Tag Archives: PS

France

Four reasons why Cope’s narrow Sunday win of France’s UMP leadership could be ruinous

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After a tense Monday during which both candidates declared victory and accused the other of fraud, it appears that Jean-François Copé (pictured above) has emerged as the presumptive leader of the French right.

With just a 98-vote margin, Copé won the election for general secretary of the center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, Union for a popular movement) of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, after an election held among UMP members on November 18.  Copé defeated former prime minister François Fillon by about 50.03% to 49.97%.

Although Copé has served as general secretary since 2010, this election has taken on significant importance as a proxy fight not only for the upper hand to win the UMP’s 2017 presidential nomination, but as a proxy fight for the future of the French right.  Fillon, a cosmopolitan and relatively moderate figure, was viewed by the French public as more serious about government than Sarkozy, and it was Fillon who pushed through many of Sarkozy’s reforms as the head of his government.  Fillon, generally speaking, is more popular among the French electorate than Copé.

So there’s good cause for the French right to be worried about Copé’s victory.  Here are four reasons why. Continue reading Four reasons why Cope’s narrow Sunday win of France’s UMP leadership could be ruinous →

France

The French right prepares to choose Sarkozy’s successor (maybe)

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France’s center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, Union for a popular movement) will vote on Sunday, November 18 to choose its next general secretary in what’s widely seen as a fight to get the upper hand on the UMP’s presidential nomination in 2017. 

The UMP will choose between two key figures — former prime minister François Fillon (pictured above, top) and Jean-François Copé (pictured above, bottom), who has been general secretary since 2010.  As the contest approaches, both candidates have accused the other of fraud, marking an ugly end to what has been a dogfight within the French right.

Unlike most French prime ministers, Fillon actually remained in Matignon — the residence of the French prime minister — for all five years of the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy.  Throughout the Sarkozy presidency, he maintained or even gained approval from French voters as a competent and moderate head of government who seemed at times more grounded and focused on Sarkozy’s reforms than even Sarkozy.  Indeed, there’s reason to believe that if Fillon had contested the presidential election against the Parti socialiste‘s François Hollande, he might have won.

Fillon, age 58, both urbane and technocratic, seems to hold a clear lead over Copé, age 48 — a recent Harris poll shows Fillon with a 67% to 22% lead among UMP voters, and a wide edge among French voters generally.

Copé, mayor of Meaux, a non-practicing Jew whose mother is Algerian, previously served as budget minister under prime minister Dominique du Villepin and president from 2005 to 2007, and he’s seen as belonging to the more strident right wing of the UMP.  In some ways, that makes him more like Sarkozy, who was no stranger to pulling hard to the right on issues like immigration or crime in order to win votes.  Copé is, in fact, styling himself as the same sort of hyperactive, gritty leader as Sarkozy.  During the campaign for the UMP leadership, Copé has spoken out against ‘anti-white’ racism in France, a naked bid for voters sympathetic to the hard right, and he mocked Muslims for taking away children’s pain au chocolat during Ramadan.

As such, Sunday’s vote is a bit of a proxy contest for the UMP’s direction in the years ahead — Fillon represents the moderate center-right and Copé represents a more full-throated hard-right approach.  But the next French election is over four years away — in April 2017.  In contrast, consider: five years before 2008, no one in the United States had even heard of Barack Obama.

After all, there’s nothing stopping Sarkozy himself for running for a second term in 2017 — many French voters still prefer Sarkozy to either Fillon or Copé for the time being, and Sarkozy has indicated he may be interested.

The winner of Sunday’s contest will have a delicate task in balancing an appeal to the broad center of French voters, while not allowing other political movements steal support on the UMP’s right.  Marine Le Pen, who won nearly 18% of the first-round vote of the presidential election in April 2012 will almost certainly try to make a bid to expand her appeal beyond the narrow confines of the far-right Front national and become the strongest candidate of the French right in 2017. Continue reading The French right prepares to choose Sarkozy’s successor (maybe) →

France

Final thoughts on French parliamentary runoff results

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As noted in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s parliament elections, the French left looked likely to take a narrow absolute majority of seats in the Assemblée nationale.

As it turns out, the Parti socialiste of François Hollande did even better — it and its allies took 314 seats, not including the 17 seats that its electoral partner, France’s Green Party (Europe Écologie – Les Verts) won: significantly higher than the projection of between 270 and 300 and nearly equivalent to the parliamentary wave after Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 election.  In this sense, Hollande’s party actually outperformed Hollande in the presidential race.

But the left’s victory was expected — the pattern of French voters handing a solid presidential majority in June parliamentary elections (following the May presidential runoff) therefore continues.

It will mark the first time that the French left have won control of the government since the 1997 legislative elections; the left lost power in 2002, following Jospin’s surprise third-place finish in the presidential election of that year.

With the final results now counted, here’s a look at each party and its road ahead:

Continue reading Final thoughts on French parliamentary runoff results →

Egypt, France, Greece

Big weekend for France, Greece and Egypt

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It’s another big weekend for elections!

Voters in Egypt go to the polls today and tomorrow to choose a president in the final runoff between the Muslim brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi and Ahmed Shafiq, a former Air Force commander and the final prime minister of former president Hosni Mubarak, in what is seen as a Hobson’s choice between Islamism and the military. Since the Supreme Constitutional Court disbanded the parliament, and Egypt hasn’t even written a new constitution, though, we have no idea whether the new president has real power or will be a figurehead!

Read Suffragio’s coverage of the Egyptian election here.

Voters in France go to the polls for the second time in two weeks for the second round of parliamentary elections, which are expected to confirm a governing majority for newly elected Parti socialiste president François Hollande.  One open question is whether Hollande’s party (and their allies) will win the 289 seats necessary to govern without forming a coalition with the greens and/or communists.  Controversial individual contests also see Hollande’s former partner Ségolène Royal, far-right Front national leader Marine Le Pen and centrist François Bayrou fighting hard for seats in France’s national assembly.

Read Suffragio’s coverage of the French elections here.

Finally, voters return to the polls in Greece after no party emerged in May elections with enough support to form a governing coalition.  Far-left SYRIZA, led by the brash, youthful Alexis Tsipras, is expected to vie with center-right New Democracy for the lead in what will still likely be a fragmented result.  Most of the Hellenic parliament’s seats are awarded on the basis of proportional representation for all parties that receive over 3% of the vote, while the top party receives a ‘bonus’ of 50 seats.  The leading party seems likely to form a governing coalition.

Read Suffragio’s coverage of the Greek elections here.

France

Tweet sets off ‘battle Royal’ between first lady and Hollande’s former partner

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At first, everyone thought her Twitter account must have been hacked.

But no: here was the new first lady of France, Valérie Trierweiler, the companion of President François Hollande, tweeting her apparent opposition to Hollande’s previous partner and mother of Hollande’s four children, Ségolène Royal, who was also the Parti socialiste‘s 2007 presidential candidate.  Royal is fighting for her political life in a tough second-round runoff where she faces an unexpectedly tough fight from renegade leftist Olivier Falorni.

While the entire Parti socialiste high guard from Hollande himself to party president Martine Aubry to prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault have all called for Falorni to step down in favor of Royal, Trierweiler tweeted this yesterday:

Courage à Olivier Falorni qui n’a pas démérité, qui se bat aux côtés des rochelais depuis tant d’ années dans un engagement désintéressé. [Good luck to Olivier Falorni who is a worthy candidate. For years he has been fighting with selfless commitment for the people of La Rochelle.]

Needless to say, when there’s just a week between the two rounds of a parliamentary election, this has been an unwelcome headline for Hollande, crowding out other political news both yesterday and today.

In the first round in Charente-Maritime 17, Royal won just 32.03% to Falorni’s 28.91% — Sally Chadjaa, the UMP candidate, won just 19.47%, but did not qualify for this Sunday’s runoff.  The result caught the national media off guard and was one of the biggest surprises in Sunday’s mostly unsurprising first round.  Royal, who was running in the constituency for the first time, had been promised the presidency of the Assemblée nationale by Hollande, after graciously campaigning for Hollande at a large rally in Rennes earlier in the spring (shown together above).

Although a poll today, conducted before and during The Tweet, showed that Falorni leads Royal 58% to 42%, mostly on the strength of UMP votes, Ayrault has again called on Falorni to step aside.  It is customary, when two or more leftist candidates advance to the second round, for the second-place candidate to step aside for the first-round winner.  Falorni, who has been a longtime ally to Hollande and who actually lives in the constituency, has refused.

The tweet highlights at least four immediate problems for Hollande and the Parti socialiste, who hope to emerge from Sunday’s elections with an outright majority of at least 289 seats in the Assemblée nationale: Continue reading Tweet sets off ‘battle Royal’ between first lady and Hollande’s former partner →

France

Final French parliamentary election results for first round

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France has now had a full day since learning the results of Sunday’s first round of the French parliamentary elections (France votes again in the second round this coming Sunday), and there’s really not much surprise in the aggregate result.

Much as predicted: the Parti socialiste of newly inaugurated François Hollande narrowly led the first round with 29% to just 27% for the somewhat demoralized and rudderless Union pour un mouvement populaire.

It seems likely that Hollande and his allies will control a parliamentary majority following Sunday’s second round (although it’s not certain) — the Parti socialiste is projected to win 270 to 300 seats to just 210 to 240 seats for the UMP.  In the best case scenario, the Parti socialiste and its allies would like to win 289 seats outright this Sunday.  If they wins less than 289 seats, however, they will be able to rely first on France’s Green Party, Europe Écologie – Les Verts, with which the Parti socialiste has an electoral alliance (projected to win 8 to 14 seats, largely because of the alliance) and then, if necessary, with the support of the Front de gauche (projected to win 14 to 20 seats), a group of communists and other radical leftists under the leadership of Jean-Luc Mélenchon.  Hollande would prefer to avoid the latter, as many potential Front de guache deputies are members of France’s communist party who would attempt to pull Hollande’s agenda further leftward. Continue reading Final French parliamentary election results for first round →

France

Le Pen and Mélenchon battle in Hénin-Beaumont precinct highlights four-way French campaign

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The most interesting contest in Sunday’s first round of the French parliamentary election may well be the most irrelevant to determining whether President François Hollande’s center-left or the center-right will control the Assemblée nationale — but it also showcases that the far-left and far-right are both playing the strongest role in over a decade in any French legislative election.

The race is the 11th precinct of the Hénin-Beaumont region, where Front national leader Marine Le Pen is running against Front de gauche leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.  Le Pen originally targeted the region in 2007 (where she won 24.5% of the vote) — it’s an economically stagnant area where coal mining was once the major economic activity.  Think of it as the part of Wallonia that’s actually part of France.*

Like many of the old French Parti communiste strongholds, it is today receptive to the economic populist message of the Front national — in the first round of the presidential election, Le Pen won 35% there, followed by Hollande with 27% and Nicolas Sarkozy with just 16%.

So it’s a constituency that Le Pen continues to view as fertile ground, a great pickup opportunity in what seems to be the Front national‘s best shot at seats in the Assemblée nationale since 1997.

Mélenchon, however, decided to parachute into the precinct to run against Le Pen (although neither have true roots in the region), prolonging the bitter antagonism that marked the presidential race.  In the spring, their enmity seemed greater than even that between Hollande and Sarkozy.

Mélenchon’s eagerness to attack the Front national led to a surge of support in the first round.  Although Mélenchon won less than some polls indicated he could have, his 11% total was still the best presidential result for the far left in two decades.

For a time, it looked as if Mélenchon’s move was a masterstroke — he would secure a seat for the Front de gauche and in so doing, polls showed, would become the left’s champion in defeating Le Pen.  As predicted, the campaign for Hénin-Beaumont has become a battle royale between the far left and the hard right, with rhetoric matching that of the presidential campaign:

“I find it funny the passion he has developed for me and that he follows me all across France,” Ms Le Pen remarked to a group of journalists at her constituency headquarters in the recession-hit town of Hénin-Beaumont. “But it is good. He divides people. There are people who would not vote for me if he wasn’t here.”

Speaking earlier as he greeted shoppers in a street market in neighbouring  Noyelles-Godault, Mr Mélenchon brushed aside the innuendo that he has some kind of obsession with his rival.

“I do not find her erotic, as I have read in certain newspapers,” he protested. He had become a candidate in Hénin-Beaumont to “shine a light on the vampires” of the National Front, he said. It would be “absolutely shaming” for the left if Ms Le Pen were elected in a former mining area “at the heart of the history of the French workers’ movement”.

And so on.

But as the campaign concludes, polls show an uptick for Parti socialiste candidate Philippe Kemel, who had previously polled far behind the two national stars — even the retiring PS deputy had abstained from endorsing Kemel.

Two polls on Wednesday showed a tight race, however: Continue reading Le Pen and Mélenchon battle in Hénin-Beaumont precinct highlights four-way French campaign →

France

Warning signs for Hollande in French parliamentary campaign

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The campaign for French parliamentary elections kicked off just last Monday, for what most observers believe is a formality in installing the newly inaugurated President François Hollande’s Parti socialiste as the majority of the Assemblée nationale.

French voters go to the polls this Sunday for the first of two rounds — in each parliamentary district, if no candidate wins over 50% (with at least 25% support of all registered voters in the district), each candidate that commands at least 12.5% support of all registered voters (or the top two candidates, alternatively) in the first round will advance to the second round on May 17.

In 2002, parliamentary and presidential elections were fixed so that the former follows nearly a month after the latter.  As in 2002 and 2007, it is expected that the winner of the presidential race in May will thereupon see his party win the parliamentary elections in June.

The rationale is to avoid cohabitation — the divided government that sees one party control the presidency and another party control the government, which has occurred only three times in the history of the Fifth Republic (most recently from 1997 to 2002, when Parti socialiste prime minister Lionel Jospin led the government under center-right President Jacques Chirac).  More than in most countries, the French electorate seem a bit more allergic to divided government, which should give Hollande some relief in advance of Sunday’s vote.

But there are complications this time around, which may result in a somewhat murkier result.

Wait a minute, you might say: Deposed president Nicolas Sarkozy is off licking his wounds in Morocco, leaving a decapitated center-right split between followers of outgoing prime minister François Fillon and Jean-François Copé, head of the Union pour un mouvement populaire (which, unlike the Parti socialiste, is not a decades-long party, but only the latest brand of a series of shifting vehicles of France’s center-right) — Fillon and Copé last week were already sniping at one another.

A surging Front national on the far right (and increasingly and uncomfortably encroached on the center-right and parts of the populist left as well), under Marine Le Pen, garnered nearly one out of every five votes in the first round of the presidential election and is hoping to do just as well in the legislative election.

Meanwhile, Hollande’s prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, seen as a prudent and moderate choice to lead France’s new government, has a 65% approval rating (higher than Hollande’s own 61% approval!), and Ayrault is already moving to reverse part of Sarkozy’s signature reform — raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 — by allowing a small subset of longtime workers to retire at 60.

How, under these conditions, could the PS possibly lose? Continue reading Warning signs for Hollande in French parliamentary campaign →

France

Hollande fills out his cabinet: Moscovici, Fabius, Valls and Taubira take top jobs

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After announcing Jean-Marc Ayrault as his prime minister yesterday, newly inaugurated president François Hollande announced the rest of his cabinet today.

Laurent Fabius’s appointment as foreign minister was expected, even though he campaigned against the European Union constitution in 2005.  Fabius (above, center) is a grandee of the Parti socialiste, having served as prime minister from 1984 to 1986 during the Mitterand administration, and later as finance minister from 2000 to 2002 under former prime minister Lionel Jospin.

Martine Aubry, a leftist firebrand who had been seen as a contender for prime minister and the runner-up to Hollande in the presidential nomination race, will not take part at all in the cabinet, which is mildly surprising.  She had been allegedly offered and rejected a “super ministry” role from Hollande.

Nor will Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s one-time partner of four decades and former presidential candidate, which is not surprising, as it is rumored that she will be appointed president of the Assemblée nationale if the Parti socialiste wins June parliamentary elections.

The biggest surprise, perhaps, is the appointment of Pierre Moscovici as finance minister.  Hollande’s campaign manager and former minister for European Affairs from 1997 to 2002, Moscovici (above, top) was close to former IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  His European experience will guide him well, as the ongoing eurozone sovereign debt crisis stands to be the French economy’s largest immediate challenge for Hollande’s government.

Michel Sapin, another chief economic adviser to Hollande, had been tipped for finance minister, but will instead serve as labor minister.  The fiscally conservative Sapin served as finance minister from 1992 to 1993 during the Mitterand administration and as the minister of Civil Servants and Sate Reforms from 2000 to 2002.

As expected, Manuel Valls, an up-and-coming MP, who served as the Hollande campaign’s communications chief and who comes from the more pro-market wing of the PS, was named interior minister.  Nicolas Sarkozy used the interior ministry as a stepping stone in the mid 2000s to launch his successful 2007 campaign.

Former 2002 presidential candidate and the South America-born Christiane Taubira (above, bottom), who is currently an MP for French Guiana, will serve as minister of justice as the highest-ranking woman in a cabinet that will achieve gender parity.  Taubira is not a member of the PS, but rather the founder of the French Guiana-based Walwari party and a bit of a “free electron” in French politics.

Nicole Bricq, a member of France’s Senate and another ally of Strauss-Kahn, will serve as minister of the environment.

Le Monde has a full infographic of the new cabinet here and full bios here.

France

From Aubry to Ayrault: who will Hollande choose as France’s next prime minister?

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With François Hollande’s election on Sunday as the next president of France, the next big decision point will be the president-elect’s appointment of a candidate for prime minister.

The designee will take a primary role in the upcoming June 10 and June 17 parliamentary elections and if, as is traditional, the winning presidential candidate’s party wins those elections with a majority in the Assemblée nationale, Hollande’s designee will become the head of government.

Outgoing president Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right Gaullist Union pour un mouvement populaire, together with affiliated groups, together hold 345 seats in the current legislature, to just 227 for the left, including just 186 seats for Hollande’s Parti socialiste.  While it is typical in France for the winning presidential candidate’s party to win the election, which comes less than a month after Hollande’s decisive victory in the presidential election, Marine Le Pen’s Front national — which won almost 19% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election — will be running very hard to win seats as well, especially given the aimless state of the now-decapitated UMP, which will be somewhat driftless without Sarkozy’s leadership.

Under France’s two-round parliamentary election system, a candidate wins over 50% of the vote in the first round (and at least 25% support of all registered voters in a precinct), he or she is elected.  If not, each candidate with over 12.5% support of all registered voters (or, alternatively, the top two vote-winners if no two candidates have received 12.5%) advances to the second round, where the candidate with the most votes is elected to parliament.

As such, Hollande’s choice will be the first important signal that he provides to France, to Germany, to the rest of Europe and to the debt market as to the direction he hopes to take the French government over the next five years.

With 2002 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal — Hollande’s former partner and the mother of his children — tipped to become the president of the Assemblée nationale if the PS wins the June election, and with one-time presidential frontrunner and former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn battling legal accusations on both sides of the Atlantic, two main candidates have emerged in the media since Hollande’s election — Martine Aubry, Hollande’s rival for the PS presidential nomination and first secretary of the PS, and Jean-Marc Ayrault, president of the PS parliamentary group in the Assemblée nationale.  In addition, former prime minister Laurent Fabius, Hollande campaign manager Pierre Moscovici, former Civil Service minister Michel Sapin and campaign communications chief Manuel Valls have also been mentioned as potential prime ministers.

So who are these potential prime ministers, how would they be received and how likely are their appointments? Continue reading From Aubry to Ayrault: who will Hollande choose as France’s next prime minister? →

France

Monsieur President: Hollande era begins in France

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France24 this morning has a concise biography — complete with photos — of the man of the hour, France’s newly elected president François Hollande:

[Hollande’s] political rise to the country’s top post has been slow and steady, with the French media portraying him as “Monsieur Normal” – an easygoing, everyday man. Contrast that with the glamour-struck Nicolas Sarkozy, who earned the nickname “hyper-president” during his five years in office.

If Hollande’s victory has a fabled quality, it surely mirrors Aesop’s “The Hare and The Tortoise”, with the steady, shelled creature finally outpacing the hyperactive hare.

International audiences are probably more familiar with his former partner, Ségolène Royal, who unsuccessfully ran against Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential poll. For those who knew him during the 2012 campaign trail – and that includes his comrades on the left – Hollande was the butt of snide, if good-natured, monikers, including “Flanby” (a wobbly custard) and “capitaine du pedalo,’ or the captain of a pedal boat.

But in the course of his bid for presidency, Hollande emerged as a statesman-like figure, a change that included an image makeover, complete with a 10 kilo weight loss and designer glasses. Continue reading Monsieur President: Hollande era begins in France →

France

Hollande wins French presidential election

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François Hollande has been elected the president of France — the first such victory for a Parti socialiste candidate — or any center-left candidate in France — since François Mitterand’s reelection in 1988. 

Exit polls show that Hollande has defeated incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy with a vote of 52% to Sarkozy’s 48%.  If true, it would indicate that the race was quite tighter than nearly all prior polls had shown in the preceding months, which had shown a steady second-round lead of between five and 10 points for Hollande.  Indeed, it would be a tighter margin than Sarkozy’s own five-point victory over Parti socialiste candidate Ségolène Royal in 2007.

Of course, with parliamentary elections due in June, and with the future of the eurozone still in some doubt, Hollande’s victory was never the key question — those will be just be starting to be asked and the answers will only begin to clarify over the months ahead.

Follow Suffragio’s prior coverage of the French presidential election here.

France

France presidential first-round campaign comes to an end

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French voters go to the polls on Sunday for the first round of the presidential election.

While the French media has been fixated on rules that would prohibit the early publishing of exit poll data on Sunday, and each candidate has been making a final push for votes, there’s not so much to analyze in advance of the vote:

We already know the top two candidates to emerge will most certainly be incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and Parti socialiste candidate François Hollande.

Despite polls that showed Sarkozy tied with or even pulling ahead of Hollande, the trend has now moved back to a slight Hollande lead.  Either way, it seems a safe bet that each will win just under one-third of the votes.  Ultimately, every poll has shown Hollande with a significant second-round lead, so the winner of the first round will take away bragging rights and perhaps a little momentum, but if Sarkozy edges Hollande out in the first round by a small amount, don’t expect that alone to significantly scramble the dynamic.

Indeed, the first-round winner is by no means a lock to win the second round — Lionel Jospin, for example, won the first round of the 1995 election but Jacques Chirac emerged in the second round with a majority; similarly, François Mitterand lost the first round of the 1981 election (to Chirac) before winning the second round, and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing won the second round in 1974 after losing the first round.

The battle for third place looks a bit more interesting — although none of Front national candidate Marine Le Pen, Front de gauche candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon or centrist François Bayrou will place out of the first round on Sunday, a strong showing for any of them could increase their political leverage with Sarkozy and/or Hollande in the event of a second-round endorsement (Le Pen is unlikely to support Sarkozy, although her supporters will likely support him overwhelmingly; Mélenchon has already said he will support Hollande in the second round; it is unclear who Bayrou might endorse).  Each will also be looking to June parliamentary elections as well — a strong showing in April is not dispositive of a similarly strong showing in parliamentary elections, but it’s a good indicator.  Mélenchon, too, may well be able to exchange a full-throated and enthusiastic endorsement of Hollande for soft support in the legislative election and/or potential ministry posts for his fellow communist/leftist coalition partners.

France

‘Hollande will destroy the French economy in two days’

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That blunt messaging is one of the reasons why Nicolas Sarkozy still has a shot to win reelection.

He also claimed that, if elected, Parti socialiste candidate François Hollande would turn France into another Greece.

All of this would be fabulously amazing positioning for a president whose record on balancing the budget is not stellar — public debt has gone up under his watch.  It’s more amazing when you consider that only in December, Sarkozy presided over France losing its ‘AAA’ credit rating from a major ratings agency.

Last week, Sarkozy pounced on the news that the French deficit for 2011, projected to be 5.7%, was, in fact, only 5.2% — never letting horrible be the enemy of terrible.

Even as unemployment hovers around 10%, last week’s GDP report also showed that France grew at a near-recessionary 0.2% pace in the final quarter of 2011.  Nonetheless, Sarkozy managed to turn even that into an opportunity to attack his opponent:

“The Socialists said France was in recession, as if they actually enjoyed it every time there was bad news for France,” Sarkozy told Europe 1 radio, announcing the 2011 deficit figure.

You cannot imagine Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for example, letting Sarkozy push him around like this.

Continue reading ‘Hollande will destroy the French economy in two days’ →

France

La revanche de Ségolène

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The revenge of Ségolène indeed.

Ségolène Royal, the 2007 presidential candidate of the Parti socialiste, joined François Hollande, the 2012 presidential candidate of the Parti socialiste at a campaign event in Nannes Wednesday night to rally left-leaning voters in France at a time when apathy — and a fierce radical left presidential challenge from Jean-Luc Mélenchon — threatens to erode Hollande’s first-round lead in the presidential race. 

Normally, it’s not incredibly advisable for a candidate, skirting along the cusp of victory, to invite last cycle’s loser to headline one of the largest pivotal rallies of the campaign — it’s sort of like Jimmy Carter inviting George McGovern to campaign for him in the 1976 U.S. general election.

But there, of course, is something fascinating and perhaps a little cathartic in watching the two — intraparty rivals, partners for over three decades and parents of four children — unite in such a public manner.  Although their political differences aren’t nearly so wide as some in the PS, no other moment could symbolize the party’s unity in the 2012 election.

It is rumored that, should Hollande win in May and should the PS win legislative elections in June, Hollande will appoint Royal as President of the National Assembly.

Among especially those with the weakest political voices in the suburbs, Royal retains an aura of excitement that the more plodding Hollande can never match — she has been campaigning for Hollande especially hard in Marseille, for example.  While the glamour has faded from Royal, who once looked to become France’s first female president — she finished embarrassingly low in the 2011 primary for the PS presidential nomination — there’s a glint yet of the magic and excitement that her 2007 candidacy once promised.

As Le Monde notes:

Et même s’il sort gagnant, il devra lutter contre cette suspicion de ne l’avoir été que par la virulence de l’anti-sarkozysme. Pour toutes ces raisons, il a besoin de retrouver un peu de la ferveur de 2007. [And even if Hollande wins, he will struggle against the suspicion of not really having won, but rather than the result of the virulence of anti-Sarkozyism. For all these reasons, he needs to regain some of the fervor of 2007.]

On the other hand, Hollande had better hope that the appearance with Royal — who lost the second round of the 2007 race to Nicolas Sarkozy by six points — does not make French voters see him as just the next in a long line of sacrificial lambs on the left in the past two decades to have watched nearly “certain” presidential campaigns end in disaster.