It was, in a sense, the end of a chapter in the Socialist Party's history. The party's annual conference at La Rochelle in west France last weekend, where the overriding mood was gloomy and downbeat, veered between resignation from more critical delegates and quiet support for the government from others. Yet the talk in the corridors and the much-applauded closing speech by prime minister Manuel Valls on Sunday show that the government has created a new political alignment. And so while the party can claim that it ended its weekend gathering with greater cohesion, this is at the expense of its previous influence on the Left as a whole.
In essence, the post-socialist era is now under way. The word “social” is no longer uttered by a single minister, nor did it feature in any debate themes. In his speech the prime minister hammered home the new mantra behind his actions, “constancy and will”, and set out a collection of “values” that revolve around the world as he sees it. “The 11th of January [editor's note, a reference to the day of street marches across France after the January terror attacks]. Return of growth. These facts give us our priorities,” he said. Over the course of several minutes he talked variously about future changes to employment law which was now “so complicated it has become ineffective”, praised “responsibility, stability and protection”, and noted that “it's quite normal to pay taxes [but] unfair to pay too much tax”. And he concluded: “You can lift restrictions while still protecting, that's what the Left is about!”
There was nothing fundamentally new in what Valls said, other than the fact that it is no longer now a question of him imposing his “modernity” on the party; instead one can see that what remains of the “left-wing” PS is very much in Valls' own image. From now the only talk is of economic efficiency, of competing in a global economy, of secularism and of Republican order. Nor is it any longer simply a question of Manuel Valls making provocative comments as he did a year ago when he stated “I love business” at the conference of the employers' federation MEDEF. Instead what we are really seeing now is a new political line, albeit one that has been as little debated as the party's political ideology was at its special congress at Poitiers in June.
Apart from the annual dinner on Saturday night, which saw young socialists calling for economy minister Emmanuel Macron to resign and whistling the prime minister – after which Manuel Valls left early – there was virtually no heckling of ministers at conference events. Nor, with a few exceptions, did many party rebels attend the conference, with big names such as former party chief Martine Aubry and former economy Arnaud Montebourg notable absentees. “They have succeeded in discouraging us and wearing us down,” sighed one senior figure on the left of the party. Meanwhile rebel MP Christian Paul, who proposed a more left-wing agenda at the June congress, has said that he will wait until May 2016 before giving his verdict on the current situation, on how the debate over the next finance budget goes, on December's regional elections and on the direction chosen by the Elysée for the presidential election in 2017.
In fact, it is as if the transition in government from socialism to a 'Democratic Party' – in the Italian or American sense – has now been completed without ever having been announced. In his speech Manuel Valls used the expression “rallying call for progressives” - described as a “beautiful alliance” by PS first secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadélis – and spoke of writing a “new page in social democracy”. The prime minister said he wanted everyone to be “proud of this Left that proclaims the Nation, the homeland, secularism”, which “needs no lessons when it comes to law and order” and which “refuses the easy option of accumulating debt”.
Such slogans are empty, with the words having no real meaning, and this leads to some surreal situations. The three debates on Saturday afternoon on the Republic – splitting them into the themes of liberté, egalité and fraternité ('freedom, equality and fraternity') perhaps lacked originality – quickly turned from theoretical discussions into a series of platitudes and a presentation of ministerial achievements that went unchallenged. And when Cambadélis mentioned Hollande's name a “spontaneous” rendition of the national anthem the 'Marseillaise' broke out in parts of the hall, for no apparent reason. On Saturday the justice minister and darling of the Left Christiane Taubira showed once and for all that she is the best ally of this Democratic Party that still calls itself socialist. Once again she got the loudest applause from delegates, in particular when she declared: “The Left betrays itself when it distances itself from the working classes.” On Sunday she was in the front row, vigorously applauding Manuel Valls's closing speech.
The prime minister seemed indeed to be able to say anything he wanted, with the 2,000 or so activists in the audience having apparently turned up with the sole purpose of clapping him. He criticised the leader of the far-right Front National, Marine Le Pen, for a lack of patriotism over her opposition to the government's controversial new surveillance law. Then after the conference hall had staged a minute's silence for migrants who had recently died in Europe or trying to reach Europe, Valls made clear his desire for “firmness” over “economic immigration” - which he distinguished from asylum-seeking – and his intention of “strengthening” the policy of returning such migrants to their country of origin. The prime minister even expressed “all my support for [Greek premier] Alexis Tsipras” because he had “made the choice to reform rather than a leap into the unknown”.
As far as Valls is concerned, the last six months in Greece have been a “political and ethical lesson for the Left across Europe”. The prime minister did not even feel it necessary to add that events in Athens had, for him, shown that no other approach was possible, and everyone in the party seemed to have accepted that idea. All that remains is for the PS to adapt its strategy accordingly.
A political realignment faced with a 'leftist left'
As is often the case, the politician who explained the political situation most frankly was the socialist president of the National Assembly Claude Bartolone. “There is no great enthusiasm in the country and that is perhaps to Hollande's good fortune,” he said. “There is no great enthusiasm for the far right, no great enthusiasm for the Right, and no great enthusiasm, either, for the socialists. But when there is no great enthusiasm it is the person who's in power who has the strongest card to play. The one that allows him to reassure people.” As for first secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, in order to remove any competition on the left of the PS he called for a unity that allows for no dissent. “Faced with reactionary France, the Left has a duty to unite. It's no laughing matter when you are confronted by the Front National!”
Yet there is no real question of a return to the pluralist Left, that coalition of parties on the Left that controlled Parliament and governed France from 1997 to 2002 under the right-wing presidency of Jacques Chirac. It seems that the choice has already been made by the PS to opt instead for an electoral grouping in the centre ground of French politics with the centre-left Parti Radical de Gauche (PRG) led by Jean-Michel Baylet, the tiny democratic-socialist Mouvement Unitaire Progressiste under Robert Hue, and a gathering of centre-green figures such as Jean-Luc Bennahmias and former minister Corinne Lepage, including senator Jean-Vincent Placé and MP François de Rugy who have both just resigned from the green EELV party. “We're trying to bring about a realignment faced with a 'leftist left',” said one minister. “Hollande is in the process of abandoning the idea of a return of [Cécile] Duflot to the government,” he added, referring to the green MP who quit the government in 2014 when Manuel Valls was made prime minister.
The break between the PS and EELV certainly seems to be a permanent one. A conference workshop on the outcome of the EELV-PS 2011 electoral agreement turned into open conflict between government minister Jean-Marie Le Guen and the EELV's David Cormand and Eva Sas, who is an MP. As for the French Communist Party, its name is not even mentioned when the PS's traditional partners are discussed. And beyond the calls for unity and the finger-pointing (“By going to the the left you end up on the Right,” said Manuel Valls on the bridge of the replica ship Hermione during a brief visit at the weekend), the regional elections in December could well end up as a master-class in disunity between the government and its allies on the one hand, and the rest of the French Left on the other.
The only voice appealing for reason was the president of the Young Socialists, Laura Slimani, who said in her conference speech: “It can't just be jumping up and down about the dangers of the extreme right that drives the unity of the Left. What will unite the Left, as in the past, is a common project of transformation [of society].” She said it would be easier to bring the greens on board by putting an end to subsidies for diesel, or to attract the communists by reasserting “our desire always to favour the law over contracts, employment rights over company agreements”. In her view “the choice for the electorate on the Left will be easier in 2017 [editor's note, the presidential election] if we open up assisted reproduction to lesbian couples, if we abolish HADOPI [editor's note, the body set up in 2009 to regulate illegal downloads on the internet] as we had promised, if we reapportion part of the CICE [editor's note, the tax credit system for companies to encourage employment] towards helping with people's spending power.” But it seems unlikely that her message will be heard.
“From now on it's in our interest to make an alliance with the 'government Greens' who accept that they won't get all their demands,” explained a close ally of François Hollande, referring to politicians such as the recently-resigned Jean-Vincent Placé and François de Rugy. “We will wait to see if they manage to form a structure, then see if there is room to involve them in the government.” Mediapart spoke to several senior socialists who still seemed under some illusion as to the capacity of the “eco-realists” to create a broad-based movement, given that the actual number of activists is no more than a thousand, including all the small parties and various political personalities. At La Rochelle Jean-Luc Bennahmias's Front Démocrate succeeded in attracting between 60 and 200 people.
But this does not matter to everyone. “What will decide the first round [in the 2017 presidential election] is the perception of the Left's direction,” said a long-standing minister under Hollande. “For that, effectiveness and economic and social results are a prerequisite, but they won't be enough; we must also be present in the domains of the environment, social justice and ethics, and not make mistakes on 'law and order'.” And as one of his colleagues remarked: “As it is, even with a divided Left, 2017 is not so undoable”.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter