The challenge for Hollande
Exclusive7 May, by Roland Hsu
The French have voted for François Hollande as their next president. Behind their choice was the important question of trust. In the US, opinion polls often ask voters whether they “trust” a candidate. In France, since 2007, the question has been moot. For French voters of all political affiliations, Nicolas Sarkozy had for the last five years pursued a vigorous platform of distrust — distrust of organized labor, welfare security, immigrants, rivals among the far right, and of compromise and traditional democratic process.
What have we learned from the results of the election? In round one, French voters relegated the incumbent Sarkozy to second place, but they also held the Socialist challenger François Hollande to a meager lead, and gave the far-right Front National (FN) a record number and percentage of votes. This was a reprimand to both final contenders for president. But the real story, and the one that will continue to play out into the new Hollande administration, is that, by design or by default, voters gave the party that most clearly vocalizes a politics of resentment (the FN) a loud voice — and a plan to amass a block of seats in the National Assembly at the next legislative election this June. This development warrants very close monitoring: as we look ahead we should see May-June as a season of continuous campaigning for the leadership of the political right.The new generation of FN leadership under Marine Le Pen successfully undermined Sarkozy’s campaign, sensing the consequence of the Hollande victory. The FN under Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen was focused on what it saw as problems in society — immigration and loss of the traditional way of life of the small shop owner. But under Marine Le Pen it is now focused on the problems of government.
She achieved her aim to break the hold on the power and politics of the right, previously exerted by Sarkozy’s Union for Popular Movement (UMP). Under Sarkozy, the center-right was able to appeal to voters swayed by its general platform of fiscal and social conservatism. Apart from those voters who were willing to support a marginalized party (such as the FN), most people who defined themselves as conservative loyalists had no option but to support Sarkozy’s UMP. But with the defeat of Sarkozy, center-right community loyalty has imploded, and will continue to do so for the rest of the legislative campaign season. The resulting vacuum offers the Front National the best opportunity since its founding to step in as the viable party to represent those leaders and voters who seek a totally reorganized right wing.
To whom can President Hollande and his ministers of finance and of labor turn for partnership, and with whom will they be forced to make deals? The new French administration may have to do deals with a block of legislators loyal to the FN in order to pass and enact major policy on economic reform, immigration and foreign affairs. Yet we saw that the Sarkozy campaign’s courting of the far right had the effect of giving Le Pen a stronger voice in the future of policy-making than even Sarkozy had calculated.
Will the new French government continue along the “Merkozy” path — the Angela Merkel/Sarkozy duet that pushed austerity? Or will it now, as Hollande promises, lead a eurogroup of “growth” economies, and push through amendments to the proposed treaty on Stability and Coordination of EU economies?
It remains to be seen whether France finds a balance between austerity and stimulus. But the evidence suggests that the new administration will not be able to push through either austerity or stimulus in any meaningful way unless it repairs the mistrust that has been created between government, industry and that underclass of the unemployed.
In France, fixing employment means bridging deep chasms between employers and recent immigrants whom we know face discrimination in hiring. Since coming to office, the Sarkozy government focused on lowering the “cost” of employment (relaxing termination rules, reducing pensions), but this did little to address the problem of double-digit unemployment rates for recent immigrants. To lower unemployment, one first must address social conflict; and to address conflict, France needs a dialogue between political and disenfranchised community leaders. To date, the record of such dialogue has not been good.
Political leaders have not prioritized making first- and second-generation immigrant youth employable. Those who live in the suburban banlieues of disenfranchised youth and the unemployed have not forgotten that Sarkozy, when he was interior minister, responded to the riots of 2005 by labeling the participants (many of North African descent) as racaille orscum.
That memory should serve as a lesson to the new Hollande government. It will need to devote real and political capital to programs of social inclusion and job training. And it will need to do so while trading legislative favors with Le Pen and her new post-UMP colleagues on the far right. This is not an enviable prospect, but it is the likely, and perhaps only, scenario for creating sustainable employment.
For Hollande’s government to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio, it must lighten the weight of pensions. But to do so is impossible without winning at least minimal cooperation from organized labor. France is well known for its tradition of labor militancy, but in the recent past this has been played out in relatively impotent rituals of periodic demos: the last nation-wide, effective general strike was back in 1995 (protesting pension cuts under President Chirac).
Again, Hollande would do well to learn the lesson from his predecessor. In 2007 Sarkozy began his term with his budget minister describing French labor relations as being in the stone age, and unilaterally rolling out an aggressive labor reform package that had the effect of invigorating the anemic unions. That led to demonstrations whose size and vigor surprised even labor leaders. The reform package was mostly withdrawn, and government, labor and industry leaders have since then mistrusted each other.
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