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France

In Charlie Hebdo massacre, French values find a rallying point

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ParisNotAfraid

Even before the gruesome murder of 12 civilians today in the name of Islam, France wasn’t exactly having the best run. France Flag Icon

Nicolas Sarkozy came to power in 2007 amid promises of rupture and reform, signaling youthful, nervous energy that would transform France’s public sector after the somnolent 12-year reign of the genteely corrupt Jacques Chirac. While he did manage to raise the retirement age and make some tweaks, the full-throated rupture never quite arrived, and his administration amounted to an embarrassing series of bling bling moments, capped off by his whirlwhind romance and marriage to singer Carla Bruni. It’s still hard not to cringe at the photos of Sarkozy and Bruni at Disneyland Paris just months after his inauguration or the thought of Sarkozy lapping up the excesses of wealth on one of Silvio Berlusconi’s yachts.

François Hollande easily defeated his reelection bid in May 2012 with a promise to boost growth and employment in policy matters and to be a ‘normal’ president in, ahem, more personal matters. France got neither from its new president, whose popularity rating today is stuck in the high 10s or low 20s, depending on the poll. Even before the 2012 election campaign ended, his then-consort Valérie Trierweiler had already gotten into a spat on Twitter attacking Hollande’s former partner of three decades, Ségolène Royal, herself a former presidential candidate and a top figure within the Socialist Party. That presaged the ridiculous split between the two earlier this year, catalyzed by the impotent image of Hollande sneaking out of the Elysée Palace on a scooter for a tryst with French actress Julie Gayet.  Charlie Hebdo, it should be noted, ruthlessly mocked Hollande for his shortcomings as well as organized religion of all faiths:

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If the United Kingdom held the ‘sick man of Europe’ crown in the 1970s and Germany held it in the 1990s before its labor market reforms and amid the tectonic growing pains of reunification, France would hold clear title to that position today, if not for so many other pretenders across Europe, each struggling under the strains of joblessness, economic malaise, depopulation and precarious public debt. After starting to fall in 2013, France’s unemployment rate leapt back to record levels (10.4%) at the end of 2014. Short of a contentious battle to legalize same-sex marriage and his soon-forgotten success from decisive military action to liberate northern Mali from jihadists, Hollande has precious few policy victories to show for his administration.

It might be more accurate to call France the ‘invisible man’ of Europe.

While Germany has emerged, for now, as the sole engine of Europe, its chancellor Angela Merkel dictating fiscal policy to the rest of the European Union and its central bankers vetoing the kind of aggressive eurozone-wide quantitative easing that could reverse deflationary trends, you don’t hear much talk about the vaunted Franco-German axis anymore. British prime minister David Cameron, who’s courting disaster in his promise to hold a referendum on his country’s EU membership, has more influence on the German chancellor than Hollande or even his relatively right-leaning prime minister Manuel Valls, who leads Hollande’s second government in three years. Whether it’s banking unions or Russian aggression in eastern Europe or eurobonds or the risk of a far-left Greek government in elections later this month, no one gives a hoot about what Hollande has to say on EU matters — or anything else for that matter.

As Sarkozy, plagued by legal challenges, plots a center-right comeback and Hollande’s center-left Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party) loses more credibility by the day, the xenophobic, far-right Marine Le Pen and the Front national (FN, National Front) are basking in the victory of emerging as the top-placed party in last May’s European elections. Polls for the first round of the 2017 presidential election routinely place Le Pen leading or tied with all the major contenders, including Sarkozy and former foreign minister Alain Juppé, on the right, and Hollande and Valls, on the left. But you could see the rumblings a decade ago, when the French single-handedly ended the push (led by former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, no less!) to draft a constitution for the European Union, when voters rejected the constitutional treaty in a May 2005 referendum.

We’ve all read too many stories in the past decade or so about the tristesse or the ennui afflicting modern 21st century France.  

So it’s understandable that so many commentators looked at the horrific attack on the Charlie Hebdo office on Tuesday and worried that it would unleash a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment, fueling the insular nationalism that drives Le Pen and the French far right, which has responded to France’s collective economic slump by lashing out at the political elite, at immigration and at the European Union.   Continue reading In Charlie Hebdo massacre, French values find a rallying point →

France

Sapin, Royal, Montebourg headline new French cabinet

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Michel Sapin

Though French president François Hollande on Monday promised a gouvernement de combat in his cabinet reshuffle, it looks like the government he’s chosen might wind up spending more time combatting one another that the myriad economic challenges that France faces.
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Just 48 hours after naming interior minister Manuel Valls, the hard-charging, Roma-busting strongman of the Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party) as France’s new prime minister, Hollande announced the rest of his cabinet reshuffle today.

Though the return of Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s partner of three decades and the 2007 Socialist Party’s presidential candidate, is sure to top most headlines, the heart of the cabinet reshuffle are Hollande’s schizophrenic choices for finance minister, Michel Sapin (pictured above), and economy minister, Arnaud Montebourg.

At first glance, Hollande’s new slimmed-down cabinet (16 ministers instead of 20) seems like a kind of ‘team of rivals,’ given that Valls, Montebourg and Royal all campaigned for the Socialist Party’s 2012 presidential nomination — the only major rival not to hold a post in the new government is Martine Aubry, a longtime champion of the party’s left wing and the former minister who introduced France’s 35-hour workweek (a policy that Valls stridently opposes).

But it’s hardly Lincolnesque.

Sapin and Royal are assuming roles they first held 22 years ago, while Montebourg is a leftist whose views are at extreme odds with the economic policy that Hollande and Valls are expected to pursue over the next three years.  Continue reading Sapin, Royal, Montebourg headline new French cabinet →

France

Hollande’s economic restart falls flat amid domestic drama

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scooter

Nothing screams ‘sexy’ more than… a payroll tax cut.France Flag Icon

With the French press salivating over French president François Hollande’s surprisingly sordid love life, Hollande tried to refocus his administration’s agenda last week at a press conference to announce a planned cut in France’s payroll taxes and other measures to boost France’s competitiveness.  It’s a bid to win back some control over his unravelling public image.  Hollande suffers from massively low approval ratings —  just 22% of French voters support Hollande (somewhat of an improvement over polls in November that gave him just 15% approval).  There’s even talk that his administration could augur the collapse of France’s Fifth Republic.

But Hollande’s policy revamp has been lost in the furor over Hollande’s alleged dalliance with actress Julie Gayet.  Tabloids showed photos of the French president sneaking off to meet Gayet on his scooter (pictured above), and the news seems to have sent his current partner, Valérie Trierweiler, to a Paris hospital for over a week.  Elected on the premise that he would bring decorum and normalité to the Élysée after the ‘bling-bling’ presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, Hollande’s love life began overshadowing his presidency within days of his inauguration.

Trierweiler tweeted in support of Olivier Falroni, a dissident parliamentary candidate in June 2012, who was running against Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s former partner and the 2007 presidential candidate of the Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party).  Royal lost that race, despite Hollande’s support.  A reporter for Paris Match, Trierweiler fulfills the role of France’s first lady, complete with budget and staff, notwithstanding that she and Hollande never married.  Hollande and Royal also never officially married during their nearly 30-year relationship, which produced four children.

Trierweiler left the hospital after more than a week on Saturday afternoon, but the discord between France’s first couple continues to dominate headlines, with Le Journal de Dimanche reporting that presidential advisers are calling the relationship ‘finished.’  So much for Mr. Normality.  Though Sarkozy and his two predecessors, Jacques Chirac and François Mitterand, were both known for active love lives, the nature of media has changed since the French press kept Mitterand’s longtime mistress a secret from the public in the 1980s.

At a policy level, none of Hollande’s domestic troubles should matter.  But they come at exactly the wrong time, overshadowing Hollande’s push to make France’s economy more competitive.  At the center of Hollande’s proposal is a €30 billion payroll tax cut for French businesses, continue pushing forward with plans for €15 billion in budget cuts this year, with €50 billion more to follow over the next three years.  Though Hollande hopes that will make France’s businesses more willing to hire French workers, it seems unlikely to erase the mistrust Hollande has engendered by pushing a top income tax rate of 75% on incomes over €1 million, a troubled policy that seems set to take effect after facing legal problems in France’s top constitutional court.  Hollande and his leftist parliamentary majority pushed through a labor market reform in January 2013, but it was a relatively minor first step that merely streamlined the process for conducting layoffs.

Hollande would have engendered much more goodwill if he’d announced a retreat from the iconic 75% rate or announced a much bolder labor market legislation.  But that carries with it the risk of a full-scale revolt on the French left.  Continue reading Hollande’s economic restart falls flat amid domestic drama →

France

Latest Bettencourt turn removes obstacle for Sarkozy presidential bid in 2017

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sarko2017

You thought you were tired of all of the talk in the United States about the inevitability of a presidential run by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in November 2016.France Flag Icon

But imagine if your next presidential election isn’t until May 2017 and everyone is already speculating.

That’s the case in France, where former president Nicolas Sarkozy is now even more likely to become the frontrunner for the 2017 race for the Élysée Palace after French officials dropped a criminal case against Sarkozy in the so-called Bettencourt affair.

Sarkozy was accused of soliciting L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt for secret campaign funds.  The fundamentals of the scandal are similar to those for which former US senator and presidential candidate John Edwards stood criminal trial for soliciting secret campaign cash from banking heiress Rachel ‘Bunny’ Mellon, who was 96 years old at the time.

French judges are still pursuing an investigation over whether party officials in Sarkozy’s Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP, Union for a Popular Movement) took advantage of Bettencourt’s mental frailty and advanced age in taking campaign donations for Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign — in particular, former UMP treasurer Eric Woerth still faces criminal liability.  But after Monday’s decision not to include Sarkozy’s name in the list of those who face liability, the former president has escaped the worst of his potential legal and political troubles for the foreseeable future.

That means that the single-most difficult obstacle between Sarkozy and a 2017 presidential bid is gone.  Though he’s no longer mis en examen (placed under investigation) Sarkozy’s legal troubles haven’t totally evaporated, and he remains under a cloud of suspicion for a handful of other shenanigans, including allegations that Libya’s regime paid €50 million to Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign.  But the Bettencourt affair was always the most serious case against Sarkozy.

As with the Clinton 2016 speculation in the United States, it’s folly to think that we can forecast with accuracy the dynamics of an election that’s years away.  But it’s stunning in some ways that Sarkozy, who lost the May 2012 presidential runoff to François Hollande, the candidate of the Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party), remains such a strong challenger for 2017 just 17 months after leaving office.

Moreover, the specter of a Sarkozy return is affect French politics today (and not just 2017) by shaping the way that other top UMP officials posture and by placing pressure on the current, vastly unpopular Hollande regime — the possibility of a Sarkozy comeback also exerts a gravitational pull on the far right of French politics, too.

Only 23% of the French electorate has confidence in Hollande, according to an October TRS-SOFRES poll — Hollande has watched his popularity erode in record time to become the most unpopular president of the Fifth Republic:

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France’s GDP growth dropped from 2% in 2011 to exactly 0% in 2012, unemployment has risen to 10.9%, and the economy’s doing not much better in 2013.  Hollande was damaged almost from the beginning of his presidency over a nasty spat between his former partner, 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal and his current partner Valérie Trierweiler.  His bold effort to introduce a top income tax rate of 75% (of incomes over €1 million) invited capital flight and global ridicule — and a rejection by France’s top constitutional court.

His woes are so great that I wondered back in May whether the French left (and France, generally) might have been better off if Dominique Strauss-Kahn had survived his sex scandal to run for president.

Most immediately, of course, all of the ‘Sarko 2017’ talk serves to prevent the emergence of a truly post-Sarkozy center-right standard-bearer.  Recall last November’s internal UMP primary to determine a new general secretary — right-wing candidate Jean-François Copé’s 50.03% was so narrow (and so challenged) by his opponent, the more moderate former prime minister François Fillon that the result threatened a UMP civil war.

Though the tensions subsided into more of a cold war than a civil war, there was always a sense that Copé was a stalking horse for a potential Sarkozy comeback — by defeating Fillon, Copé’s narrow win prevented Fillon from becoming the undisputed leader of the French right.

What was a Copé-Fillon showdown in 2012 has now transformed into a more open Sarkozy-Fillon showdown, with Fillon billing himself as the clean-break candidate for 2017, though Sarkozy himself has yet to decide whether to make a comeback bid for the presidency and is unlikely to join the political fray against either Fillon or Hollande anytime soon.  An IFOP poll earlier this year showed that six out of 10 French voters preferred that neither Sarkozy nor Fillon run in 2017, though Fillon generally held higher approval ratings as prime minister than Sarkozy did as president, and there’s reason to believe he would have made a better candidate for the UMP in 2012 than Sarkozy.

Meanwhile, no consideration of the UMP’s machinations would be complete without considering the far-right Front national (FN, National Front) that, if anything, is gaining more strength than either the UMP or the Socialists.  The far right notched a huge victory in a by-election in the southern canton of Brignoles on October 7, when the Front national candidate Laurent Lopez won 40.4% of the vote and will face a runoff against the UMP’s candidate Catherine Delzers, who won 20.8% (another far-right party, the Parti de France, won just over 9%.)

Despite Sarkozy’s lurch to the right on immigration and crime throughout his career, it didn’t stop Front national leader Marine Le Pen from winning 17.9% of the vote in the first round of the April 2012 presidential election.  Among the factors that could push the UMP away from Fillon and toward a leader like Sarkozy or Copé in 2017 is the fear that a relatively moderate standard-bearer like Fillon would allow Le Pen to siphon even more support from the center-right.

France

As Hollande marks one year in office, would Dominique Strauss-Kahn have been better for France?

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DSK

Today is the one-year anniversary of François Hollande’s inauguration as the new president of France, having swept to the Elysée Palace with a mandate for a more subdued presidential administration and a leftward turn after the ‘bling bling’ administration of center-right president Nicolas Sarkozy.France Flag Icon

Hollande won’t face voters again for four more years, and by 2017, Hollande’s reputation may well have recovered, but at the one-year mark, he’s had a horrific presidency so far:

  • France slipped back, as a formal matter, into recession today, with a GDP growth rate of -0.2% for the first quarter of 2013 with an unemployment rate of over 10% and eclipsing the previous high in 1997. 
  • Barely a month into his administration, Monsieur Normal appeared to be unable to stop a fight between his current partner, Valerie Trierweiler, and his former partner, Segolène Royal, when Trierweiler tweeted her support for Royal’s opponent, thereby ending Royal’s chances to become the president of France’s parliament, the Assemblée nationale, and making Hollande look as if he couldn’t even control matters within his own relationship.
  • The traditional Franco-German axis that’s powered European integration for decades remains at a frigid impasse, despite the widespread belief that German chancellor Angela Merkel has outfoxed Hollande and is winning the policy war on how to address the ongoing eurozone economic crisis.
  • He worked to implement a 75% income tax rate on income above €1 million per year, though France’s constitutional court has ruled it unconstitutional on technical grounds, all the while keeping in place strict targets to reduce France’s budget deficit and retaining a rise in the retirement age from 60 to 62 implemented by the Sarkozy administration.
  • Budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac stepped down in April 2013 after it was revealed he had a Swiss bank account and had potentially committed tax fraud.
  • Altogether, Hollande’s approval ratings are the lowest of any president after one year in office, and fully 73% of French voters are dissatisfied with Hollande and 68% are dissatisfied with his prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault.

It’s been, from a political perspective — and even from a policy perspective — a bit of a disaster.  Hollande’s chief accomplishment, enactment of same-sex marriage in France, has been accompanied by vigorous opposition from Sarkozy’s party and from the far right, inspiring massive anti-marriage rallies and even an uptick anti-gay violence.

It’s enough to make you wonder — what would have happened if Dominique Strauss-Kahn had never been alleged to have sexually assaulted a maid in a New York hotel, had stepped down with his head held high as managing director of the International Monetary Fund to run for an almost certain nomination as the presidential candidate of France’s Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party) and proceeded to challenge Sarkozy?  Strauss-Kahn today, as a matter of coincidence, re-emerged to open a bank in South Sudan, one of his rare appearances since the debacle that led to his arrest in May 2011.  Although U.S. prosecutors dropped charges of attempted rape and other sexual abuse charges in August 2011, Strauss-Kahn’s political career was finished.

Though it’s subject to a ‘grass is always greener’ caveat, there’s good reason to believe that a Strauss-Kahn presidency would have been a smoother affair than the embattled Hollande administration.

Despite whether it would have been better or worse, a Strauss-Kahn presidency would have been an incredibly different beast from the outset.

It seems unlikely that Strauss-Kahn would have ever campaigned on a pledge to raise the top rate of tax to 75%, let alone attempted to enact it, when it’s such an outlier among peer tax regimes.  It seems more likely that Strauss-Kahn, as a relative moderate within the Socialist Party, would have been more receptive to implementing labor market reforms designed to make France more competitive — perhaps a gentler variant of the Hartz IV / Agenda 2010 reforms that Germany enacted under social democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the early 2000s.

But as a former IMF chief and a former finance minister under the government of prime minister Lionel Jospin from 1997 to 1999 who worked to reduce the budget deficit to prepare for French entry into the eurozone, Strauss-Kahn would have come into office with an unrivaled economic credibility that would have allowed him to challenge Merkel on the direction of economic policy in the eurozone with vigor — and then some.  It’s not hard to imagine Strauss-Kahn pursuing a relatively ambitious reform program domestically while simultaneously calling for less punishing austerity measures in the more devastated southern European economies.

Certainly, Strauss-Kahn’s candidacy and his presidency would have been plagued with the same sort of scandalous affairs that brought his career to such a  screeching halt in 2011.  It’s difficult to imagine Strauss-Kahn being emasculated in his first month in office (fairly or not), unable to stop a very public spat between a current and former lover, one of whom happens to have been his party’s 2007 presidential candidate and a leading political figure in her own right.  Strauss-Kahn would have come to the French presidency after a career in the public eye, unlike Hollande, who had chiefly served a behind-the-scenes role — when he was half of France’s power couple, it was Royal, not Hollande, who was the public star.  Hollande, from 1997 to 2008, was the first secretary of the Socialist Party and, unlike Strauss-Kahn, he was never a minister in the Jospin government and he was certainly not among the presidential contenders in 2007.

Four years are a long time in politics, French or otherwise, and Hollande can at least point to a military intervention earlier this year in Mali that went relatively smoothly by accomplishing a narrowly defined goal, and the Mali operation represents the Hollande administration at its best.  Hollande could engineer his own comeback, especially if the economy improves this year or next — it’s hard to believe he can sink much lower in public opinion.  For now, Strauss-Kahn will still have some ways to go until he, if ever, reaches political redemption in France.  But he’s a formidable economic and political talent, and comebacks aren’t altogether unheard of in France.  Just look at the return of former prime minister Alain Juppé as foreign minister in the final 15 months of the Sarkozy administration, despite his 2004 conviction for mishandling public funds.

With such an uninspiring administration, Hollande could well turn to a cabinet shakeup in the future to replace Ayrault or other top minister, including finance minister Pierre Moscovici — and he might do well to bring Strauss-Kahn or Royal, whose political talents remain unutilized, back into the top tier of government.

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 →