PERRY ANDERSON
THE CENTRE CAN HOLD
The French Spring
France,
geographically and politically the hinge of the European Union, where
its northern and southern tier join, has undergone a more drastic change
of position within it than any other member state. Germany, already
with the largest economy and population before unification, has since
become—once again—the dominant power of the continent, and as its
franker spirits make no secret, hegemonic in the Community. Spain, long
marginalized by poverty and dictatorship, has lived entry into the
Community as status-promotion to European prosperity and respectability.
These have reason for satisfaction with the EU.
Italy less so: its economic slippage under the single currency,
however, has not substantially altered what was always a supporting
rather than leading role in the Community. France, on the other hand,
which was once premier among the six founders—capable under De Gaulle of
bending the other five to its will, French functionaries and language
first in influence and use in the Commission, and down to the turn of
the eighties still diplomatically senior partner with Germany—has seen a
remorseless fall from former heights. In part this was an inevitable
consequence of German reunification, which automatically gave the
Federal Republic a still greater demographic and economic advantage. But
in larger measure its sources were endogenous.
The
indices of the country’s loss of standing, most of them well advertised
in native debates, are legion. Many go back to the nineties, but have
become starker since the crisis of 2008. Economically, growth has
crawled, averaging less than 1 per cent a year; unemployment increased
to 10 per cent—among youth 25 per cent; [1] the budget not been in the black for over forty years; public debt risen to 96 per cent of GDP;
per capita income scarcely moved. Diplomatically, Paris has more and
more taken its cue in Europe from Berlin and in the world beyond from
Washington, its elites barren of significant independence in either
arena. Culturally, English has become the lingua franca of
the Union, official and popular. Socially, no other large country in
the Eurozone has seen such levels of social and racial unrest, or
consistent expressions of popular dissatisfaction with the state of the
nation. For years now, with the briefest intermissions, morosité has become a settled mood.
1
Politically,
the Fifth Republic created by and for De Gaulle, with a unique
concentration of executive power in the Presidency and a legislature
rigged to exclude trouble-makers, functioned more or less smoothly for
thirty years after his death, down to the end of Mitterrand’s time in
the Élysée. By then the era of fast growth and rapid rise in living
standards that had underpinned its original success was long over, and
the effects of the global downturn since the mid-seventies were
beginning to tell. Mitterrand’s sharp turn of 1983, abandoning public
spending to prime the economy for austerity to stabilize the currency,
talk of socialism for rhetoric of financial discipline, was widely
greeted as putting the political system on a sounder basis. In neutering
French communism as a helpless junior accomplice to the change, and
discrediting the pernicious revolutionary strain in the country’s
culture, he had laid the foundations of a stable Republic of the Centre:
no longer dependent on the individual charisma of a national hero who
was distrustful of parties, but now solidly anchored in a cross-party
ideological consensus that capitalism was the only sensible way of
organizing modern life. With the PCF at
last eliminated as any serious presence from the scene, France could
look forward to the kind of alternation between a Centre-Left and
Centre-Right, differing on details but agreed on essentials, that was
the certificate of a liberal democracy.
So,
on the surface, it came to pass. At the Élysée, Mitterrand from the
former was succeeded by Chirac and his faithless minister Sarkozy from
the latter, followed by Hollande from the former: nineteen years of
presidential rule by the Centre-Left, seventeen years by the
Centre-Right. Until 2002, when the Presidency was abbreviated from seven
to five years, making elections to the executive and legislature
coincident, there was even alternation within
alternation—‘cohabitation’—as one side captured the Premiership with a
majority in the National Assembly while the other continued to hold the
Presidency: Chirac and Balladur under Mitterrand, Jospin under Chirac.
But below the surface, for deep-lying cultural reasons, the equilibrium
was always less stable than it seemed. From the eighties onwards, as
elsewhere in the West, the continuous imperative of the time was
neoliberal radicalization of the operations of capitalism: deregulation,
privatization, flexibilization. In France, this was an agenda
calculated to provoke tensions within the electorates of both
Centre-Right and Centre-Left. [2]
Gaullism,
of which the Centre-Right presented itself as the—albeit increasingly
notional—heir, had never attempted to undo the local version of the
post-war welfare state, if anything expanding it as fiscal revenues
rose, and always secured at least a third of the working-class vote,
while holding fast the traditional bastions of conservatism in rural and
small-town society, topped up by the modern entrepreneurial and
technocratic elites at the switches of French capitalism. Liberalism had
never been much of a watchword in post-war France, where it was
typically associated with unbridled laissez-faire. The arrival of
neoliberalism—the prefix scarcely even necessary to raise
hackles—predictably opened up a fault line in the Centre-Right bloc
between its business, bureaucratic and professional components, over
time increasingly eager to benefit from a striking off of outdated
fetters on the pursuit of profit, and its provincial notables and
petty-bourgeois clerks or artisans, not to speak of workers, who stood
to suffer or be sidelined by them; similar tensions arising when in a
subsequent phase divisive moral questions—should there be a market in
reproductive rights, should marriage be gender-neutral?—were added to
economic issues.
Inevitably,
the advent of neoliberalism split the Centre-Left electorate too. There
Mitterrand’s skills had left the Socialist Party in all but complete
command of the situation, with a Communist remnant obliged to tag behind
it by the two-round electoral system. The majority of Centre-Left
voters came from the lower end of the income pyramid: workers,
schoolteachers, poorly paid white-collar and public-sector employees,
with superimposed above them better-off professionals, semi-managerial
personnel and state administrators, flanked by the country’s large,
well-endowed media-intellectual establishment, and in control of the PS machine.
Hayekian doctrine had little to offer the former, but a growing
attraction for the latter, increasingly persuaded that the basic drivers
of a much needed modernization of society could only be the firm and
market. The fissure in the Centre-Right was thus reproduced on the
Centre-Left. On each side, the dominant layer of the bloc was committed
to advancing the neoliberal turn Mitterrand had set in motion in the
early eighties. But since both had to win elections to achieve power,
neither could risk alienating essential voters by campaigning too openly
for a neoliberal agenda, or provoking violent social reactions by
pursuing it too radically in office. The result was the unsatisfactory
record of half-measures deplored by every right-minded organ of liberal
opinion—the Financial Times, the Economist, the Frankfurter Allgemeine—abroad.
Public spending remained far too high; the welfare state was not cut
down to decent size; business was not set properly free; budgets were
not in surplus; unions were not broken; post office, prisons and too
much else remained in the hands of the state. In their timidity,
Centre-Right and Centre-Left shared responsibility for the failure of
France to embrace modernity.
2
In
point of fact, the symmetry was incomplete. There was a significant
difference in the problems that neoliberalism posed to each coalition,
and the ways each handled it. [3] For
the Centre-Left, the component of its electoral base that stood to lose
from any French version of the achievements of Thatcher or Blair was
larger than the corresponding segment of support of the Centre-Right,
and bound to lose more, as socially most vulnerable at their receiving
end. To meet this difficulty, the PS required
an altogether more affirmative ideological lamination of its course,
capable at once of embellishing and distracting from its objectives.
This was bequeathed it by Mitterrand: the inspiring ideal of Europe. It
was in its service that the French were called upon to liberalize and
modernize themselves. In private, Mitterrand—more candid than his
successors—knew what that meant, as he confided to his familiar Jacques
Attali at the outset: ‘I am divided between two ambitions: the
construction of Europe and social justice. The European Monetary System
is a condition of success in the first, and limits my freedom in the
second.’ [4]Once the EU was
in place, every market-friendly initiative could be extolled or excused
as required by solidarity with Brussels. Not infrequently, the
Centre-Right too found this a convenient exutoire,
but it could never resort to Europe as an all-purpose ideological trump
without renouncing its claims to some memory of Gaullism, and did not
need to. Neoliberal aims came more naturally to a larger part of its
constituency, requiring less borrowed finery for them.
Yet
at the same time, the Centre-Left was the better equipped of the two
blocs actually to introduce neoliberal reforms. Resistance to these was
always most likely to come from the popular classes where the larger
part of its own social base lay, in particular—though not
exclusively—from the trade-unions, where only the collaborationist CFDT could
be relied on to swallow virtually anything. For the Centre-Right to
provoke a head-on conflict with unionized workers or student movements,
not to speak of broader popular layers in sympathy with them, was to
invite defeat, as Juppé discovered in 1995 and De Villepin in 2006. By
contrast, still claiming to represent the injured and oppressed—and
interpret their best interests—the PS was
in a more favourable position to neutralize such opposition, as Valls’s
success in ramming through a labour law to please business in 2016
showed. So too it was no accident that over the years the Centre-Left
privatized many more public enterprises than the Centre-Right.
3
Inevitably,
the long-standing difficulties, going back to the eighties, in the way
of a neoliberal makeover of French capitalism intensified once the
financial crisis of 2008–09 struck the country. The deteriorating
condition of the economy, as growth fell and unemployment rose, made
harsh remedies of the market even less tolerable to those suffering at
the bottom of society, yet even more urgent—if France was to become
competitive again, the only route to all-round prosperity—in the eyes of
those at the top of it. The crisis hit France under Sarkozy, who tacked
as best he could between the need for reform and the need for
re-election, in the end securing neither. With the Centre-Right stymied,
alternation kicked in once again, putting the Centre-Left into office.
But if Sarkozy’s presidency was a let-down for the former, Hollande’s
proved a disaster for the latter, stretching its already frayed
tightrope between electoral promise and political performance to
breaking point. After campaigning with a more radical rhetoric than his
predecessors, announcing that ‘my enemy is finance’, and pledging
revision of the Stability Pact written by Berlin and Brussels, taxation
of the rich and succour for the poor, Hollande was soon presiding over a
government more conspicuously tilting to business and tailing Berlin
than Sarkozy’s, and relying still more on military adventures in Africa
and the Middle East for temporary injections of national adrenalin.
Growth failed to quicken, the budget to balance; per capita income
continued to stagnate; the number of jobless, far from falling, rose.
Within
a year of his election, Hollande was already the least popular
President in the history of the Fifth Republic. Sarkozy was disliked for
his swagger, and disappointed expectations of his rule. But when he ran
for re-election, he could still muster 48.4 per cent of the vote. By
contrast, Hollande was despised for his indignities, and—much more
decisively and ruinously—angered or alienated the vast majority of those
who had voted for him. With less than twelve months of his mandate
remaining, his ratings in the polls had fallen to single digits. Such a
collapse in support was unprecedented. It looked certain that the
tightrope was about to snap, precipitating his fall. Yet such was
Hollande’s sense of self-importance that with the Presidential contest
of 2017 only six months away, he was still bent on running for
re-election, reckoning that he could use the authority of office to keep
the PS behind
him and with it have a fair chance of keeping the Centre-Left in power.
Of the first, at least, he had reason to be confident: the party was
very unlikely to unseat a sitting President as its candidate. All such
calculations were shattered by the publication that autumn of a 650-page
book in which two journalists from Le Monde recounted their conversations with him, recorded across five years from 2011 to 2016. A suicidal sottisier of
footling grudges and vanities, its effect was that of a French version
of the Nixon tapes—incredibly, not concealed but conceived as
self-advertisement. [5] Overni
4
With
polls giving it a wide lead, the Centre-Right looked set for an easy
victory, France poised for its customary alternation. In the wake of
Hollande’s self-destruction, the party Sarkozy had relabelled Les
Républicains held a two-round primary to pick its candidate for the
Presidency. To general surprise, neither Sarkozy nor Juppé, the
favourite, emerged victorious. Instead, it was Sarkozy’s former premier
François Fillon who swept the board with a heterodox mixture of
Thatcherism and Gaullism: a more radically neoliberal socio-economic
programme than ever presented before in France, breaking with consensual
welfare commitments, combined with a more independent foreign policy
than either camp had ever dared envisage since De Gaulle, breaking with EU and US taboos
on Russia and the Middle East. With a large lead in national polls—in
early December, touching 30 per cent of first-round preferences—he
looked all but certain to be the next President, given the automatic
cross-party rush to back whoever faced off against his closest
challenger Marine Le Pen, running 7 points behind him but virtually
guaranteed to get to the second round, where over 60 per cent of the
electorate could be counted on to vote for her opponent.
Six weeks later, a thunderbolt put paid to this prospect. On 24 January, Le Canard enchaînérevealed
that Fillon had for years been using his staff allowances as a deputy
in the National Assembly to pay his wife, and later also his children,
for imaginary services. Immediately put under judicial
investigation—which during the primary contest he had said, in a
scarcely veiled attack on Sarkozy, long threatened by the same, should
disqualify anyone from running for the Presidency—his standing in the
polls collapsed. A week later he had dropped to third place, and never
recovered. The Centre-Right, unable to force him to withdraw, was
suddenly out of the game.
In eliminating Fillon, Le Canard enchaîné became
the country’s Great Elector, its intervention effectively deciding the
race for the Presidency, whose outcome was predictable within hours of
its story. The spectacular nature of its scoop aroused virtually no
curiosity as to its origin. Yet there certainly lay the key to the dénouement.
Fillon’s malversations were in no way out of the ordinary in the French
political class. One estimate is that something like a hundred deputies
in the National Assembly used their allowances in not dissimilar
fashion—if more frequently, perhaps, mistresses than wives on the
payroll. The sums of money involved, considerable by the standards of
ordinary people, were small change at the high end of political
corruption in France—little more than ‘shoplifting’, as one scathing
critic put it. Evidence, however, requiring access to bank accounts, tax
returns and the like, was harder to come by. How did the Canard acquire these, at so strategic a moment? The weekly, billed as France’s top scandal sheet, bears comparison with Private Eye in
Britain, each offering a mixture of satire and exposé. If the
elephantine humour of the French version makes its British counterpart
look like rapier wit, the larger difference lies in the intimacy of the Canard with
the tenebrous world of back-door manoeuvres in the political class, and
manipulative operations of the French intelligence services, of both of
which it has more than once been a willing instrument. [6] The
timing of its exposure of Fillon was an unambiguous indication that
this was not the fruit of months of patient independent investigation,
but simply a package—agreeable to the paper’s political
orientation—handed to it by interested parties in the state apparatus.
These could have been placemen of thePS in
the Ministry of Finance, acting to thwart the probable victor of the
opposite camp; confidants of Sarkozy, of which there were still many in
the police, exacting revenge on Fillon for having done his best to cast
suspicion on his rival in the Jouyet affair; [7] or
the military-diplomatic security complex, moving to destroy a threat to
Franco-German unity on Crimea and Western sanctions on Russia, in much
the same way as its American counterpart checkmated Trump’s inclination
for overtures to Moscow. Whatever the source of the dossier, its effect
on the election was larger than all the campaign speeches of the
different candidates combined.
5
The Canard published
its story two days after the first round of the primary in the
Socialist Party had revealed the full extent of the disarray in the
Centre-Left. Once Hollande had stepped back, his Premier Manuel Valls,
who had long been eyeing the opportunity, announced he would run for
President. France’s best known admirer of Blair, Valls had never been
popular in the party, as too muscular a politician on its right, calling
too openly for it to drop any pretense of socialism. He hoped however
to capitalize on his position as head of the government, and image as a
tough-minded foe of terrorism. The sharp neoliberal and authoritarian
bent of his last year in office, however, had provoked enough revulsion
in the base of the party to undo him. Well ahead in the first round, and
a landslide winner in the second was another of Hollande’s ministers,
Benoît Hamon, who had resigned from the government in late 2014, and ran
as a candidate of the left of the party. A pallid figure, enjoying
little or no support in its establishment, and scant appeal beyond the
shrinking perimeter of its base, his victory simply advertised the
condition to which the PS had
been reduced: hollowed-out and divided—Valls refusing even to vote for
him. His nomination, sealed just after Fillon was effectively knocked
out of the ring, took the Centre-Left as cleanly out of contention as
the Centre-Right had been five days earlier. In April he would pick up
just 6 per cent of the electorate.
6
By
the second week of February, with both stanchions of alternation
removed, it was already clear who would be the next President. In
October Emmanuel Macron, Hollande’s Minister for the Economy, had
resigned from his post to run against his patron. The previous April he
had created a movement adorned with his own monogram, En Marche!, with
the obvious intention of testing the waters for a bid to capture the
Élysée, and in November duly announced it. A typical product of the
upper reaches of the political class, an énarque moving
effortlessly between public service and private enrichment, from
Inspector of Finances to instant millionaire with Rothschild, he had
joined the PS in
2006, dipping out of it in 2009, after making the connexions levitating
him into Hollande’s personal entourage in 2012, where he became deputy
chief of staff and in short order, at the age of 36, a leading minister
in the government. Entranced by thisenfant choyé, Hollande saw in him an earlier version of himself, adorning his regime with a touch of youthful glamour. Macron, c’est moi, he told his journalists. [8] So
far as policy went, he was not wrong: little or nothing divided them,
Macron’s background guaranteeing he would be a business-friendly icon of
deregulation of the kind Hollande wanted. That formally he was no
longer a member of the PS hardly
mattered, since privately Hollande was already saying the party was a
thing of the past. But in thinking that Macron would be a loyal
princeling, since he owed his elevation to Hollande, he was deluded.
Close up, Macron could see the likely fate of his regime, and at the
right moment had no hesitation in helping to bring it down to further
his own ambitions. By the time he announced his candidacy, he had
assembled business, bureaucratic, professional and intellectual backers
galore, along with a commensurate war-chest, and bathed in fulsome media
coverage, could step forward as the embodiment of all that was dynamic
and forward-looking in France.
Ideologically, from the outset Macron had launched En Marche! as
a movement transcending the outdated opposition between Right and Left
in France, for the creation of a new, fresh politics of the Centre,
liberal in economics and social in sensibility. This was, of course,
itself a time-worn appeal, repeatedly offered by assorted politicians of
one kind or another, and corresponding to a real demand in the middle
of the spectrum of political opinion, but never successfully dislodging
the dichotomy of Left and Right; in part because of the polarizing logic
of the electoral system, but equally because the dominant opposition
was between two blocs each of which could legitimately claim the same
prefix: Centre-Left and Centre-Right. Now, however, that both of these
were disabled, a ‘pure’ self-declared Centre could for the first time
command the stage. In projecting his construction, Macron had to deal
with the last pretender to the role, the Catholic politician François
Bayrou, who had run for the Presidency in every election since 2002
(achieving a high point of 18.57 per cent of the vote in 2007), and
could subtract electors from Macron if he ran again. The political party
from which he had come, the UDF, was a creation of Giscard in the seventies, and in its subsequent metamorphoses—it is now the UDI—served
as a traditional, if not invariable, ally of the much larger party of
originally Gaullist extraction led by Chirac—of whom Bayrou had been a
Minister—and Sarkozy. [9] It
had always been a more significant component of the Centre-Right bloc
than any counterpart element in the Centre-Left. Since Macron could
scarcely conceal his passage through the PS,
it was all the more important he secure the support of Bayrou, to
ensure that his candidacy had visible endorsement from the opposite
field, where the banner of the Centre had always been most consistently
raised. On 22 February, Bayrou came aboard without undue tergiversation.
Macron immediately gained 5 points in the polls. The Centre was now
truly his own. Well ahead of Fillon, with Hamon languishing low behind
either, he had locked down the Presidency.
7
Such
was not, however, the narrative in the French, let alone international
media. There, the election featured as a dramatic, even nerve-wracking
contest, dominated by the threat of the Front National—thinly veiled
fascism or rabidly toxic populism, according to taste—coming to power,
in a nightmare Gallic version of Trump’s victory in America. In part,
the typical logic of press and television dictated this. News is not
news if it is predictable: titillating frissons of fear sell better than
boring assurances of comfort. But also, and much more important for the
purposes of the second round, was the standard logic of the established
order: the more lurid the danger from the extreme right, the more
overwhelming the need for all decent citizens to rally behind the
champion of democracy, whose identity could at first be left tactfully
blank, before becoming, to general relief, an enchanting young banker.
The realities of the FN today
have little to do with all this. Formed in the early seventies by the
ex-paratrooper Jean-Marie Le Pen, it was originally a small party of the
far right, of classic anti-communist and anti-semitic outlook, which a
decade later achieved its first, still modest electoral breakthrough
(9.65 per cent), picking up working-class votes disillusioned by
Mitterrand’s turn to austerity. Ideologically, it remained—and this was
not so usual for far-right parties of the period—militantly pro-European
and free-market, anti-statist. [10] After
Maastricht, it dropped its enthusiasm for Europe and gradually
increased its popular audience, as the only party that was not
implicated in the visible corrosion of the political system, and the
deterioration of conditions of life under it. In 2002 it came as a shock
to the establishment when Le Pen got through to the second round of the
Presidential election, before being crushed by Chirac’s 82 per cent
landslide against him, [11] and
five years later reduced to a tenth of the electorate. In the wake of
this setback, Le Pen withdrew, and his daughter Marine took over
leadership of the party. Thereafter, the combination of the Great
Recession, Marine’s much greater political skills, and the free fall of
the Hollande regime, put the wind in its sails. Crucial to its ensuing
success was Marine’s repositioning of it as not only a hammer of the EU,
but also—another 180-degree transformation—a champion of welfare
protection and state intervention, against the devastations of
neoliberalism. In 2014, the FN came first in the European elections in France, with a quarter of the vote.
Sociologically,
this rise was a conquest of the working class, where the party came to
occupy much of the space vacated by French communism. This was not the
unionized factory proletariat of old, largely destroyed by
de-industrialization, but its atomized successor, eking out a precarious
living on short-term contracts in smaller enterprises, generationally
removed from its predecessor in daily experience and surrounding
culture, and capped not by teachers and lesser public employees as in
the PCF, but by petty entrepreneurs and self-employed professionals or artisans in the FN.
United by hostility to politicians and technocrats above and immigrants
and vagabonds below, the contradictions of this bloc were objectively
no less than those of the two competing camps of the establishment. But
they were not put to the same subjective test: since the Front was
excluded from the political system, it could not be blamed for its
misdeeds—it was the only organized force plainly innocent of them, and
too often the only one speaking the plain truth about them. Under
Marine, it had become the first party of the French working class. In
the first round of the elections this year, the number of workers who
voted for it was far ahead of any other party—37 per cent; in the second
round, 56 per cent. As inequality of income and insecurity of
employment steadily increased under the system of collusive alternation,
so have those willing to cast their ballot for the FN:
4.8 million in the Presidential election of 2002, 6.8 million in the
regional elections of 2015, 7.7 million in the first round in 2017, 10.6
million in the second round—the last figure, however, an artifice of
the distortions imposed by the double tour.
Its real level of support is about a fifth of the electorate, less than
those—mainly workers too—who abstain, vote blank or spoil their
ballots. [12] There
was never the slightest chance that Marine could win the Presidency.
Far from being a deadly threat to the system in place, the FNis
an eminently functional part of it, clasping together all respectable
opinion that might otherwise waver or question it, in an anxious or
self-righteous defence of the status quo: the ideal scarecrow of a
neoliberal republic.
8
Ranged beyond the system on the opposite flank was the recent creation of La France insoumise,
led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Younger by a generation than Benn, and a
dozen years than Lafontaine, Mélenchon is the last major figure from the
European parties of the Socialist International to turn, late in their
career, sharply to the left—in his case, even discarding the label as
too confining. From a pied-noir family
that relocated from Morocco to France in 1962, after an early formation
in the Lambertist branch of French Trotskyism that produced many cadres
of the PS,
he became an ardent admirer of Mitterrand and, rising rapidly through
the Socialist Party, at the age of 35 the youngest senator in the
history of the Fifth Republic. Active in the internal arguments and
disputes of the party from a position of the left in it, for some three
decades he remained loyal to its leadership, defending Mitterrand’s
conversion to austerity, voting for Maastricht, becoming a minister
under Jospin, and approving his ruinous change to the constitution.
In 2005, however, he came out against the proposed European Constitution, overwhelmingly backed by the PS,
and rejected by a large majority in the ensuing referendum. Three years
later, he abandoned the party to create a small one of his own to the
left of it, with which he negotiated an alliance with the PCF to fight the elections of 2012 together as a Front de Gauche,
himself running as its Presidential candidate. The experience was not a
success, Mélenchon getting 11 per cent of the vote, scarcely more than
the combined score of various smaller left organizations in 2002, and
the FG only
7 per cent in the legislative elections. Mélenchon had hoped the Front
would unite disillusioned socialists and residual communists in a French
versionof Die Linke in Germany (Lafontaine was present at its foundation); but the PCF, clinging to its long-standing local deals with the PS, had no intention of letting itself be merged in this fashion, and nothing came of it.
Changing tack, four years later Mélenchon created an entirely new movement, La France insoumise, to
run for the Presidency again, this time independent of any other force.
The change was more than just organizational. Fascinated for some time
by the success of heterodox governments in Latin America, he drew
particular inspiration from the example of Rafael Correa in Ecuador,
like him a former minister of a social-democratic party, who had
pioneered the idea of a ‘citizen’s revolution’, rewriting the
constitution, redistributing wealth and protecting the environment. This
was the way forward, to abandon the exhausted schemas of the
traditional European left for a radically progressive populism,
summoning the people to battle against the elites in control of a
bankrupt political and economic system. Impressed with the strategic
insight of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, encountered in Argentina
in 2013, Mélenchon set about applying their lessons at home. [13] With
a platform not unlike Correa’s—heading its demands is the call for a
Sixth Republic, to be founded by a Constituent Assembly doing away with
the presidential monarchy and rigged electoral system, to create an
equitable parliamentary democracy with right of recall and referendum
initiative [14] —La France insoumise banned
red flags and the Internationale for the tricolour and Marseillaise at
its meetings, appealing to all patriots regardless of class or age to
rise up against the decaying order of the Fifth. Borrowing the cry that
drove out Ben Ali in Tunisia, Dégagez!—‘Clear
out!’—became the leitmotif of the campaign. Widely acknowledged as
victor of the television debates, addressing with unmatched rhetorical
verve mass meetings projected from city to city by hologram, Mélenchon
achieved the largest increase in support—some 7 percentage points—of any
candidate in the closing weeks of the campaign.
9
It
was an impressive feat. The final vote for the first round saw the four
leading candidates closely bunched, Macron with a clear lead at 24.01
per cent, the other three separated by scarcely more than a single
percentage point: Le Pen 21.30, Fillon 20.01, Mélenchon 19.58. [15]The populist turn of La France insoumise had
paid off. Mélenchon displaced Le Pen from her long-standing position as
the most popular politician among the nation’s youth, winning 30 per
cent of the 18–24 age group, and the unemployed, taking 31 per cent,
with a striking degree of support too among immigrant youth in the banlieues.
In four out of France’s ten largest cities—Marseille, Toulouse,
Montpellier, Lille—he came first. With a smidgeon below Podemos’s share
of the vote in Spain the previous summer (21 per cent), campaigning on a
much more radical programme, by reducing Hamon to just over 6 per cent La France insoumise achieved what the Spanish movement had sought and failed to do, crush the Socialist Party at the polls. [16] But it had not overtaken the FN, Marine retaining a big lead among both blue- and white-collar workers, and the two lowest income groups. Together, the FN and LFI won a full 40 per cent of those who marked a name on a ballot in late April. Another 24 per cent abstained or voted blank. [17] No
other West European country has seen such a radical rejection of the
established order. Two out of five voters, shuddered mainstream
commentators, were apparently ready to embark on any demented adventure. [18] Where might it end?
In
reality, the two anti-systemic forces, rather than aggregating to a
common populist insurgency, largely cancel each other out. However
similar their critiques of the social and economic system, insuperable
moral and ideological differences on immigration hold them apart at
opposite ends of the political spectrum, where each freely demonizes the
other. [19] So long as the FN has
the edge in the competition between the two, it provides the requisite
spectre for ritual unity around the Fifth Republic, and in the second
round of the Presidential election performed the same service as fifteen
years earlier. This time, however, the appeal of a union sacrée was
less. Mélenchon declined to urge his voters to fall in line behind a
victor so obnoxious to them, who had no need for their support, and
two-fifths did not, abstentions at their highest level for almost fifty
years. Macron cruised home with a huge margin, virtually double Le Pen’s
vote—if nationally not quite at Chirac’s level, matching him in Paris,
with an Uzbek score of 90 per cent, gratifying enough. Out of an
electorate of 47.5 million, Macron won 20.7 million, 16.2 million
abstained or voted blank, and 10.6 million opted for Le Pen.
What
the figures made clear was the political source and social background
of Macron’s support. In the first round, he took 47 per cent of those
who voted for Hollande in 2012, and 43 per cent of those who voted for
Bayrou, in each case virtually double that of any other candidate, as
against a mere 17 per cent of those who had voted for Sarkozy; and in
the second, by far his highest score—71 per cent—was among those who had
voted for Hamon. Socially, he led in the two highest income categories
during the first round. [20] In
other words, his core support was a recycled version of the Centre-Left
bloc that put Hollande in power. Not exactly the same, because this
time part of it deserted to Mélenchon and a smaller slice remained
faithful to Hamon, losses offset by Bayrou voters who had gone in
similar numbers to Sarkozy in 2012, and about a third of the UDF,
which after Bayrou abandoned it had stayed with the Centre-Right. The
relative weight of the two components in the victorious camp has thus
changed: Macron’s coalition lies further over to the Centre. But within
it, there was no doubt which party supplied most of the key personnel
and political-organizational software for the new ruler. The small
political coterie around him derive either from the team assembled by
Strauss-Kahn, before his disgrace, for his own run for the Presidency,
or former aides in the Ministry of the Economy of aPS government. Paradoxically, the contingencies of vanity and scandal journalism—Le Mondeand Le Canard between
them—have produced the most ironic of all upshots: the least popular
President in living memory, heading the most discredited administration,
has resulted in a succession headed by a figure out of the same stable,
whom he created and saw as hisDoppelgänger. He would come to regret his confidence that Macron, c’est moi, but the degree of political continuity between the two is there for all to see.
10
Neon-lit
with hype in a jubilant international and sycophantic domestic press,
Macron is presented as France’s version of Trudeau or Obama, or for
those with selective memories, Blair. The similarities of ideology and
image are real. But there are not insignificant differences. Personally,
although much has been made of his charm, half the country has so far
proved immune to it: on the eve of the first round, 46 per cent of the
population expressed their dislike of him, his campaign having left
among many an impression of arrogance, pretension and stridency.
Arrogance: an énarque of énarques, exudin
Behind
them, on the evidence, lies a ruthless political will and intelligence
leaving his Atlantic analogues at the post. None of them shot to power
with such speed or bravado, and so little ballast. Nor is that Macron’s
only advantage over them. Both the office he has captured and the field
he confronts afford him much greater freedom of manoeuvre. The powers of
the French Presidency, unconstrained by any surly mid-term election of
Congress, let alone a refractory Supreme Court, far surpass those of the
American, and are immune to British backbench rebellion: designation of
them as royal is not purely metaphor. Beyond these familiar
prerogatives, moreover, an exceptional clearing now lies open before
him. For over three decades, neoliberal reformation of France was a
sequence of halting difficult steps in the right direction, that could
never acquire full momentum because of party-political alternation
between a Centre-Right and a Centre-Left, each striving their best to
forward it, each impeded by significant parts of their constituency, and
locked by the electoral system into a bi-polar competition with the
other. In 2017, with the meltdown of the PS and extenuation of its rival, there is suddenly every chance the deadlock will be broken.
Historically,
no newly elected President of the Fifth Republic has ever failed to win
a majority in the National Assembly, and not a few have won a
landslide. But the majority was always a partisan construction, composed
of deputies representing a pre-existing party or coalition of parties,
and since the eighties, subject to contradictory pressures or demands
from its electorate. Macron, cresting on his two-thirds vote in the
second round, could be confident of the rule—deliberately reinforced by
the constitutional change of 2001—that in the wake of victory, an
incoming executive can rely on sweeping up the legislature too. But,
unlike his predecessors, he could produce an Assembly to his liking
virtually ex nihilo, stocked with the
novices and transfuges of his new-born machine, La République en marche,
as dependent on their creator as once were members of Forza Italia in
Italy. If the initial nucleus of this construction comes from the PS,
encrusted with contributions from Bayrou’s MoDem and a few spangles
from ‘civil society’, the strategic aim is to amplify it with the
co-option of leading figures of the Right. Encouraged by the timely
selection of one of their own—Édouard Philippe, yet another énarque—as
Prime Minister, and another, Bruno Le Maire as Finance Minister, a good
number are already eager to jump on the bandwagon, and more will no
doubt follow. Logically, the result should be a homogeneous Centre with a
super-majority, capable at last of accomplishing the modernization of
France according to the best prescriptions.
11
The
exclusionary electoral system still in place, at institutional level
there is little to stop this. In 1958, with 20.4 per cent of the vote,
De Gaulle secured 198 deputies, while the PCF with
19.2 per cent got 10. By the first week of June, so predictable had the
upshot in the Assembly become that in the first round of the
legislative elections, over half the electorate didn’t even bother to
vote—51.29 per cent abstaining, with another 2.23 per cent voting blank
or spoiling their ballots: a figure without precedent not only in
France, but in any West European country since the Second World War.
With the support of just 15.39 per cent of the electorate La République
en marche was on course to take up to 80 per cent of the legislature,
the largest partisan avalanche in the history of the Fifth Republic. [22] The
Républicains, demoralized by the disgrace of Fillon and weakened by
desertions, are in no mood, or position, to make much trouble. On the
streets, the unions—CFDT excepted—will
try to resist, but having proved unable to block the El Khomri labour
law under Hollande, they are unlikely to fare better with Macron, at
least at the outset, in the honeymoon period of a new government.
Domestically, Macron will enjoy the benefits of the current upswing of
the business cycle, and no doubt be able to push through most of his
programme, a French version of Schröder’s Agenda 2010—deregulating the
labour market, cutting public spending, priming start-ups, reducing
corporate taxation, streamlining the welfare system—without excessive
difficulty. He will be careful to make it a compensatory rather than
disciplinary variant of neoliberalism, with a few side-payments to the
least well-off. With household debt still quite low—57 per cent of GDP,
against 53 per cent in Germany and 88 per cent in Britain—there is
plenty of room for a credit bubble. Buoyed by a ruler who is one of its
own, the animal spirits of capital can be counted on to revive, lifting
investment.
Whether
results will match expectations is another matter. Germany’s export
boom, returning the country to moderate growth and falling unemployment,
was powered by wage repression, not by Agenda 2010, whose contribution
to recovery was minimal, and accompanied by increasing inequality and
precarity—over double the percentage in France of workers earning less
than two-thirds of the median wage. A Biedermeier political
culture, and comparison with less fortunate neighbours, has kept the
country socially sedated. These are not conditions that can readily be
replicated in France. A competitive export surplus along German lines is
out of reach, a fallacy of composition. French political culture,
however much the last trente inglorieuses have
diluted or doped it, is still potentially more explosive terrain than
the tranquil landscape across the Rhine. If growth and employment picked
up rapidly, a Second Empire atmosphere could settle over the country
once more. But it is far from guaranteed.
12
Critical
for the success of such a prospect is the more important side of
Macron’s agenda, for which domestic reform is conceived as a
down-payment. The larger stake in view is the future of the Eurozone.
There, the consensus in Paris has for some time been that monetary union
in its present form has not only caused problems for the weaker
economies of the Mediterranean belt, but difficulties for French growth
too—the imposition of a 3 per cent ceiling on any deficit only tolerable
because circumventable with the complicity of Brussels. [23] In
the contest for the Presidency, the most striking proposal to issue
from respectable opinion for dealing with this long-standing headache
for France came from Hamon’s camp, where Thomas Piketty and fellow
spirits drew up a draft ‘Treaty for the Democratization of the
Eurozone’—twenty-two articles, with a stirring preamble. T-Dem, as they
baptized it, would create a Eurozone parliament composed of deputies
from each national parliament, chosen by each party in proportion to
their weight in it (topped up with a small similar tranche from
Strasbourg), which would vote taxes for a common Eurozone budget to
serve ‘lasting growth, social cohesion and economic convergence’,
mutualize all public debts over 60 per cent of GDP, and elect a Eurozone finance minister to administer the resulting budget. To reassure voters of the residual PS that
this package would be to their liking, Piketty and his co-authors
explained, figures in hand, that in such a Eurozone parliament, the left
could count on a solid majority. [24] The
political naivety of the scheme—as if in addition to all its other
provisions, each less acceptable to German opinion than the last, this
calculation would make it more palatable to Bavarian Social-Christians
or Dutch Liberals—needs little emphasis.
Macron’s
version was prudently vaguer, calling for a Eurozone parliament—even
less realistically, composed just of all ‘members of each national
parliament’, a body that would run into the thousands, meeting once a
month—and Eurozone finance minister to launch a bold investment plan,
without specifying where the resources for one are to come from. [25] For
the Finance Ministry in Berlin, this vision could probably be forgiven
as campaign fluff, not to be taken too seriously. The German political
class is well aware that Macron is its ideal interlocutor, unlikely ever
to be bettered, and will do its utmost to bolster him—Schäuble
declaring even pre-election that he would ‘do everything to help’. So
some give on the Eurozone is virtually assured. But the odds are that it
will be largely cosmetic, falling well short even of another impotent
assembly and figurehead minister, duplicating existing Union structures.
As things stand, anything more serious would face fierce opposition not
only in the Federal Republic, but in the Dutch, Finnish and other
parliaments. The balance of forces in a neoliberal but not yet
neofederal system of power militates against dramatic changes.
On
the margins of the system, more radical responses to what the Union has
become can be found. In France, the single currency is prized by
neither populism, of left or right, though the right has for some time
taken a much clearer position against it than the left. In the election
campaign, Mélenchon came closer than in the past to envisaging an exit
from it, but both he and Le Pen—aware that the prospect frightens most
voters, and especially the elderly—denied any intention of unilaterally
scrapping it. What then? Mélenchon alone put the question in its
appropriate framework. The problem of recasting monetary union was not a
technical issue, as typically depicted, but a geopolitical one. France
had the economic and demographic weight, if it had the political will,
to bring an unaccountable European Central Bank—the real sore, not the
euro—to book, and compel Germany, an ageing society that was not as
strong as it seemed, to accept social and economic democratization of
the Union, on pain of breaking it up. [26] It
was the relationship of forces that must ultimately matter. France, and
with it Europe, would remain at the mercy of financial and bureaucratic
elites until the French recovered their nerve. No language could be
more foreign to the country’s new ruler. Why quarrel with Germany, when
it is all that France and Europe should be?
12 June 2017
[1] Two-fifths
of the jobless are long-term unemployed; 86 per cent of new jobs in
2016 were temporary, four-fifths of them on contracts of less than a
month: ‘The economy that France’s next president will inherit’, Financial Times, 8 May 2017.
[2] For the most acute analysis of these, see Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini, L’illusion du bloc bourgeois. Alliances sociales et avenir du modèle français, Paris 2017, passim.
[3] Missing from Amable and Palombarini’s excellent account is sufficient attention to this.
[4] Attali, Verbatim I, Paris 1993, p. 399.
[5] In
October 2015, he was still taking a second mandate for granted.
Especially damaging were his aspersions on the judiciary (‘cowards’),
his ministers (‘inaudible’, ‘diaphanous’, ‘unidentifiable’), the world
of culture (‘hard and ungrateful’), not to speak of the lamentable
figure he cut when talk turned to his two mistresses: Gérard Davet and
François Lhomme, ‘Un Président ne devrait pas dire ça . . . ’,Paris 2016, pp. 155, 388–9, 81–95, 125, 129 ff.
[6] For abundant documentation of the interpenetration of personnel, and connivance of the paper, with the PS under
Mitterrand, with whom its editors were infatuated, and its particularly
odious role as a conduit for the efforts of his regime to conceal its
responsibility for the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and killing of a
Greenpeace activist in New Zealand, which Le Canard worked
zealously to attribute to the British rather than French secret
services, see the unappetizing record in Karl Laske and Laurent
Valdiguié, Le vrai Canard. Les dessous du Canard enchaîné, Paris 2008, pp. 245–347.
[7] For which see Davet and Lhomme, ‘Un Président . . . ’, pp. 445–56.
[8] Davet and Lhomme, ‘Un Président . . . ’, p. 357: later, this pearl: ‘Emmanuel Macron est un être qui n’est pas duplice’, p. 366.
[9] After his performance in the election of 2007, Bayrou had split from the UDF to create his own MoDem party, to offer a somewhat less conservative brand of centrism.
[10] Foreign journalists, thrilled that Macron should play Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, adopted by the EUas
its official anthem, might have been startled to learn that in the late
eighties the same musical kitsch blared through the amplifiers at
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s meetings for the FN.
[11] For
the background to the election in Jospin’s manipulation of the
constitution, his fiasco at the polls, and the left’s futile abasement
in the second round of 2002, see The New Old World, London and New York 2009, pp. 174–7.
[12] Prior to 2017, it has been reckoned that less than one in seven workers actually cast a ballot for the FN,
so widespread was proletarian abstention: Patrick Lehingue,
‘“L’électorat” du Front National. Retour sur deux ou trois “idées
reçues”’, in Gérard Mauger and Willy Pelletier, eds, Les classes populaires et le FN, Paris 2016, pp. 33–7, who concedes, however, that over half the FN electorate
is working class of one kind or another, and that more workers are
represented on its electoral lists than in any party. This layer of its
support is concentrated in the North and North-East; in the far South
its electorate is more conservative, coming from a small to medium
bourgeoisie tinted with Catholicism.
[13] See his own account in Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Le choix de l’insoumission,
Paris 2016, pp. 310–6. ‘In sum, Chávez, Correa, Mujica, Laclau and
Mouffe liberated my language and my political imagination.’ The Latin
American chapter of his experience was ‘what allowed me, before others,
to supersede the old fixation on organized wage-earners’. In Spain,
‘Podemos has made the same attempt. All its leaders have learnt from
revolutionary Latin America. Yet in France as in Europe, how many have
participated in this stirring together of ideas? So few! Most are still
bogged down in the old schemas of the traditional European left, despite
the evident failure of methods’: pp. 315–6. Chantal Mouffe would be a
leading presence on Mélenchon’s platforms.
[14] Detailed in Mélenchon, L’Avenir en commun. Le programme de la France insoumise et son candidat, Paris 2016, pp. 23–7.
[15] In
the last month of the campaign, Fillon edged his ratings upwards,
without ever closing on Macron, by mobilizing a Catholic
neo-conservatism that in recent years has shown surprising growth among
educated youth, providing much of the energy for his triumph in the
Centre-Right primaries.
[16] Its task was, of course, easier: in Spain the PSOE was in—admittedly lame—opposition to a Centre-Right government rather than comparably discredited by a Centre-Left debacle.
[17] For the data, see the Ipsos Report, Premier tour. Sociologie des électorats et profils des abstentionnistes, 23 April 2017.
[18] For
a typical outburst, see France’s version of Elizabeth Drew of old, or
Philip Stephens of today: Alain Duhamel, ‘La tentation de l’aventure’, Libération, 20 April 2017.
[19] Not in equal measure: where the fire of the FN has been overwhelmingly directed at the revolving door of the mainstream parties, mocked by Marine as the indistinguishable UMPS, Mélenchon has often taken the FN as his primary target. There is also an asymmetry on the central issue dividing them: whereas the FN proposes clear-cut xenophobic solutions for immigration, the FI—like most of the European Left in general, bereft of any comparably specific answers—tries to avoid the subject altogether. L’Avenir en Commun, its programme for the 2017 election, contains 83 headings: the word immigration is not to be found in any of them.
[20] For these figures, see Ipsos Report, Deuxième tour.Sociologie des électorats et profil des abstentionnistes, 7 May 2017.
[21] Sample
flights: ‘I learnt from Colette what was a flower, from Giono a cold
wind in Provence and the truth of characters. Gide and Cocteau were my
irreplaceable companions’; ‘I took the road of characters in Flaubert,
Hugo. I was consumed by the ambition of Balzac’s young bloods’; ‘André
Breton, who loved Paris so well, arrived one day by chance in the
backland of the Lot and cried: I have stopped wanting to be anywhere else.
I will never tire of contemplating the motionless, fugitive soul of
France’; ‘In the spirit of France there is an aspiration to the
universal that is at once an unceasing indignation at injustice and
oppression, and a determination to tell others what we think of the
world, here, now and on behalf of everyone. The spirit of the
Encyclopaedists directed by Diderot offers the quintessence of this mad
ambition, but that ambition is us.’ Emmanuel Macron, Révolution, Paris 2016, pp. 14, 19, 45, 51–2. Elsewhere, in a publication curated by a veteran from Le Monde, Balibar, Ricoeur, Deleuze, Bourdieu are put to service in similar fashion, as naturally Camus, Chateaubriand, Char, etc. Macron par Macron, Paris 2017, pp. 18–22, 31, 41, 46, 84–5, 91. After all, ‘Politics is a style, a magic’, he explains to his interlocutor.
[22] Of votes cast, LREM-MoDem took some 32 per cent, Les Républicains 16 per cent, FN 13 per cent, La France Insoumise 11 per cent, the PS 7 per cent. With 3 per cent more votes than the FN, Les Républicains could get ten times as many deputies: figures like these making complaints the FN is undemocratic little short of farcical.
[23] For
the imperturbable mutual cynicism of the Commission and of Hollande in
demanding and accepting the ceiling, both knowing perfectly well that
France would not respect it, merely in order to discourage other member
states from flouting it, see Hollande’s exchange with his flabbergasted
interviewers: Davet and Lhomme, ‘Un Président . . . ’, pp. 516–7. The only rule of the rule of law ritually held aloft by the Union is that it can be ignored whenever required.
[24] Stéphanie Hennette, Thomas Piketty, Guillaume Sacriste and Antoine Vauchez, Pour un traité de démocratisation de l’Europe, Paris 2017, pp. 61–2, 74–5, 31–8.
[25] Révolution, pp. 235–6.
[26] Le choix de l’insoumission, pp. 381–3.
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