The left in France has found any number of explanations for the grave shock of Lionel Jospin’s first round elimination in the French presidential election. Many believe that President Chirac, elected by a massive 82 percent of votes from across the political spectrum, is the chief culprit, for degrading the office of the president and for running a campaign so heavily focused on security that it played into the hands of the far right. The media is heavily criticised – for belittling the campaign by understating the differences between Chirac and Jospin, for focusing on security to the detriment of other issues, and for misleading French voters through inaccurate polling, so that many believed that protest votes would not prevent a second round clash between the two candidates. Others have blamed the electoral system, the caprices of a divided left, the European Union – and the voters themselves: in fact, anyone, or anything, that deflects attention away from the Socialist Party itself.
Perhaps it is simply that the party is still suffering from post-traumatic shock. For the left to be entirely absent from the final presidential ballot, while the extreme-right revels in its moment in the national spotlight, is a humiliating defeat. But this search for a scapegoat cannot be sustained. It is with Jospin and his party that the buck must eventually stop.
Early on, informal focus groups highlighted specific weaknesses in Jospin’s strategy. His humility and graciousness during his first televised interview caught viewers off-guard, but this pleasantly surprised them. His linking of social justice and modernisation won support and reassured centrists. His concentration
on social issues gave the impression
that he both understood and cared.
However, while sending a powerful message on trust, Jospin lacked a big message that was carried throughout the campaign. Individual social polices were presented in isolation, not as part of a coherent strategic whole. Alternative agendas and strategies were suggested – an increased focus on life-long learning, leading education reform, and labour market reform – but were generally disregarded. Jospin continually failed to draw dividing lines between his own and Chirac’s programme. The media may not have aided him, but it is with those that ran and advised the campaign that the immediate blame lies. In short, they failed to get their message across.
Francois Hollande, First Secretary of the Socialist Party, admits that the campaign neither clarified the extent of the work accomplished over the last five years, nor the importance of the presidential elections – in particular the first round. Given the luxury of a face-off with Chirac during the second round, things may have been different. It is a luxury they have not been afforded, and perhaps their own complacency that Jospin would out pace Chirac in the long-term was part of their undoing in the first round.
Fundamentally, however, this is not simply an issue of spin and electoral strategy, the poor positioning of the campaign, or the lack of charisma of the candidate. This would be an easy way for the Socialists to reassure themselves, but it would be a mistaken one.
While Le Pen’s presence in the final round sent shockwaves around the world, for the post-election discussion to focus entirely on the impact of the National Front would be a mistake. Le Pen’s vote was very little changed; it was the overall fragmentation of the vote, and the failure to motivate so many to vote at all, which did as much to produce the final result.
The French, and the French left in particular, should certainly be deeply concerned that five million people have voted for the far right – but the left’s failure in the first round is the reflection of deeper problems within the Socialist Party itself. How this defeat is interpreted is likely to determine the future of the party and social democracy in France.
For some time now, the French Socialists have presented an unclear vision of the reform of social democracy and the French state. Ministers are sent to both Port Allegre and Davos. Social partners are consulted, only for the party to then impose its decisions. Endless reports are commissioned – consider pensions for example, five in five years – but satisfactory or acceptable resolutions are never found. The party seems torn between proposing a modernising agenda and perpetuating its traditional approach.
To a certain degree, as Nicolas Weill argues in Le Monde, the Socialist Party has already adopted a ‘troisieme voie’. It included the Greens in its majority, thus contrasting environmental concerns with the traditional ‘anchored’ industrial ones, and began to adopt New Labour’s leitmotif on the fight against criminality, although many on the left of the party felt that to adopt strong policies on such issues would be to pander to the right. Le Pen’s success should convince at least the majority that, while not pandering to the discourse of the right, the moderate left must provide concrete programmes in this field.
The French Socialists have also pursued economic reform with greater vigour and success than the right. But, and an important but at that, they have not explained what the benefits of these reforms are. As Pascal Lamy, the European Commissioner for Trade, and Jean Pisani-Ferry, Jospin’s chief economic advisor, argue, the French left should not feel embarrassed about taming inflation, liberalising trade and capital movements, ending the confusion between the welfare state and shareholder state, or indeed privatising the banking sector. The problem is that large parts of the French left appear to be just that, embarrassed – and this has led to the vilification of Europe rather than an engagement in a debate about liberalisation and regulation at the European level. During the campaign neither Europe nor immigration were seriously addressed, and both were top concerns for the average voter.
This, according to the sociologist Alain Touraine, is the central problem with the Socialist Party. It has not wanted to make difficult decisions or address problem issues. In these fields, as in others, the task is a difficult one. Large groups of French society appear to have more confidence in its past than the future. However, when opportunities to co-operate with modernisers arose, as they did with the CFDT, they were not taken. In the final analysis, it is simply unacceptable to allow a discourse on insecurity to develop and fail to address it, even if you find the issue hard to deal with.
Having failed to present a moderate left argument to their voters, should the Socialists be surprised to see their supporters seduced by other camps? The success of the far left in the first round, which claimed more than ten percent of the votes cast, has been interpreted by some as a sign that the moderate left have drifted too far towards the centre and abandoned their key constituency. Yet the programmes of Besancenot and Laguiller offered little in the way of constructive reform and the gradual disappearance of the French Communist Party provides ample warning of the irreversible political decline that follows circular doctrinal debates. To learn this lesson from defeat could be to consign the entire French left to a decade or more with no hope of power. As Jacques Delors has noted, the Socialists have for too long delayed a real debate on the need to reform. The consequence of this is that it has bred animosity on the far left, and annoyance among centrists.
A clear message, combined with a clear vision and commitment to reform, is what is needed, but to achieve this the Socialist Party must re-engage with the citizens and to do this it will be necessary to reform the party. In 1997, Tony Blair warned the French Socialists that they should modernise or die. It is now time to heed this warning. The legislative elections are effectively a third and fourth round. They provide an opportunity for redemption. But there is only a very limited time period within which to get the first stage right. President Chirac’s nomination of Jean-Pierre Raffarin as the new Prime Minister, a centre-right politician who is likely to try and occupy much of the centre ground, has made the task harder, and a speedy reform of strategy in time for the legislative elections may prove to be at the expense of the more profound reforms required for the party. Former Finance Ministers Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Laurent Fabius could provide the necessary charisma and authority to turn the situation around. Whoever is to lead this reform, they would be well advised to take all the help they can get between now and then.