “normal” presidency and an “exemplary” government, in opposition to outgoing president Nicolas Sarkozy’s bling-bling lifestyle and corruption-plagued term of office. Sarkozy, now head of the Républicains party, is Juppé’s principal rival for becoming the conservatives’ candidate in the elections next year, a rivalry that will be decided in the party’s primary elections this autumn.
Ten rivals are now running to become the mainstream Right party’s candidate in primaries that will be held between November 20th and 27th. While the dark horse is former agriculture minister Bruno Le Maire, a 46-year-old who is now highlighting his generational difference with the ‘old guard’, it is Juppé, who will turn 71 this summer, who is riding high, well above his rivals, in opinion polls.
For foreign observers, his popularity may appear surprising. In 2004, Juppé was convicted for his part in the misappropriation of public funds in a wide-ranging case into how Paris city hall, when former president Jacques Chirac - under who he served as prime minister - was mayor of the capital, was used to employ officials of the then-conservative party, the RPR (later the UMP, now renamed Les Républicains), via the city hall payroll. He was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence, and stripped of his civic rights for five years, reduced to 14 months and one year respectively on appeal. After which Juppé left France for Canada, where he took up an academic post in Montréal.
Juppé, who in 2006 regained his seat as mayor of Bordeaux, returned to government under Sarkozy’s presidency when he was appointed foreign minister in 2011. His positioning now as the conservative contender for the presidency in elections due in 2017 clearly represents for him an ultimate comeback for a man who was regarded by many political observers as the man who paid for Chirac’s corrupt system at Paris city hall.
Now, like Hollande during the socialist primaries in 2011, Juppé is in the lead in opinion surveys and, like Hollande, this is despite a markedly uncharismatic image. Like Hollande, Juppé refuses to rise to Sarkozy’s frequent commentating on all and any subjects making headline news, preferring to set his own agenda of what he identifies as the fundamental issues facing the country.
François Hollande’s time in office may now be marked by the trampling under foot of his election pledges and slogans, but Hollande’s election campaign strategy was nevertheless a success. “It didn’t prove too bad for him,” agreed Gilles Boyer, Juppé’s campaign director, when presented with the comparison. But he was keen to underplay any likening of the two. "To compare the two men is to understand little about them," he said. "The worst mistake would be to look at what others have done in order to copy them. Campaigns are different according to political periods. The anti-Sarkozy line won’t work twice."
That last observation is questionable. The backing Juppé enjoys to become his party’s presidential election candidate is, for a number of supporters, also – if not above primarily – because Sarkozy is unpopular. Which helps to explain why those among Juppé’s close circle were quick to insist on Sarkozy’s right, before a trial, to be presumed innocent when he was placed under investigation in the probe into his 2012 election campaign spending, and why they also insist that Sarkozy should naturally stand for the primaries. For without him, the race would not be the same.
While Hollande, during the 2011 socialist primaries, could claim a degree of policy differences to his rivals, Juppé is a man of the Right, with right-wing ideas, and a right-wing programme, and whose means of differentiating himself from his rival lies in the clear clash of their public images.
“When you take the propositions on immigration put forward by [close Sarkozy ally and former French interior minister] Brice Hortefeux and [those of] Alain Juppé, they say much the same thing,” observed Benoist Apparu, a Républicains party Member of Parliament (MP) and key ally of Juppé. “On the other hand, they don’t say it in the same manner. It’s the tone that changes.”
Juppé’s policy coordinators are Hervé Gaymard, a former minister under Jacques Chirac’s presidency, and Pierre-Mathieu Duhamel, who was Juppé’s chief of staff during his 1995-1997 term as prime minister. “Within the Right and centre-right, there are far fewer splits over ideas than there were in the Socialist Party at the time of their [2011] primaries,” commented Gaymard. “With us, it’s the tessitura of the political voice that will count for a lot.”
Like Juppé, Gaymard’s career is also clouded by scandal, notably, but not only, over the revelations that, after his appointment as economy minister under President Chirac in 2004, he had the use of a 600-square-metre apartment close to the Champs-Elysée, the rent of which was paid by public funds, depite the fact that Gaymard was the owner of several properties in the capital, including a large Left Bank apartment. The revelation, by weekly French investigative and satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé, ended his ministerial career.
A comparison of the economic policy programme presented by Juppé and Sarkozy shows that they are in agreement on a significant number of issues, including fading out unemployment benefit payments after an individual has been jobless for 12 months, the abolition of the ISF wealth tax (applicable to households with assets of 1.3 million euros or more), the non-replacement of one-in-two civil servant posts left vacant after retirement and the company-by-company negotiations by management and unions over weekly working hours.
It is therefore in a battle of style and manner that Juppé and Sarkozy will present their differences, and it is here that appears the convergence between Juppé and François Hollande.
While Sarkozy remains persuaded, despite the defeat in his 2012 re-election bid, that victory comes by driving divisions (in Brice Horetefeux’s words - “you don’t win through the centre, but rather by dividing”), Juppé has adopted the same strategy as Hollande did four years ago. But as for Hollande’s adopted image as a “normal president”, in opposition to Sarkozy’s loud bling-bling style , Juppé refutes the suggestion that he is painting the same image of someone “normal”: “How can you expect me to use that word?” he asked during an October 2014 interview with French public TV channel France 2. “It is heavy with meaning since [Hollande’s election in] 2012. I am, quite simply, someone who feels well about himself.”
- The same strategy (for the first round)
Throughout the 2011 Socialist Party primaries to elect a candidate for the 2012 presidential elections, François Hollande remained the front runner in opinion polls, far ahead of party veteran and left-winger Martine Aubry, despite the fact that she garnered more support than Hollande among MPs. At the time, Hollande was careful to downplay the lead. “I believe that one must be serene,” he told TV channel TF1 in October 2011. “No opinion poll has elected a candidate, and those who believed in opinion polls, and who saw themselves elected before the event, have been disillusioned.”
Hollande’s campaign team for the primaries made no secret of their strategy of fishing wide for votes among the 2.5 million who took part in the poll, spreading the net beyond the core Left, unlike his rival Martine Aubry. “The strategy is that of designating the best-placed [candidate] to beat [incumbent president] Nicolas Sarkozy,” explained then Manuel Flam, Hollande’s senior campaign advisor.
Four years later, Alain Juppé is following the exact same approach. While he is quick to point out that “opinion surveys are a photo of the precise moment, and that does not preclude what happens at the precise moment plus one”, he also takes advantage of his current lead in the surveys to shape his image as the best-placed candidate to beat François Hollande in 2017. “Among the factors involved in the voting, there is obviously the desire to hand victory in the primaries to the candidate who can win the presidential election,” said Benoist Apparu.
“Juppé is an ideal candidate for all those, and they are numerous, who don’t want a return match of Hollande v. Sarkozy,” commented his colleague Hervé Gaymard. “We’re not snubbing the current balance of strength, but we’re remaining cautious.”
Mirroring Hollande’s tactic in the socialist primaries of 2011, Juppé addresses an electorate in the primaries that is much wider than the largely pro-Sarkozy hardcore of the conservative Les Républicains party. In an interview published in February 2015 by regional daily Sud-Ouest, Juppé was clear on the subject. “It will be about rallying the widest possible [electorate],” he said. “If there are 500,000 voters, Nicolas Sarkozy will have all his chances [of winning]. If there are three million, I will have all my chances.”
- The same vocabulary
In a speech in Marseille in March 2012, during the presidential election campaign, Hollande presented himself as “the candidate of coherence, consistency, of confidence”. Four years later, Alain Juppé is campaigning with the keywords “conciliate, rally together, reform”, to which he regularly adds those of “coherence” and “confidence”. While there is no great surprise that two candidates for the presidency use a similar all-things-to-all-men vocabulary, what is of importance is that they both employ the terms to better illustrate the weaknesses of their opponents.
For to talk of “conciliation” in face of Sarkozy is to highlight how the latter adds a certain hysteria into political debates. To talk of “coherence” is to underline Sarkozy’s recurrent U-turns, and “confidence” recalls the degree to which the former president disappointed so many who voted him into office in 2007. While Juppé insists his combat is to end “the experience of the socialist government” and the “pernicious ideas” of the far-right Front National party, all of his utterances point a damning finger at Sarkozy’s image.
In an interview published in January in the French bi-monthly magazine Society, Juppé said that what separated himself from Sarkozy was “essentially a difference of temperament”. But it is also their use of words. While “anguish”, “fear” and “threat” are recurrent in speeches by Sarkozy, his rival plays upon what former French prime minister and Juppé ally, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, likes to call “the positive attitude”. While Sarkozy’s approach is aggressive, Juppé borrows the theme of benevolence, which he claims to have adopted from the years he spent in Canada where, he said, “the other is not necessarily an opponent”.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
While Sarkozy shares with right-wing thinker Alain Finkielkraut the observation that France is plunged into an “unhappy identity” crisis, Juppé talks up the notion of a “happy identity”. In his interview with Society he said: “I’m well aware that we’re not all happy today, that there are tensions everywhere. But do I have the right to propose to my fellow citizens an “unhappy identity”? A happy identity is not an observation, it’s an aim.”
Juppé claims to have learnt the lessons of his attempted blunt reforms, notably of the social security system, when prime minister between 1995 and 1997, and which prompted huge street protests. “I have changed and I have understood that it is necessary to first listen, consult, reach agreement on a reform,” he told radio station Europe 1 in January, in what was yet another example of distancing himself from Sarkozy.
- The same orthodoxy
During his presidential election campaign, François Hollande refused to allow his manifesto to be muddled by reactions to events in the news. “In this campaign, I’m always asked if I haven’t got a proposition to add,” he said at a meeting in Nice in March 2012. “I had the desire to present 60 propositions and 60 pledges, and to go about things in order that the French clearly know what is the direction of the action that I wish to lead.”
His approach distanced him from his principal rival for the presidency, outgoing president Nicolas Sarkozy, who, firstly as a minister and later while head of state had made his hallmark that of introducing or reforming laws in reaction to passing events in the news. Now, as leader of the Républicains party, he continues on the same line, firing off proposition after proposition in reaction to headlines.
“We are campaigning at our own rhythm,” said Juppé’s campaign director Gilles Boyer. By refusing to react to every major news event, unlike most of his conservative rivals, Juppé differentiates himself from his principal opponent. “The advantage Juppé has in the opinion surveys allows us to master the tempo,” said Benoist Apparu. “We can disconnect from daily news events and concentrate on the essential.”
Avoiding rushed reactions and over-exposure in the media, Juppé has chosen to set out his programme in a series of books (the first was on education, to be followed in May with the publication of another on economic and social issues, and in September another described as a “more personal” work). His campaign team are working on the publication, mostly via the internet, of some 15 small essays on subjects that include farming and culture, aimed at what they call “opinion makers”.
“It’s certain that if he had chosen to write a confiding book, with empty phrases, anecdotes and introspection, I think the numbers sold would have been higher,” said Boyer in an interview with France Inter radio, in a veiled comparison with a book recently published by Sarkozy. “Juppé said less about himself because he’s less of an egoist,” commented Gaymard.
- The same claim to give “priority to the young”
François Hollande made a priority in his policy programme of the future of the young. “Will the young be living better in 2017 than in 2012?”, asked Hollande, referring to the five-year presidency he was bidding for, at an election campaign meeting at Le Bourget, close to Paris, in January 2012. “I ask to be judged on this one pledge, on this truth alone, on this one promise.” By imposing this as the theme of his campaign, Hollande offered hope for the Left and prevented Sarkozy from steering the debate to questions such as immigration, national identity and border security.
Juppé, four years on and now himself facing up to Sarkozy’s recurrent themes, is more or less adopting the same approach. His first book, Mes chemins pour l’école, sets out his intention of making education his priority, what he calls “the mother of all reforms”.
He has multiplied his conferences in the elite higher education institutions, les grandes écoles, while giving interviews to niche publications such as the magazines Inrocks and Society. In what Boyer now sees as a faux pas, Juppé launched an “appeal to the young” from a bar in a working-class district of Paris, joining in a game of ‘beer pong’ (see video below) with members of his young supporters group ‘Les Jeunes avec Juppé’, and which was widely relayed on the social media. “It wasn’t in the script and I wouldn’t have done it because it’s not him,” said Boyer.
But beyond this, the number of young supporters he is attracting is something of a surprise. How is it that this 70-year-old mayor of Bordeaux, who, apart from his two years as prime minister in the mid 1990s, has served numerous ministerial posts under presidents François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac and also Nicolas Sarkozy (as foreign minister), can be seen by the young as representing the future? How can the man whose reforms as prime minister in 1995 prompted a mass movement of strikes and street protests be seen by them as their next champion? “Because he has the stature of a head of state,” observed Gilles Boyer.
Boyer cites the mobilisation behind Juppé of 200 young supporters’ committees across France. “Many of them had never been engaged in politics until now,” he said. “Those who are less than 40-years-old did not live through 1995. But in any case, that episode brings to his credit the fact of having been courageous. It gives the impression of a guy who had made the proper diagnostic before everybody else.”
- The same low-key approach
It is a fact that Alain Juppé, like François Hollande, is not known for his capacity to excite crowds. Unlike Nicolas Sarkozy, who delights his fans at every meeting, Juppé is somewhat distant. "He is very, very cold, he doesn’t attract people," commented Jacques Chirac’s wife Bernadette in September 2014. “I am someone who calls upon reflection rather than feverishness,” was Juppé’s response one month later.
Enlargement : Illustration 4
“It’s certain that Sarko will always be better at placing 5,000 hysterical people in a meeting hall, but is that what really counts?” asked a source close to Juppé. “If the French want to elect a street salesman in 2017, it won’t be Juppé.” Similarly, in March 2012, Hollande, campaigning for the presidency, said that he preferred to win the election “with a little less enthusiasm than to lose it with greater fervour”.
Juppé’s allies insist that, unlike Sarkozy, he can go anywhere without being barracked, in working class districts, amid farmers, or a migrant camp in Calais. Support for Juppé is discreet, but there. According to Boyer, there is a “flow of requests from intellectuals and experts who want to work on his project”, which he says number between 300 and 400. Juppé’s movement ‘Le Cap AJ pour la France’ has collected to date 1.8 million euros, and his team hope to reach a total of 3 million euros in donations by the end of the year.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse