In the immediate wake of the disastrous results for the ruling Socialist Party in local elections held in March, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault resigned and Manuel Valls, with the support of Arnaud Montebourg, succeeded him. The idea then was that this would be a government of combat, united behind President François Hollande. But just 147 days later, the cabinet team no longer exists.
With a life of less than five months, the brevity of Valls’ first government is a record since the Fifth Republic was established in 1958 - except for the government of Pierre Messmer which was dissolved because of the death of President Georges Pompidou in 1974. “I want the Left to succeed in duration,” said Valls speaking on March 12th at a live debate streamed on Mediapart. He has at any rate succeeded in establishing a record.
There is another striking new element. It has often been the case in the past that ministers express disagreement with the government line. On the Left, Jean-Pierre Chevenement did so on several occasions, as also, on the Right, Alain Madelin. More recently, it was the turn of Delphine Batho, who in July 2013 lost her post as ecology minister in the Ayrault government over her disagreements with budgetary policies. They left, or were sacked, but now is the first time the disagreement of an individual minister results in the resignation of the whole government.
Under the Fifth Republic, a change of government has never been a disciplinary move, nor is it used as a manner of getting rid of a minister, whether or not that be the Minister of the Economy. It has a political sense, and that is still the case today. The nomination of the second Valls government, under cover of being an assertion of authority, is the affirmation of a policy line and the removal of dissent.
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Naturally, the names of numerous new arrivals have been rumoured, including former Communist Party leader Robert Hue, as an offering to the Left, or a return to government of the Greens in the form of Senator Jean-Vincent Placé or Member of Parliament François de Rugy. But Hue no longer represents anyone but himself, while the national secretary of the EELV Green party, Emmanuelle Cosse, has made clear that if any of its members took up a ministerial post it would be “in their own name” and not the party’s.
Once the cloud of media frenzy will have subsided, after the comings and goings in the courtyard of the prime minister’s office, the Hôtel Matignon, and that of the presidential office, the Elysée Palace, after the hubbub of the ‘who stays’ and ‘who goes’ reporting, there will remain the truth about the collapse of the government: Valls, on the Right of the Socialist Party, became prime minister with the support of leftists Montebourg and Benoît Hamon, in a compromise, however precarious, between the left- and right-wings of the Socialist Party, and that deal has exploded.
The political breadth of the government and its parliamentary majority had already shrunk in March when the Green party ministers left government, refusing to serve after Valls replaced Ayrault as prime minister. There has also been the developing dissatisfaction on the left-wing of the majority, the rebellious so-called ‘frondeurs’, not to mention the ire of the socialists’ centre-left allies of the Part Radical de Gauche, who are unhappy at the recent territorial reforms. But now it threatens to shrink far further with the departure of Montebourg, which will leave the government with only the supporters of Manuel Valls to back it. Back in 2011, during the socialist primaries to decide the party’s presidential candidate for 2012, Valls garnered just 5% of the vote.
President François Hollande, who won 52% of the votes cast in the presidential elections in May 2012, can now only count on the support of those in the Socialist Party who are in favour of the so-called Responsibility Pact, a controversial programme of some 40 billion euros in tax breaks for business in exchange for job creations – similar to a plan that Valls presented to the 2011 primaries under the name of a ‘growth and competitivity pact’.
Hollande has lost the support of what was once the Socialist Party as a whole and the many factions of the Left outside it, and is now reduced to enjoying the favour of just one minority current of his party. If that is not tantamount to a dissolving of parliament, then the world stands on its head and the socialists in fact won the local and European elections and François Hollande is a widely popular president.
There are many – on the Right, of course, but also now on the Left - who would like to see this minority that is the ruling ‘majority’ stand the challenge of parliamentary elections. However, there appears little, if any, chance that Hollande would pronounce the dissolving of parliament. The constitution of the Fifth Republic allows him to carry on with the staus quo, however absurd that may become, until the date of the official calendar for the next presidential and parliamentary elections, due in 2017 (parliamentary and presidential terms are a maximum of five years).
Hollande himself described in advance the situation he now finds himself, in his 2006 book Devoir de vérité, (A Duty of Truth). “I no longer believe in the possibility of coming to power on a five-year programme of which there would be nothing to change during the term of office,” he said in the book, which is made up of a series of discussions with Edwy Plenel, now editor-in-chief of Mediapart. “I think there is necessarily an exercise of democratic verification in the middle of a term of office. Reality changes too quickly, circumstances provoke accelerations or, on the opposite, delays, obstacles emerge, events happen […] The duty of truth is to be capable of saying: “we go back to the ruling majority, perhaps even the electorate, in order to regain a relationship of confidence”.”
In comparison with his presidential election campaign manifesto, Hollande has indeed changed his programme – and from almost day one of his mandate. But apparently he is incapable of taking the decision to “go back to the ruling majority, perhaps even the electorate, in order to regain a relationship of confidence”.
Thus it is that this significant event that is a change of government is presented as a disciplinary issue, as a question of authority. As if the problem was, precisely, not the initial absence of authority on the part of the French president. In her book Voyage au pays de la désillusion (‘Journey in the land of disillusion’), ex-Green party leader Cécile Duflot, Ayrault’s former housing minister who left government because she refused to serve under Valls, suggests like so many others that Hollande, just after his election, could and should have stood his ground against the German conservatives. But he didn’t, contrary to his promises.
Today, Hollande is reduced to displaying his authority over Montebourg, because of a choice he made with a lack of authority. He demands “a government in coherence” with his own incoherencies. He would do better to place his policies before the electorate rather than basking in the powers of the constitution of the Fifth Republic, so protective and so presidential that what has become a minor minority can remain a governing majority.
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The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse