“Trust is a word that does not feature in laws or regulations, it costs nothing, but it can yield a great deal.” That is a quote from François Hollande during his speech at Le Bourget on January 22nd 2012 during his election campaign. Ten months after becoming president of the Republic the level of mistrust in the country has never been so high. Indeed, the crisis of confidence is even of historic proportions – for the Fifth Republic, born in 1958 - if one believes the opinion polls. These may be an uncertain form of measure, for sure, but they appear to be backing up other indicators.
In this context the result of the first round of voting in a parliamentary by-election (1) in the Oise département (broadly equivalent to a county) last weekend thus seems like a logical event on the descent into hell being pursued by the socialist government. The Socialist Party (PS) candidate Sylvie Houssin was eliminated in the first round, not reaching the required threshold of 12.5% of registered voters. The battlefield is now left free for a duel between the Right and the far-right Front National, with the attention on Jean-François Mancel, the incumbent MP who embodies the worst that the right-wing UMP has to offer.
The pitiful press release from the PS leadership, which attempted to sweep this disaster under the carpet in claiming that it was historically a seat held by the Right (which is untrue) and calling on its voters in the second round next weekend to vote for a UMP member in Mancel who in the past has made an alliance with the FM, cannot hide the social and political reality that threatens the government today. This reality is where exasperation meets disappointment, where disagreements mingle with anxieties and a feeling of rejection combines with a sense of betrayal.
Up until now the government’s communications team has sought to put things into context, pointing out that opinion polls are volatile. And they have underlined (using opinion polls...) that while the voters on the Right are extremely rebellious, that those in the centre are not convinced and the far left is hopelessly trapped in its obstinate and endless demands for more, at least the core electorate on the Left had not abandoned the government. That was always a doubtful claim and this by-election confirms it: voters on the Left switched off en masse and did not deign to vote last Sunday, helping an abstention rate of 67%.
A few days ago Mediapart questioned a loyal supporter of the president, Bernard Cazeneuve, who was then European affairs minister and is now the new budget minister replacing Jérôme Cahuzac, on the central question that should today guide the political course of a government of the Left: how do you stop the Front National from becoming France's leading political party next year at the time of the European elections? Did the recent Italian vote not sound a warning?
The paucity of his response was not reassuring. The ministers is worried by the “rise in populism” and also the worrying presence of “Manichean” debates in pubic life (in other words where there is a simplistic distinction made between right or wrong, good or evil). But other than that? “So, we have to listen to what the people are saying to us,” insists the minister. To revile “popularism” - a catch-all word – is not only intellectual laziness. It is also an evasion that enables you to avoid confronting the fundamental contradictions that are in the process of undermining this presidency. Because it is precisely through not listening to “what the people are saying” that François Hollande and the majority of European leaders find themselves in such a situation where they are being rejected.
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1: The by-election was called after the country's Constitutional Council annulled last year’s result, in which the UMP's Jean-François Mancel narrowly beat his socialist rival. The council referred to literature put out by Mancel's campaign team on the eve of last year’s poll which it said made unfair accusations against his opponent.
A yawning chasm
These fundamental contradictions are in the first place being fed by the yawning chasm between the promises of the French presidential campaign and the reality of the politics pursued in the last ten months. On 22nd January 2012 François Hollande promised the “enthusiasm of the bold”. Instead we are ruled by people who were in Hollande's year at the elite École nationale d'administration and by the little grey men at the Ministry of Finance's Treasury department.
The head of state committed himself to creating an “irreproachable Republic”. One of his key ministers Jérôme Cahuzac, has just had to resign after the launching of a full-blown judicial investigation for 'laundering of the proceeds of tax fraud' in relation to an undisclosed Swiss bank account. But this resignation came four months after Mediapart's first revelation on the subject, which left the minister in an untenable situation of conflict of interest that no one, in the government or the PS, seemed to have a problem with.
A socialist MP Sylvie Andrieux is today being tried in Marseille for misuse of public funds. The PS had found nothing to say nationally while its representatives in Marseille are arguing over support for Andrieux in the next council elections in 2014! In the same way the party – led by Harlem Désir - has still not sorted out high-profile scandals hitting the PS in other parts of the country.
The president was also seemingly committed to a major modernisation of public life in France. Yet his institutional reform package is a meagre affair that passed almost in secret before the last Cabinet meeting. The promise to ban politicians from holding more than one political office at a time has been pushed back to, in theory, the end of Hollande's five-year term, the right of non-EU foreigners to vote in local elections has been buried, the independence of the judiciary left to one side and the issues of proportional representation and female-male parity have been forgotten.
Let's stop there at the list of commitments that have been watered-down, abandoned and not kept, while going on to highlight two measures that were never talked about during the election campaign and which have given a quite different “colour” to the government’s economic policy. One is the plan designed to boost competitiveness, with 20 billion euros of tax credits available to businesses, and the other is workplace reform. For recently a second theme has emerged that has fed into this this unprecedented crisis of trust: and that is the government’s growing disorganisation.
“Never lose your sense of direction,” François Hollande said during his Le Bourget speech. Yet successive and opportunistic adjustments made by the government in the face of events have clouded all sense of perspective. Recent days have given a telling illustration of this, following a number of cases showing a lack of joined-up thinking.
One could have, one should have hoped that last week there would have been a major public discourse on the “reorganisation of the school” at the very moment that education minister Vincent Peillon was in the National Assembly defending his legislation on this subject. It was, we were told, major legislation “at the heart” of the presidential project: François Hollande managed the feat of not saying one word on it all week despite spending four days visiting the regions, trips punctuated by half-a-dozen speeches.
Peillon has every right to feel even more isolated, for scarcely had his law been adopted by MPs amid general indifference, then the smouldering row over changing the length of week and days for primary schools flared up again. This time it was the former PS party boss Martine Aubry, who as mayor of Lille in northern France announced that she would not be applying the school week and day changes in her city until 2014, even though the government would prefer them to be implemented for the next school year. What then are we to make of this socialist reform that socialists are wary about putting into practice? In terms of political education, it was the worst of results.
Who are the priority: the citizens or local councillors?
This is not the only example of the disorganisation of the government where presidential initiatives have caught ministers unawares, against a background of a war of egos and the weakening of the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. There was also last week the revelation that the president may make use of 'ordonnances' or temporary laws approved in Cabinet and signed by the president, and which are only later ratified by Parliament, a summary procedure that highlights the unconstrained powers in our presidential system. This was announced on the fringes of a presidential speech by mayor of Dijon and president of the socialist group in the Senate François Rebsamen without the prime minister even being informed.
In this last announcement we can hear the jarring notes residing at the heart of the government. In the meantime a small embryonic package of institutional reforms was presented at Cabinet in four separate laws and whose overall narrative is incomprehensible.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
François Hollande is, gradually, governing with same muddled restlessness that marked Nicolas Sarkozy's term of office. The “accelerated” time that a five-year term of office imposes on the president does not do him any favours at all, whatever the views of some of his councillors who are now suddenly forced to develop a theory about this general disarray.
The president wanted to get back “in touch with the French people” by visiting Dijon in the east of France for two days. There we saw, as in the days of Nicolas Sarkozy, a demonstrator brutally taken away by the police and a president who was above all keen to speak to local councillors. Ah, those local officials from regional France... From Dijon to Bordeaux, last week Francis Hollande did not miss an opportunity to praise the “lifeblood” that is our army of town, département, regional and inter-communal councillors.
So on Tuesday there he was at Sombernon in the eastern Côte-d'Or département (see photo above) to praise the beauty of the Auxois-Morvan area in a speech that had the tone of a Radical Party politician during France's Third Republic. “Rurality is at the same time our history and our future,” said Hollande. “It's our history because it's in rural areas that France was created with its agriculture, its production, its landscapes, its traditions. But rurality is also a measure of confidence in the future because it is in the rural areas that we can find the levers for our own development.”
Enlargement : Illustration 4
And here he was at Bordeaux in south-west France on Saturday (see photo right) to inaugurate the new Jacques Chaban-Delmas bridge. “A new bridge is always an event,” he said, adding that one must “put trust in local regions”. Hollande went on: “Ladies and gentlemen, the bridge that we are opening today is the perfect example of the cooperation which has been established between local authorities, between local areas.” Local areas, rurality, inter-communal cooperation, the metropolitan authorities, decentralisation, European financing: the president who was once president of the council for the Corrèze département in south-west France relishes all this, expert as he is in the improbable, multi-layered French political and administrative system.
This might help in managing things. But it does not help in any way to define the main themes and priorities of a political project. This is one of the main challenges faced by François Hollande since his election. To be able to speak to the citizens, not to local councillors; to mobilise the local population rather than local areas; to energise the electorate rather than pamper local councillors. In short, to lead a political fight by mobilising above all his own electorate. That same electorate that did not vote on Sunday and which, if nothing happens in the meantime, could desert the voting booths for a long time.
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English version: Michael Streeter