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发帖数: 29846 | 1 François Hollande, the new French president
6 May 2012
The French have just confirmed their political creativity. In other Western
democracies, a presidential election leads to the clear-cut victory of one
candidate over another, along with the endorsement of a more or less
predictable program. Not so in France. On April 22, the elections’ first
round, French voters were free to choose from among ten contenders,
including Trotskyists, radical ecologists, and a representative of America’
s Lyndon Larouche cult. In the second round, concluded Sunday among the two
remaining challengers, voters rejected incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy
in favor of Socialist François Hollande. Now Hollande, the nation’s
new president, faces a much less forgiving “electorate”: the financial
markets, which will determine whether he can save France from a Greek
scenario of default and bankruptcy.
The first round was most significant for revealing the strength of the so-
called populists. Including groups on the right and left, populists tallied
one-third of the vote. The far-right National Front won slightly above 18
percent of the vote, allowing Marine Le Pen to outperform the past
achievements of her father, the party founder. On the other end of the
ideological spectrum, a Communist Party–supported candidate, Jean-Luc Mé
lenchon, won 11 percent. A loose collection of other marginal candidates
also won a small portion of votes. While the candidates of these diverse
parties went at one another furiously during the campaign, they all, more or
less, represent the same forgotten or downtrodden segments of the French
population: those who live in the nostalgic glow of France’s glorious past,
when Imperial France dominated the West and when jobs were stable and
protected from competition by high tariffs. The far right may be more
xenophobic and the far left more revolutionary, but they share an anti-
European, anti-euro, anti-market, anti-competition agenda. They advocate a
stronger state to protect the so-called French way against any foreign
infringement—whether ideological or ethnic.
In a nutshell, one-third of the French, in the first round, expressed
support for some version of the populism that pervades Western Europe.
France will be difficult to govern if one-third of its citizens feel
disenfranchised and opposed to the overall direction of French society
concerning European integration, cooperation with the U.S. against terrorism
, and participation in the global economy. The first-round results, moreover
, ensure that these groups will remain discontented: whatever their
differences, Hollande and Sarkozy are not populists. Both are rational and
accept the world as it is.
Contrary to popular impression, the second round merely confirmed how close
the two rivals are—their identities as left and right candidates
notwithstanding. Hollande bears little resemblance to the socialist
firebrands France embraced through the era of François Mitterrand,
president from 1981 to 1995. His views are closer to the German Social
Democrats or British Labor than to the obsolete Marxist tradition. He did
not propose nationalizing industries and banks, the core of Mitterrand’s
1980s platform. In fact, Hollande hardly mentioned the necessity for public
investment to rekindle economic growth. He only cautiously promised to
increase the number of teachers (the Socialist Party’s core constituency),
and except for promising to close one of France’s 50 nuclear plants—a
symbolic gesture to Greens—he made no attacks on nuclear energy. Above all,
in a complete rebuttal of the French Socialist tradition, Hollande promised
to contain public expenses and balance the budget in compliance with
European treaties. He uttered not a word against the independence of the
Frankfurt-based European Bank, issuer of the euro, a currency shared by 330
million Europeans in 17 countries. His only modest quibble with the German-
led so-called “austerity” strategy was to suggest that the word “growth”
be added to the Bank’s statutory obligations (up to now, its only duty has
been to maintain price stability).
Such a shift from socialism as we knew it to a center-left social democracy
considerably narrowed the ideological gap between Hollande and Sarkozy’s
more rightist platform—especially since the French right has been
traditionally more statist than free-market-oriented. The run-off campaign,
then, was far from a clear-cut debate between a free-market right and a
statist, or at least Keynesian, left. It instead became a competition for
financial virtue: each candidate suggested that the other was not up to the
task of reducing the public deficit. Sarkozy, a tactician lacking strong
convictions, knows that his countrymen dislike the free market and expect
the state to alleviate their existential anxieties. He thus said nearly
nothing about what entrepreneurship and economic innovation could bring to
the French economy. He did not mention the labor market rigidity that is one
of the major causes of the nation’s 10 percent unemployment rate. Avoiding
unpopular economic issues, he tried to shift the argument toward issues of
national identity and border control, the Left’s weak point, at least from
a rightist and populist perspective. It didn’t work.
Hollande’s victory appears to be less an endorsement of him than a
referendum on Sarkozy. The new president remains a broadly unknown, untested
politician with no clear agenda. Based on Hollande’s campaign, French
citizens understand only that he is no Sarkozy. It remains to be seen how he
will govern and above all, how he will manage the looming sovereign-debt
crisis.
The new president will have to contend with two unpredictable forces: the
French populists, often ready to take to the street in protest, and the
financial markets. With enough police, a French president can control the
Paris street; but he cannot compel Wall Street to buy French Treasury bills
at sustainable rates. So far, no head of state—whether in Spain, the United
States, or Japan—has devised a convincing way to balance the national
budget. Thus, all Western economies suffer unsustainable debt, and all stand
on the verge of a sovereign-debt crisis—a shared malady born of 30 years
of public profligacy.
The way forward is, as the Germans suggest, austerity—a precondition for
growth. In France, by a remarkable historical irony, it may fall to a
formally socialist president to carry this program forward.
Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor, is the author of numerous
books, including Economics Does Not Lie. |
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