Last Monday, 6th May, was the first anniversary of François Hollande's election victory but they were not getting out the candles at the Elysée Palace. The Fifth Republic's second socialist president instead held a scheduled seminar with government ministers. Hollande urged them to “make good use of their time” while waiting for the structural “reforms” the government has carried out to “profoundly change the face of France”. The president told them: “It's down to the government to make good use of this time. Now is not the time to rein in but on the contrary to accelerate. It's not simply the time to defend our performance but to go on the offensive. A year is a short time, but four years [editor's note, the remainder of the president's five-year term of office] isn't long.”
There was, in any case, no real appetite for celebration with the president’s popularity at its lowest, with the government accused of implementing austerity measures, with the economy on the brink of recession and with a thousand people added to the jobless total every day.
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Faced with this depressing reality, the government often appears divided and gives the impression of going nowhere fast, even though it has all the powers of the state at its disposal. Even more seriously, it gives the impression that it doesn't know where it is heading. “There are four years to go, what are we going to do?” is a question that is being posed in various government ministries. The Cahuzac affair and its explosive denouement have managed to give this relatively new government the air of an administration in its final days.
In August last year, at their annual gathering under the sun at La Rochelle on the west coast of France, members of the Socialist Party met and took a little time off to reflect. “Don't be in such a hurry!” was one message. “The media and the French public, you have to wean yourselves off the Sarkozy way!” was another, in reference to the previous president Nicolas Sarkozy who was noted for his 'hyper' style.
The party needed the time out, as the start of the presidency had been difficult. The key note speech on government policy by prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault had disappointed and Parliament had not been very active in July. The summer was marked by the expulsion of Roma gypsy migrants, a curious signal for the government to give barely three months after the Left's victory, given that it was a controversial and widely condemned policy closely associated with President Sarkozy. The party delegates at La Rochelle were promised that the presidency was going to move on to another phase, calm the mood in the country and work towards the “change” that François Hollande had promised.
They are still waiting. The expressions “hiccups”, “shambles” and “lack of authority” have often been deployed by commentators and headline writers. These are media shorthand to describe the Hollande government's genuine fragility. How can one explain the sense that nothing is happening when ministers are doing their job and Parliament has voted through 35 laws since July, not including international conventions? How can one explain the feeling that the government has no sense of direction?
When the former Socialist Party first secretary Martine Aubry was competing with François Hollande in the party's primary election to be the presidential candidate, she said of his policies: “When there's vagueness, that's when there is a problem (1).” That problem is still there. François Hollande defines himself as a social democrat but more than anything he seems to carry out reforms as he goes along, here a measure in favour of employers, there a symbolic social measure to please the Left. Like the party boss that at heart he still remains, he is careful never to make his direction clear.
“We're clearly not talking about another Nicolas Sarkozy,” says Pascal Durand, national secretary of the green alliance Europe Écologie – Les Verts (EELV) which has two ministers in the government. “But where are the structural reforms leading to a real change of direction? I don't see them,” he says. “What's stopping them?”
At all levels of the government this kind of question is continually being asked. Mediapart here seeks to understand “what is stopping them” by producing a kind of tour map of the various constituent parts of the socialist administration that is not working. It is Mediapart's attempt to interpret a year in which François Hollande has (almost) completely failed.
A mandate for change?
“I am no longer a socialist president I am a head of the French state,” said François Hollande during a television appearance in late March. The words depressed many socialist parliamentarians but they reflect the president's frame of mind. François Hollande wants to be seen as the president of compromise who calms things down after the Sarkozy years.
His taste for compromise – tried and tested after ten years of trying to control the competing factions in the Socialist Party (PS) – was strengthened by the circumstances of his election a year ago when he won with around 51.6% of the vote. “The balance of power doesn’t favour us,” says François Rebsamen, president of the socialist group in the Senate and a close ally of the president. “It doesn't favour us in Europe. The president’s victory was close. And straight away there was the continuing economic crisis, a parting of the ways between the Left and the protest left [editor's note, for example the radical left Parti de gauche founded by Jean-Luc Mélenchon) which is not in the government and which doesn't support it. You have to deal with that. In those circumstances it's not wrong to be tactically smart. You have to get round obstacles, not by disowning your beliefs but by knowing when to pull back.”
Even if this means no longer talking to your own side while giving the impression of striving towards economic policies similar to those espoused in the centre of French politics, such as by François Bayrou. Or when the president receives at the Elysée those who oppose same-sex marriage, even if this gives their protest legitimacy.
Although the Left talks of boldness, courage and bringing about major change in both France and Europe, François Hollande believes that his victory on 6th May 2012 was based more on anti-Sarkozism than on an ideological rejection of the Right. And that fighting a cultural or ideological battle is difficult in a France that is turning in on itself and shifting to the Right. Therefore the head of state is more concerned about the areas of urban sprawl around large towns and cities and other areas where the far-right Front national is making inroads, and likes to think of his tone as very republican and inclusive in nature.
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1. The rhyming French expression that Aubry used was: “Quand c'est flou, c'est qu'il y a un loup”, meaning literally that when things are vague, there is a wolf about. The expression, which Aubry attributed to her grandmother, caused a certain amount of puzzlement among some French commentators, with one calling it “obscure and ambiguous” though it has since been picked up and used in other contexts.
According to François Hollande, the majority of the French public expect him to adopt a 'centrist' position. Even at the risk of having to accept a breach with the Left. “There is a fault line between social democracy that accepts the market [economy] and the anti-liberals,” explains one of his advisers. “It's a choice that the European social democrat parties made a long time ago but in France the PS has never completely broken with anti-liberalism. That's what makes the task harder for us.”
And even if a section of the electorate on the Left could punish the PS for its social democratic stance, “there is no alternative” insists the Elysée. According to someone close to the president “we're faced with a structural choice, as we were in the 1980s. Either we follow the European model and go down the path of debt reduction and competitiveness, and a section of the left of the Left refuses. Or we make a more radical choice and a section of the moderate socialist electorate doesn't go along with it.” The insider adds: “The wager is that no head of government can make this second choice. Political power will always alternate between the Left and the Right. It will never alternate between François Hollande and Jean-Luc Mélenchon [editor's note, in other words, swap between different factions of the Left].”
Problem number one: François Hollande.
“The real problem lies in the one thing we cannot change.” The comment from an adviser is cruel but accurately reflects what is being said in the corridors of power; that the problem is, first of all, Hollande himself. Especially since the former “normal president” has now taken it on himself to be more prominent and assertive, thinking that's what both the institutions of the Fifth Republic and the media demand of him.
What causes the problem is firstly his method. As president, Hollande remains true to the reputation he gained as first secretary of the PS; the dithering, the taking of compartmentalised advice from different people. And then the compromises, with a decision that drops at the last moment to tackle that which, the president believes, the political situation requires. “He tacks,” says the socialist MP Colette Capdevielle. Like those boat skippers who, sailing into the wind, start zigzagging...at the risk of leaving everyone all at sea.
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There are many examples. For ten days government ministries waited for the decision from the Elysée on the much-anticipated issue of whether it would back legislation granting an amnesty for trade unionists convicted of crimes committed during disputes, something the Left had been hoping for and expecting. When it finally came the decision was announced on the radio by Alain Vidalies, the minister for relations between the government and Parliament, whose statement that the government would not support the amnesty came on the very morning that the proposal, already adopted by the Senate and due to go to the National Assembly, was in committee stage.
Similar dithering took place over the case of the Florange steel works in north-east France which led to open warfare between the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and the minister for productive recovery Arnaud Montebourg for want of clear refereeing of the dispute by the Elysée, and over the removal of the French version of the 'three strikes' law for repeat offenders introduced under Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. In the end the Elystée decided that the law would be scrapped, but only when other measures to combat repeat offenders had been found. Another example came over the issue of whether lesbian couples should get access to medically-assisted procreation by in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination. Hollande initially said nothing, let socialist parliamentarians add it to the legislation on same-sex marriage and adoption, then decided to remove it from that law.
When France under Hollande last year finally and officially recognised there had been a massacre of Algerian protesters in Paris on 17th October 1961 that decision, too, was made at the last minute and issued in an official statement. It was the same with France's backing for Palestine's bid for United Nations status, a decision on which came after weeks of hesitation and despite the heavy lobbying of some close advisers.
François Hollande does, however, know how to make a decision when outside events force him. This was the case, for example, over his approval for the war in Mali or the move to force parliamentarians to publish their financial assets which was decided in his office on the very evening that former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac admitted having a Swiss bank account. That decision was made at the risk of upsetting members of the National Assembly and the Senate.
But the problem with the head of state is also a political one. For a long time ministers themselves misread the situation. The supporters of a more leftish approach by the government happily attacked the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, the man they see as embodying the austerity policies, thinking they were defending President Hollande's position. “Frankly, at Cabinet meetings, the one who's most to the Left is often Hollande,” said one minister last autumn. Several of them - housing minister Cécile Duflot, minister for productive recovery Arnaud Montebourg and education minister Vincent Peillon – preferred to go directly to the president to deal with their demands. Afterwards, they became disenchanted and grasped that even if François Hollande had made a deal with all sections of the PS and the greens, he is first and foremost a social democrat.
In truth, Hollande and Ayrault are two sides of the same coin, both in search of compromise at the risk of becoming bland and refusing to act. But they are also the harbingers of a social democracy that is neither really defined nor really modern. “I understand that the room for manoeuvre is small and that it's difficult to carry out left-wing policies...but what's our narrative?” asks Philippe Martin, a socialist MP for the Gers département – broadly equivalent to a county – in south-west France. “For the last ten years in opposition we've carried out posture politics without formulating an alternative plan for society. During that time the world's moved on. And we've arrived in power with criteria dating from the 19th and 20th centuries. With a slogan of 'growth' and a figure of '3%' [editor's note, meaning a public spending deficit that is at or below 3% of gross domestic product].”
The prime minister's office, Matignon
The prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault is accused of being the more conservative of the executive 'couple' and has for some time been the focus of anger from MPs and certain ministers. But he has also attracted endless media scrutiny in which he is portrayed as a weak link. In the PS parliamentary party members drone on endlessly about the premier's immediate entourage, which is not considered to be very effective, about the prime minister's laboured speeches and mediocre talents as a speaker, his terrible handling of public relations – he has recently reorganised his communications team – and so on. Yet while a government reshuffle is on the cards for the coming weeks, Jean-Marc Ayrault's position is less under threat then ever.
In reality, Matignon - the prime minister’s official residence and office – is not working so badly. It is constantly making decisions on all kinds of issues. But well as being swamped by day to day events, the real problem with Matignon lies in the balance of powers that was established when France's Fifth Republic was created in 1958. “Being at Matignon is a painful experience, there's always been a sadomasochist relationship with the [president's official residence and offices] Elysée,” explains one minister. If Ayrault and Hollande are often following the same political line, it is the Elysée that is pushing those policies and which retains the upper hand in terms of the relative powers of those two institutions. This is because the presidential system, the electoral pressure of having a five-year term as president and the demands and expectations of the media all serve to shape this relationship.
At a result, nothing gets decided without the say-so of the 'Château', as the Elysée is sometimes referred to in government circles. At the start of this government inter-ministerial meetings took place without any representative from the Elysée being present, on the orders of the head of state himself. But this arrangement had to be changed. Now it is sometimes the case that ministries are less represented at ministerial meetings than Matignon and the Elysée. “I've already been in meetings where there were five people from the Elysée and six from Matignon! I've never seen that,” says a senior civil servant who was already in post under Nicolas Sarkozy. The result, very often, is that “nothing gets decided”.
The government
“There are as many voices as there are ministers,” says one adviser. In fact, the government is made up a bit like the national committee of the Socialist Party, with its heavyweights – or 'elephants' as they are often termed – its invisible members and its different factions. There are pure Hollande supporters, trusted supporters who are keepers of the flame – for example employment minister Michel Sapin, defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, budget minister Bernard Cazeneuve and agriculture minister Stéphane Le Foll. There is also a group of ministers “of the Left”, even though there are varying tones even differences between them, for example justice minister Christiane Taubira, social economy minister Benoît Hamon, Duflot and Montebourg, some of whom have openly spoken out against the policy of austerity.
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One MP lists the ministers who do not seem to serve any great purpose - crafts, trade, and tourism minister Sylvia Pinel, higher education minister Geneviève Fioraso, overseas territories minister Victorin Lurel and war veterans minister Kader Arif, while environment boss Delphine Batho is a senior minister of whom one sees little. There are some who are accused of focussing on their own PR above all else, for example digital economy minister Fleur Pellerin, whose much-publicised visit to South Korea in March did not go down well with all MPs. Then there are those figures who are thinking to the future – Manuel Valls, Peillon or Montebourg – and who sometimes dissociate themselves from the prime minister.
Above all, there are several divergent political lines among the ministerial team. In October ministers were divided over plans for a “competitiveness shock” to help French businesses. The differences are also very clear over the question of austerity and the attitude to adopt towards Angela Merkel's Germany. At the finance ministry the old rivalry between Montebourg and finance minister Pierre Moscovici is endless, from squabbling over plans for a public investment bank to the recent affair in which Yahoo wanted to buy Dailymotion, a sale blocked by the minister for productive recovery in the name of defending a “French gem”.
These rows are generally interpreted as another “hiccup” or a sign of the prime minister's “lack of authority”. That is the recurring criticism of certain sections of the media and a favourite argument used by the Right, but it is also the refrain of several senior socialists who regularly urge Jean-Marc Ayrault to “make an example” by dismissing a minister who steps out of line.
Some of those close to him say that Ayrault has sometimes thought about doing so. But François Hollande has been against it. After the Cahuzac affair he did not want to have an immediate, rushed reshuffle. However, a change of the ministerial team is on the cards for later this year, and will apparently take place between the “end of May and September”. According to someone close to François Hollande it will not reduce the number of ministers from 38 – as some have suggested – but will instead reorganise the major ministries and their responsibilities so that each one has just one boss. This will remove the need for Matignon to get involved in some minor disputes and decisions, and avoid squabbles.
“The reshuffle should be based around a ministerial structure that gives more visibility to the work that is being carried out,” says a source close to the president. “At the moment there are 38 individuals who meet with Matignon. We have done an enormous number of things. But in an emergency each of the ministers is like a mole that has built its own tunnel. At the end they poke their heads out, and the question is: is there a network of tunnels? Matignon needs to be given more time to run them. Because it's there that the work must take place. It's down to Jean-Marc to do it.”
The ruling parliamentary majority
On 25 April Socialist Party MPs went off on holiday for two weeks. The general view was that it was a much-needed break. For in recent weeks the mood in the socialist group – which has an absolute majority in its own right in the National Assembly - has become very bad. On top of the feeling that as MPs they do not serve much purpose in a Republic where everything stems from the highest levels of the state and the cold anger of voters they face in their constituencies, there came the explosive and destabilising Cahuzac affair.
As for policy differences, these have started to surface now after the episodes involving the “competitiveness shock” and the agreement reached between employers and some trade unions which dismayed a number of socialist MPs who nonetheless preferred not to voice their concerns in public. In addition, many of them do not appreciate the executive's desire to make them publish – as opposed to simply declaring them to parliamentary officials – their financial assets. “We're scapegoats,” complain some.
Warned about the executive's plans on publishing assets at the last minute, the socialist president of the National Assembly Claude Bartolone led the attack against this aspect of transparency. To such effect that one could even imagine that it was Jean-Marc Ayrault himself who leaked the photograph of Bartolone's beautiful house at Les Lilas in the eastern suburbs of Paris to the magazine Le Canard enchaîné...
“At the moment there is no [government] majority for this legislation,” warn those close to Bartolone, who is on very poor terms with some of the prime minister's advisers. For its part Matignon has hinted - without really believing that it will use it - that to get the transparency law passed it could resort to invoking Article 49.3 of the French Constitution, which in certain circumstances allows the government to force a measure through parliament.
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In addition to all these complaints, MPs also feel that they are not sufficiently regarded, complain that they don't get a reply when they try to contact ministers and say they do not get enough notice when ministers visit their constituencies. “There's been a profusion of legislation that's been badly handled, there needs to be a new link between Parliament and the government,” says the Hollande loyalist MP Gwendal Rouillard.
François Hollande had promised when he was a candidate that as president he would not host his party's MPs and senators at the Elysée. But they complained, and so over the last few weeks the Elysée has organised three meetings with handpicked parliamentarians. The first such meeting, revealed by Le Canard enchaîné, took place on 19th April and involved around ten parliamentarians, including MPs Seybah Dagoma and Pascal Popelin and senator Bariza Khiari. “The French people don't know where you are leading them,” Khiari reportedly told the president. “They have to be told. They must be reassured. And that, that's your job François.” There have since been two more meetings. “He listened,” said one person present. On each occasion he “got it in the neck” says another.
The socialist majority in the National Assembly has a number of divisions which are now starting to become visible. Some young members elected for the first time in the euphoria of last summer's parliamentary elections want to make a name for themselves and use the media, something which exasperates the party's old guard. The left wing of the part is making its voice heard, abstaining or voting against certain government legislation, actions that exasperate other MPs, all the more so as these acts of disobedience go unpunished. Some MPs who disagree with the government’s line are even starting not to turn up for votes.
The situation is a little different in the Senate, the upper house of parliament. This is partly because its president, Jean-Pierre Bel, has a very low profile, unlike his National Assembly counterpart Bartolone, who is a very visible figure in national political debates. Bel, the first socialist to preside over the Senate – the Left won a majority for the first time in the Senate’s history in 2011 – is most notable for his absence, as he spends part of the week in his constituency in the Pyrénées in southern France. “What's the name of the president of the upper chamber again?” jokes one socialist MP. Yet it is Bel who would be called upon to stand in for the president if that were to be necessary, as his job makes him number three in the French constitutional hierarchy.
But most importantly, the Senate seems to have become a place for giving voice to a conservative side to Hollandism. For example, in March socialist senators voted to end paying family allowances to families that have lost custody of their children following a court ruling, in doing so going against the prime minister’s recommendation. It was Hollande's close ally François Rebsamen who led the revolt against the government's bid to stop politicians holding more than one elected position at a time, although he heads the socialist group in the Senate.
And it is the party's regional barons in the Senate who have led the opposition to the government's draft bill on decentralisation, forcing it to divide the bill into three separate texts. There is no guarantee that all three will be voted through. “A victory for conservative attitudes,” says one supporter of the plans.
This is all complicated by the fact that the Communist Party, whose handful of senators bolster the Left's slim Senate majority, are using it as a forum for their political opposition to the government's rigorous budget policies. However, this does not seem to worry the executive, which is convinced that the Senate will in any case swing back to the Right in elections in 2014.
New government, same civil servants
Hollande himself is a pure product of the most elite parts of the French system. He graduated from the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), where the top echelons of French government and industry learn the exercise of power, networking and running France's complex system of administration. He served at the Cour des Comptes, the French audit court that surveys the legitimacy of public finances.
Hollande brought people from his graduation class at ENA with him to the Elysée Palace – like Sylvie Hubac, his chief of staff, and secretary-general of the Elysée Pierre-René Lemas. But, in fact, most heads of staff in ministries were educated at ENA. And despite the change of government, the same people, the technocrats, still hold the levers of power. One Hollande adviser said last autumn that he was worried by the lack of policy inventiveness in the ministerial offices after the public sector cutbacks seen during the Sarkozy years. “They cut the administration to the bone, there is no longer any slack allowing you to think beyond the day-to-day,” he says. “There are too many 'technocrats', almost nothing but. As a result we are too management-oriented, there's no one to come up with new public policies...”
Moreover, most senior civil servants appointed by the previous government are still in their jobs, chief among them Serge Lasvignes, whose position and influence as secretary general of the government is like that of a behind-the-scenes prime minister. He was appointed to the post in 2006 by then prime minister Dominique de Villepin.
Many consider this tenured crème-de-la-crème civil servant, who talks to ministers on equal terms and whose office is in Matignon's VIP wing, to be slowing down the more audacious reforms. Some suspect he has even left glitches in some draft bills, leading to the Constitutional Council, France's constitutional court which ensures that laws conform to the constitution, rapping the government over the knuckles.
The same phenomenon can be seen in the country at large. Socialist parliamentarians note that local police chiefs or heads of regional health authorities appointed by the previous government do little to defend Hollande's policies. “We've had a new police chief on board for a few weeks, he's marvellous, he talks about the jobs of the future! The previous one talked about [the 8th century AD Holy Roman Emperor] Charlemagne," says one socialist MP.
In fact, the executive did not want to axe too many Sarkozy appointees so as to avoid “roughing up” the civil service as the previous president was said to have done, to avoid being seen to conduct a witch-hunt or to impose a “Socialist Party state”. For the same reason it also rejected making multiple appointments of officials who would be more favourable to its political positions.
Some say this is praiseworthy while others see it as a sign of weakness, and some in Hollande's own camp openly criticise it. “After ten years of right-wing rule, the pool of senior civil servants on the Left had dried up and we had to start from scratch,” says the head of a ministerial office who is also a Socialist Party member.
The same civil servant also says that, in several ministries, the new government has found it difficult to get cooperation from heads of departments in some ministries. “At first we did not want to take action against them. We were too nice. Since then they have taken advantage of that.”
This phenomenon is most in evidence at the finance ministry, where the treasury section, a haven of economic and budgetary orthodoxy, rules the roost. The current policy of budgetary rigour only reinforces this state of affairs. And it has real consequences: a law regulating banks was seriously watered down. Nor can it be said that the ministry has been on the ball in the past few months in the fight against financial speculation.
Socialist Party missing in action
On top of all this, the Socialist Party has fallen into a sort of torpor. Ministers have not been attending national bureau meetings on Tuesdays, which does not help coordination, but they are not the only ones. The bureau's meetings are dull to the point that hardly anyone goes to them. The same is true of the meeting regularly scheduled the following day with the party’s national secretaries.
Party figures and ministers meanwhile routinely talk down the first secretary, Harlem Désir, telling journalists that he “is afraid of his own shadow”. Désir responds with soothing press releases or makes declarations that go against Hollande, like calling for a referendum on state institutions as a response to the Cahuzac scandal, just to prove that he exists.
The torpor is also a symptom of the party's wider disarray. Apart from the left wing, represented by Benoît Hamon and several prominent leftist party members, the Socialist Party is today a collection of disparate groupings ranged behind personalities (such as Hollande, Valls and Peillon) that hardly talk to each other, rather than being a meeting place of differing ideological tendencies.
Because of this the level of discussion and debate within the party is poor. In a bid to regain control of his ministers but also to coordinate better with the party, prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault is not just now organising weekly meetings with some ministers, such as Peillon and Montebourg, but also with Désir and Guillaume Bachelay, the party’s number two.
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English version by Sue Landau and Michael Streeter