In the coming months Germany, France, The Netherlands and Sweden will all hold important elections. Their results have the potential to transform the political landscape of Europe, which moved towards the centre-left following the elections of Tony Blair and Lionel Jospin in 1997.
In Germany it is very likely that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will
face similar issues to the ones he did in 1998. German is currently experiencing a high level of unemployment, with over four million people currently
out of work. The economy requires structural reform to improve the projected growth rate of one percent
in the coming year. German schools have also been the subject of recent criticism, and there are rising concerns about immigration.
The slowing of economic growth is a worry for Chancellor Schroeder. He himself had been aided by an economic slowdown in his campaign against Helmut Kohl in the 1998 elections. The situation in which Schroeder currently finds himself is rather unfortunate. In 2000, the economy was growing at an annual rate of 3 percent; unemployment was approximately
3.5 million, and falling. However, the economic reforms that he pushed through were something of a half way house – failing to satisfy the economic liberals while simultaneously managing to displease the left of the SPD and
the trade unions.
Nevertheless, Schroeder is on the offensive. He has promised to apply regional employment schemes to the entire country, in which low-paid workers receive subsidized healthcare, and social security and income transfers, thus increasing their real wages. Whether this will create the twenty thousand plus jobs that has been predicted remains to be seen, but it is clearly a step in the right direction, as are the further reductions in income tax that are planned. Schroeder’s problem is that many of his reforms need time to take effect, and with elections due in September, time is running short.
Edmund Stoiber, Schroeder’s opponent, and leader of the Christian Social Union, has also built a reputation for economic competence. However, Bavarian politics tends not
to travel well, with most Germans considering the CSU – essentially the baby party of the Christian Democratic Union – to be further to the right of its sister party. There is a general reticence among the more northern liberal voters to vote for the Bavarian party, which is openly opposed to Schroeder’s plans to loosen immigration controls.
Despite the increased profile of
the immigration question, it is unlikely to play as prominent a role in Germany as in the coming Dutch elections in May. The ‘Dutch miracle’ of low unemployment, proud multi-culturalism and fine-tuned consensus that has been presided over by Wim Kok, the leader of the centre-left Dutch Labour Party, has recently been upset by the arrival of Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn, who had been thrown out of the nationalist Liveable Netherlands party only a month earlier for insulting Muslims, romped home in the recent local elections in Rotterdam – home of nearly one million of The Netherlands’ Muslims – on an openly and unapologetic anti-immigration platform. The result was described as ‘shocking’ by Ad Melkert, the Dutch Labour Party leader.
In comparison to Germany, the French Socialist Prime Minister and presidential candidate, Lionel Jospin, leads a government with an impressive track record in employment creation. President Jacques Chirac, Jospin’s conservative opponent in May’s presidential elections, continues to claim that the government has failed to harness the potential of the exceptional economic growth of the last four years. In fact, though, never before have quite so many jobs been created in France in such a short period of time. In only four and a half years nearly two million jobs were created: 540,000 in 1999, and 580,000 in 2000 alone. This translated into a reduction of unemployment by almost three and a half percent. This is in stark contrast to the performance of the previous center-right Balladur and Juppe governments, who were weak
on the job creation front, and governed during a period of rising unemployment (an increase of 200,000 in four years).
On a less positive note, France’s crime rate soared by a massive eight percent last year, and this has handed a powerful weapon to Jospin’s opponents. It is perhaps time for the French left, in a manner similar to the British Labour Party in 1997, to send a clear and tough message on crime. In addition, Jospin has also had to face strikes
from public services workers: the gendarmerie, general practitioners
and specialists, for instance.
As the dates of the French presidential and legislative elections draw ever closer, Europe appears, at
best, to be only a peripheral or marginal issue. By contrast, in Sweden, the role of Europe, and in particular the euro, is likely to be a prominent theme in the September elections. Recently, the LO (the Swedish trade union confederation) called for the establishment of a buffer fund to
ensure that welfare and employment issues are protected if European Monetary Union is joined.
In recent years, the French left
has been less than vocal on European issues. The Nice European Council
was hardly a marked success. And it
was not until April last year that Jospin followed other European leaders in outlining his vision of Europe. Europe may appear, on the surface, to be a peripheral issue. But as Pascal Lamy and Jean Pisani-Ferry note in their recent essay, The Europe We Want, the French left’s unease with Europe is actually symptomatic of a more deep-rooted complex. The French once believed that they were exporting their model of governance to Europe. Now they find that European integration is challenging some of its central pillars. Europe, simply stated, highlights and magnifies the incoherencies of the French state.
This is clear in a number of substantive policy areas such as agriculture and EMU. But, nowhere
is it more evident than with regard
to public services. In France, the conflation of public service and public enterprise is deep-rooted, and public service employees constitute a well-organised electoral constituency. The response of the French authorities to pressures to liberalise their energy markets has been to adopt an essentially defensive or obstructive stance in European negotiations, as they have done in the Common Agricultural Policy.
The merits and sustainability of
this defensive approach are certainly debatable. As Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former French Finance Minister, wrote recently, this is the first time
in over 40 years, in fact since the beginning of both the Fifth Republic and the European project, that no major policy proposal has emanated from the Elysee Palace (the President’s official residence). Cohabitation might, as Olivier Schrameck, Jospin’s chief of staff, has claimed, be partially to blame (foreign affairs being a policy area shared by the President and Prime Minister). It certainly damaged the French Presidency of the EU in 2000, and the question of Franco-German parity may have been handled better had it not been embedded in national political tensions.
However, the real problem is not so much that the French are not leading, but rather that there is a danger that the French left, in particular, is becoming eurosceptic. Despite the fact that the Convention of the Future of the EU was launched in March, across the continent it is unlikely that the debate on the future of Europe will get seriously underway before autumn. However, when it does, it may force the centre-left, and in particular the French left, to do some serious soul searching.