With 100 days to go before the first round of the French presidential elections, Socialist Party candidate François Hollande is still baffling observers and rivals alike. In the wings for over a year now, Hollande has pulled off a tour de force by imposing his strategic slow tempo on the political debate, displaying a singular virtuosity in the art of fuzziness.
Hollande, 57, a Member of Parliament and President of the General Council of the Corrèze département, has adopted a very presidential posture, travelling the land surrounded by journalists as he meets and greets the French. But he has yet to outline even a semblance of a policy programme. His “presidential platform”, as he christened it at the inauguration of his campaign headquarters on the Avenue Ségur in the very chic 7th arrondissement of Paris, won’t be divulged till “late January”.
In an interview on January 13th with French daily freesheet 20 Minutes, regarding a mooted reform of the dependants’ allowance system under the French tax code (quotient familial), he said: “You must always wait until I’ve settled the matter. The whole plan will be [made] known at the end of the month. In the meantime, only what I say counts.” In the same interview, he claimed: “Credibility is on my side. I note attentively that, even if the French have their doubts about politicians, they trust me more than the president to reduce unemployment. And the 2nd-round transfer of votes still looks to come out in my favour. Sarkozy’s unpopularity is deep-seated.”
Here you have Hollande’s strategy in a nutshell, and he frankly owns up to it. Like recently-elected Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, he’s simply waiting to be crowned with success. And in the meantime, so as not to lay himself open to attack by his opponents, he is playing it safe, making sure not to take the risk of injecting too many ideas into the debate, let alone any hint of a vision of future society. So the prospect is set out as a change of party in power, not of policy: an alternation, not an alternative.
A disciplined party
This implicit espousal of “the status quo – only better” flags the downfall of political conviction, and that is what is so baffling about his campaign message to date. His abundant entourage (a 160-member campaign team) have been churning out communiqués to parry statements from President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party, and its government. In fact they have become expert rhetoricians, turning this golden opportunity for political debate, which is what the elections should be, into a sombre contest of pat, and pathetic phraseology.
At the moment, it appears as if the two sides were in tacit tactical collusion to stave off any debate at all, as each is certain that it can beat the other in the home straight that is the second round vote, and each convinced that, apart from them, there is only oblivion.
For a year now, ever since he began campaigning for the Socialist Party primaries, François Hollande has been hammering home the message that he would be a lesser evil than Sarkozy, and repeating three propositions over and over again: the creation of extra jobs in public education, a subsidised youth-training and hiring programme (the contrat de génération) and tax reform. He plays them up or down according to the context and prevailing public sentiment.
Little by little, he has been fleshing out a few specific items on the Socialist Party agenda, affirming his intention of setting up a National Investment Bank and making the public prosecutor’s office independent from governing political powers. But the candidate’s shilly-shallying on other issues continually baffles the electorate, such as his position on tax reform. The existing ‘family quotient’, an income tax allowance based on the number of dependants, was originally a Socialist Party measure, and was transformed by those who deliberately leaked its existence into a technocratic jumble; now the candidate himself wants to water it down even further.
At least Hollande can count on a disciplined Socialist Party. The new year has ushered in a “long first yearly quarter of empty rhetoric”, commented one party leader with a smile. Well aware of the vital impact a presidential victory would have on their chances of winning the ensuing general elections in June, the party leadership are united behind their champion. Martine Aubry, the party’s Secretary-General and runner-up in the party primaries, actually went as far as to compare Hollande to ex-Czech president Vaclav Havel in a New Year’s speech. Those who backed Aubry in the primaries hold less enthusiasm, but at least they are keeping publicly quiet, albeit without entirely succeeding in concealing their scepticism.
Using the threat of 2002
Like the old guard of the Socialist Party, Hollande thinks he can count on the whole left-of-centre electorate to back him, by persuasion or force, because they’re so eager to get rid of Sarkozy. He is akin to former Socialist leader and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, but without the latter’s liabilities of the past, or a more sobre version of Ségolène Royal, his former companion and Socialist Party candidate who lost to Sarkozy in 2007.
The other two principle candidates on the Left, Eva Joly (for Green party Europe Écologie Les Verts) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (for the radical Left Front de Gauche), may well embody original and radical positions in their way, but because neither has any chance of making it past the first-round vote, they have a hard time making a dent in Hollande’s ‘make-your-vote-count’ machine. Thus far, Hollande’s strategy appears to be proving effective.
Lately, the early momentum of the Greens has been petering out. They are paying the price for an energy policy agreement with the Socialist Party that has since been trampled underfoot by Hollande, who now talks about de-commissioning only one or two nuclear plants, and for an electoral alliance with the PS that has been undermined by local dissidence, sometimes even with a nod from Socialist Party HQ (as in the case of the Seine-et-Marne département).
Although officially endorsed by her fellow Greens, Eva Joly is often contradicted by her party’s leadership, as when she recently proposed forming a united anti-Sarkozy front to support any left-of-centre opponent still standing against him for the second round of voting, or when she proposed establishing Jewish and Muslim holidays. Meanwhile, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, another leading member of the Greens, has intimated he might actually vote for Hollande in the first round, again adhering to the ‘make-your-vote-count’ strategy.
On the other hand, radical Left candidate Mélenchon has not yet laid down his arms and still thinks his power of conviction will shake up what the two frontrunners consider a foregone conclusion. Braced by his strong showing on a political debate programme on TV channel France 2 earlier this month, in which he raged with consummate brio to an audience of 3.3 million viewers (as many as Far-Right candidate Marine Le Pen managed to draw), Mélenchon is counting on the fallout from the financial crisis to make his presence felt in the debate. But not a single Socialist Party figure has agreed to debate with him. They prefer to leave Mélenchon in a state of isolation that is increasingly hard to justify, as he waves the flag of old-guard socialism and calls for a return to a pre-austerity Left. It remains to be seen whether, as Mélenchon hopes, the “time for character” and a “citizens’ revolution” have finally come round for him.
As for Centre-Right MoDem party candidate François Bayrou, his margin of manoeuvre to the Left has narrowed since the last elections in 2007, faced with a Socialist challenger to his electorate at the centre and whose presentation is that of an able and responsible manager. Nevertheless, Bayrou remains a serious alternative to the mainstream Left and Right which have dominated the the presidency under the Fifth Republic, and represents a safe haven for voters of the Right disaffected with Sarkozy.
The manner in which Hollande and Sarkozy have confiscated the political debate, creating a climate in which convictions count for less than temperaments, can only satisfy Marine Le Pen, candidate and leader of the Far-Right Front National party. But her outsider status plays into Hollande’s hand, because he can brandish the threat of a re-run of the second-round vote in the 2002 presidential elections, when Front National candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, won a place in the second-round knockout against conservative Right candidate Jacques Chirac. Le Pen survived the first round after the score for Socialist Party candidate and outgoing Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was severely undermined by protest votes from the electorate of the Left, disillusioned with his government policies, which went to marginal, radical candidates. As Hollande sees it, reminding the Left of the trauma that caused is enough to validate his play-it-safe strategy before voting begins on April 22nd.
-------------------------
English version: Eric Rosencrantz
(Editing by Graham Tearse)
The original French version of this article can be found by clicking here.