President Nicolas Sarkozy's 'elastic' political majority finally snapped at the weekend. His ruling conservative Right UMP party has now lost its the support of its centre-Right current, known as Centrists, with the departures from government of Radical Party leader Jean-Louis Borloo and his followers Valérie Létard and Marc-Philippe Daubresse, and that of Hervé Morin, leader of the New Centre party.
Until Sunday, Morin had served more than three years as defence minister, beginning in Sarkozy's first government formed in May 2007. "My conviction is that there needs to be an independent, Centrist path present at major elections," he said at a press conference called at his ministry. "Since April 2010, the head of state is in disagreement with this approach and so, for my part, I could no longer stay in government."
"I had been expecting a unifying gesture in the make-up of this new government [ ...] just as France is crossing through a major crisis. I saw the formation of a UMP electoral campaign team [... ] close to the RPR. I regret that," added Morin.
The reshuffle has exposed a rift within the UMP (Union for a Popular Movement), which was established in 2002 as a broad, one-party umbrella coalition of most conservative and centre-right parties. These were principally the Gaullist RPR, the main force of the conservative Right, then led by former president Jacques Chirac, and the UDF, a centre-right party founded by former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
The 'Centrist' parties in France, akin to those described as 'liberal democrats' in other countries, are currently principally made up of Borloo's Parti radical, Morin's Nouveau centre party, and the non-UMP MoDem, led by François Bayrou, former head of the UDF. The three have been unable to agree to any common platform, and have traditionally been weak and separate partners to the huge power block formed by the former RPR school.
"This is a classic situation for the Centrists," commented Brice Teinturier, a director of opinion polling company Ipsos. "How do you establish your existence when you are an auxiliary force? From the moment that Hervé Morin expressed his will to become a [presidential] candidate he could pack his bags at the Ministry of Defence."
Jean-Louis Borloo, who has been a government minister over a period of eight years, beginning under the presidency of Jacques Chirac, is more firmly anchored than Morin in the ruling UMP conservative Right parliamentary majority. He was more measured in departure comments, although there was a scathing message to read between the lines. "I have chosen not to be a part of the next governmental team," he said Sunday, before the list of new ministers were announced. "I prefer, indeed, to have back my freedom of speech and of proposals, in the service of my values [... ] at the top of which I place social cohesion."
That last phrase was aimed at French public opinion in the context of recent months of strikes and demonstrations over the pension reforms. Marc-Philippe Daubresse, until Sunday Minister for the Young and Active Solidarity, announced he was leaving "in solidarity" with Borloo's position. "The question was whether [government] policy should be modified towards more social cohesion," said Daubresse. "That was what we asked for and it should have been manifested in [policy] orientations and the positioning of Centrists in government." He did however nuance his position by adding: "We are leaving the government, not the [parliamentary] majority."
'Borloo realised he hadn't the weight to exist'
Yves Jégo, vice-president of Borloo's Parti Radical and a UMP Member of Parliament and said it was "a political fault" that the new government included no-one from his party.
"A government represents balance," commented Dominique Paillé, the Centrist deputy spokesman for the UMP, formerly a member of the UDF. "That needs to be ensured between the two currents of the majority, those emanating from the RPR and those from the UDF."
Only two Centrist politicians remain in the new government; Michel Mercier, who has been made justice minister, and Maurice Leroy, appointed Minister of Urban Affairs. President Sarkozy now faces the prospect that he has lost the support of the former UDF party current of the UMP.
The reshuffle saw the bolstering of Sarkozy's closest supporters; Brice Hortefeux, who remains interior minister, but with increased powers, and Frédéric Lefebvre, UMP spokesman who was made minister in charge of small and medium-sized businesses. It brought in former prime minister Alain Juppé, heavyweight of the conservative Right, longstanding lieutenant to Jacques Chirac whose roots are firmly planted in the RPR. As newly-appointed defence minister, has effectively become the government's 'Number Two'. Xavier Bertrand, until this week general secretary of the UMP, was given the labour ministry. Importantly, the new government also includes the hardline conservative Right in the form of Thierry Mariani, the new Secretary of State for Transport.
Mariani notably tabled amendments to the 2007 Immigration bill, including the introduction of DNA tests for the delivery of visas to immigrants rejoining families in France, in the case that these were for more than a three-month stay and in cases of serious doubt over the validity of the applicant's claim to be a relative. He also proposed the suppression of providing temporary public sheltered accommodation offered in emergency to illegal immigrants. Both were thrown out by the senate.
For François Bayrou, the former UDF president and now head of the Centrist Modem party, openly opposed to the UMP, "the proof that we have long been waiting for has been given".
Bayrou, who caused a split in the UDF camp when he refused to join its merger with the RPR under the single UMP banner in 2002, has struggled to establish himself as a Centrist leader, despite his brief triumph in the 2007 presidential elections when he polled 18.5% of the first round vote. Despite losing to Sarkozy and Socialist Party canbdidate Ségolène Royal, who went through to the second round play-offs, the result was a significant rally of support for his minority Centrist camp.
But his stand-alone stance has seen him in something of a political wilderness since Sarkozy's election. The departures of Borloo and Morin, his Centrist rivals, provided what was clearly not an unpleasant moment for him. "A certain number of [centrist] politicians said 'we will best defend our ideas from being on the inside'", he told French TV Channel France-5 on Sunday. "My argument was, if you want to be heard you must be independent, otherwise you will become insignificant." Then came his put-down: "At the end of an eight-year path, what Borloo has realised is that he does not have the weight to exist."
Sarkozy now faces a Centrist counter-attack
The government readjustment to a UMP-based team also announced the end of the cross-party 'opening' that Nicolas Sarkozy has made his speciality. This had seen him offer posts even to figures of the Left, notably making former Socialist Party bigwig Bernard Kouchner his foreign affairs minister. "Out with the [cross-party] opening, out with the Centrists," commented Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry, whose party nevertheless considers Kouchner to be a traitor. "It is the hard-line Right that is falling back onto the UMP-RPR hard core."
The 'opening' included other appointments, guaranteed to attract high media profile, from among France's ethnic minorities, largely absent from politics; notably these included Fadéla Amara, who was until the reshuffle Minister of Urban Affairs, an outspoken feminist from a family of North African immigrants, and Rama Yade, a Senagelese-born UMP militant who was Minister of State responsible for Sport. Both have lost their jobs, along with Kouchner and Jean-Marie Bockel, a renegade socialist senator and mayor of Mulhouse, who was Minister of State for Justice.
The one survivor of Sarkoy's 'opening' approach is the controversial Eric Besson, once a socialist MP and presidential election campaign director for Ségolène Royal, who turned coats shortly before Sarkozy's election and became immigration minister. He has now been given the post of Minister of State for the Economy responsible for Industry and Energy.
The reshuffle has shown a new 'opening' of sorts, aimed at the Gaullist camp of the conservative Right that was more recently embodied by the man who Sarkozy wrested power from, former president Jacques Chirac. These include Michèle Alliot-Marie (former justice minister now given foreign affairs), François Baroin (reappointed as budget minister). Bruno Le Maire, from the camp of Sarkozy's bitter rival Dominique de Villepin (the flamnoyant former prime minister loyal to Chirac with ambitions to overturn Sarkozy), has been given the agriculture ministry. Other 'Villepinistes' appointed to government are Georges Tron (Secretary of State responsible for the Civil Service) and Marie-Anne Montchamp, spokeswoman of Villepin's political movement 'République solidaire', made Secretary of State responsible for Social Cohesion.
But the president has now exposed himself to a counter-attack from the Centrists in the presidential elections due in 2012, when they may well field a single candidate who could damage Sarkozy. Valérie Létard, the outgoing Centrist Secretary of State for Green Technologies and Climate Negotiations, who has served alongside Jean-Louis Borloo for some 20 years, said he would now "set off back to parliament."
She told French TV news channel itélé: "His wish, not out of spite, is to build up and reinforce his Centre [ ...] we regularly [all] meet together. Everyone comes to these meetings." Borloo himself made his ambitions for 2012 clear: "For my part I have not changed, I shall go to take contact with the French people."
The historian and political analyst René Rémond produced a theory about the logic of the existence of a plural Right in France, who have always fielded (at least) two presidential election rivals; Jean Lecanuet versus Charles de Gaulle, Chirac versus Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Chirac versus Edouard Balladur. But the reshuffle re-orientation towards the hard core of the UMP is an admission by Nicolas Sarkozy of both his failure to create an enlarged conservative Right under the banner of the UMP, and of his policy of cross-party political appointments.
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English version: Graham Tearse