François Fillon won Sunday's conservative primary election because the Left no longer exists as a serious opposition. That, in a nutshell, is the message sent by voters on the Right in choosing Fillon as their presidential candidate for 2017. They are sure that their champion has the temperament, and the unique opportunity, to act without wondering whether such and such a measure will be too tough to get through, or too risky to implement. The two candidates in Sunday's primary, François Fillon and Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppé, had more or less the same political programme, in other words the most liberal conservative manifestos since World War II. What divided them, to an impressive extent, was that while Juppé wanted to smooth the hard edges of his programme, Fillon wanted to sharpen them. To listen to Fillon speak it will be a question of taking it or leaving it.
This will mean the people of France taking the biggest redundancy plan in French history with 500,000 public sector jobs being axed. It will mean accepting an austerity programme two to three times more drastic than the one seen during President François Hollande's terms of office. It will mean accepting a massive reduction in taxes for the wealthiest and for businesses, coupled with a rise in value added tax for households. It will mean accepting the end of the current working week in France, which will be then be set at a maximum of 48 hours. It will mean accepting, too, a 39-hour working week for public servants, with only 37 of those hours paid. In the workplace it will mean accepting the pre-eminence of individual work contracts over employment law. It will mean taking the unravelling of the social security system in favour of individual insurance policies with private companies. It will mean accepting the re-writing of French history in the classrooms. And, finally, it will mean accepting the retirement age being increased to 65, with full pensions only available for those aged 68 or perhaps 70.
Ten years ago, merely to have mentioned any one of these mind-blowing policies would have sparked massive and angry protest movements. In 2016, nothing at all. Dead calm. No anti-government marches as over the plans to reform higher education in 1986, no strikes against welfare cuts as in 1995, no youth protests against a planned new employment contract as seen in 1996, and no mass protests against pension reforms as witnessed in 2010. Once Nicolas Sarkozy was jettisoned from the political landscape, as he was just over a week ago in the first round of the primary, the Right's voters, no longer worried that they would stir up opposing forces, chose the candidate who will go the furthest in each of these areas and who calmly sets out his method for doing so: no quarter given, no compromise, no discussion, and rule by government decree.
So the Right that voted on Sunday did so not in the hope that Fillon was going to carry out some reforms; but that “at last” he will start from scratch. One needs a calm spirit to start a campaign with such a manifesto. To be certain that, come election day in May 2017, French people will not be turned off by the string of sacrifices that awaits them. To have the certainty that no political or trade union opposition will later block the route.
This political programme, confirmed in the choice of the least consensual candidate in the primary, could simply be seen as a challenge thrown down to the Left. But it perhaps goes further than that. It conveys a feeling of all-powerfulness. That of a political force that feels sure its opponents will be out of the fight even before they have entered the fray.
Where does this certainty come from? From the opinion polls, naturally, which predict that the second and deciding round of the 2017 presidential election will be fought between candidates from the Right and the far right – the Front National. It comes, too, from the results in all French elections for the last four years.
The certainty also comes from the obvious divisions that exist among the left-wing alternatives to the right wing of the ruling Socialist Party. Though French communists have now agreed to back radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon as a presidential candidate, the workers' party Lutte Ouvriére will as ever field its own candidate, as will the far-left Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA). In addition the greens have nominated European MP Yannick Jadot to be their presidential candidate and the Socialist Party's current allies the Parti Radical de Gauche will also put up a candidate. Meanwhile the socialists themselves are still hesitating between a president (François Hollande), a prime minister (Manuel Valls) and former ministers (Benoît Hamon and Arnaud Montebourg) and the deadline to be a candidate in their January primary is yet to expire. One could also mention the former minister Emmanuel Macron, who is launching his own independent bid for the presidency. If one does the maths one realises that if the Left makes up a third of voters, they will be spread between at least different seven candidates. Faced with such a powerful statistic, the voters in the primary for the Right and centre were not worried they would frighten France by choosing the most right-wing of their candidates.
But this plethora of left-wing candidates for an election that many assume is lost in advance is not the only reason why the Right are so relaxed. Looking at the current government as well as the left wing of the Left, the Right feels that it has signed up to a political insurance policy for fifty years.
For the current government is in a state of clinical death, to the extent that rumours of a reshuffle were circulating on Sunday, signalling its final throes. Hollande was said to be furious that Valls had hinted he might stand against the president, and was considering replacing him as prime minister with interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve. This extraordinary weakness stems from a slump that began immediately after Hollande's election in 2012 and has continued ever since.
The president, elected by the Left, gambled on moving to the centre and progressively abandoned his own camp's reference points as he headed towards those of the Right. The arrival of Manuel Valls as prime minister in 2014 accelerated the process by sanctioning the emergence of the young hopeful, Emmanuel Macron. In this way Hollande's term of office came undone before our eyes. The left of the Socialist Party was kept at arm's length, Macron departed and Valls has been debating whether or not he should stand against his own president, while the Right responded to the illusion that one can govern by being “neither Right nor Left” by choosing its most right-wing presidential candidate since the Liberation.
Though reassured by this debacle on the Left, a triumphant Right could in theory be concerned about a rise in popularity of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. But in the end they do not believe that he will be a threat either. The reason is that they are convinced that while this candidate of the alternative Left will increase his core support to the point where he overtakes Hollande, that core support will still remain a minority, even on the Left. The Right see Mélenchon as a man who can mobilise people, not bring them together.
If one also adds the certitude the Right exudes that the unions will not be able to resist the future laws aimed at removing their predominant workplace role in favour of individual company referendums, then one can understand Sunday's primary vote. The Right feels dominant and sure of itself and is convinced that it has elected not just its candidate, but the next president of the Republic.
This is a challenge that has been laid down to the entire Left. It has to prove that it still exists, by overcoming its deep-seated hatreds and by showing that it has not given up on exercising political power. The Socialist Party will only survive if it forgets the electoral illusion of an “openness” towards the centre ground which has simply resulted in François Fillon upping the ante and the ruling party losing both its political compass and its voters. As for Jean-Luc Melenchon's Left, it must indeed open itself up to voters from the moderate Left and not push them back to the right if it wants to be in a position to qualify for the second round of the presidential election. Just as Mélenchon has understood that you need an authentic candidate to assert yourself in a presidential election, he will admit too that you need a coalition to hope to win it.
Without those still in power steering themselves back towards the Left, and without the left of the Left reaching outside of itself, the 2017 presidential election has every chance of resembling that of 1969 when the Left was also badly divided between the French Communists and the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (replaced later that year by the Socialist Party). The only difference is that on that occasion it was a centrist, Alain Poher, who was beaten by a Gaullist, Georges Pompidou. In 2017 meanwhile the contest could be between the hard right and the boss of the far-right Front National, Marine Le Pen.
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The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter