Social democracy is struggling everywhere in Europe. But, as Tolstoy might have said, the French socialist family is unhappy in its own way, argues The Guardian in this editorial article.
Part of this has to do with the dismally low ratings of President François Hollandeat the end of his five-year term. But internal squabbling, personal feuds and ideological confusion have left their mark too. Ahead of Sunday’s run-off in the French leftwing primaries, designed to choose the Socialists’ candidate for this spring’s presidential election, their future is uncertain.
It is important to understand the party’s distinctive history. Postwar French left politics were shaped by a powerful Communist party. Marxism held sway for decades. In the 1950s, the predecessor of the Parti Socialiste held strongly Atlanticist views and supported the war in Algeria (a position that led to its collapse). In 1971, François Mitterrand led a transformation, bringing moderates and marxists under a single banner, and rebranding the party. This paved his way to the French presidency.
Yet the PS never did what Germany’s SPD did in its 1959 Bad Godesberg congress – abandoning class warfare and hostility to capitalism as such, and opting for reformism. Nor is the PS the equivalent of the British Labour party, which grew out of the trade union movement a century ago. Mitterrand eventually moved the party slightly to the centre, as Mr Hollande has also done, but strong cultural differences remain. The PS has rarely embraced a New Labour approach.
In fact, the leading contender in Sunday’s run-off vote, the ex-education minister Benoît Hamon, has compared himself to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Hamon seems all but guaranteed to win (he won the first round last weekend with 35% of the vote; anyone paying one euro could cast a ballot). He wants to introduce a basic universal income, a 32-hour week, to legalise cannabis and to tax robots. He is a keen reader of Chantal Mouffe, an ideologue of leftwing populism. His run-off opponent on Sunday is the pro-business former prime minister Manuel Valls, who styles himself as the voice of the serious left in government, but suffers from being associated with Mr Hollande’s lacklustre presidency.
Sunday’s victor is unlikely to win the presidency. France has shifted sharply to the right, not least because of the trauma left by terrorist attacks. Marine Le Pen of the Front National thinks she can capitalise. She will court traditional leftwing voters by casting herself as a defender of the welfare system, against the “Thatcherite” policies that François Fillon, the mainstream rightwing candidate, has put forward. Mr Fillon is currently entangled in a scandal over payments made to his wife from parliamentary funds, another potential boost for Ms Le Pen.
The wider left is divided too, not just the PS.