The defeat of Ségolène Royal in the contest for the French presidency is of huge importance. It follows on the defeat of the Social Democrats in Germany and Sweden. The left in Italy stays in power with a tenuous majority. Britain’s Labour waits to see how Gordon Brown will win back the 4.5 million voters lost to the party since the 1997 election victory.
All of Europe is searching for a new model of left-wing theory, practice and, above all, electability. The first lesson for the French left and for all lefts seeking to renew themselves as the 21st century gets under way is to learn from history. This is truer in France than in any other country. Since the inauguration of direct elections for the presidency of France more than four decades ago, the socialists have only won twice – François Mitterrand in 1981 and again in 1988, at a time when he changed the electoral system to allow the racist, anti-semitic National Front to weaken the votes for the mainstream right headed by Jacques Chirac.
The French left has only been able to win one-term parliamentary majorities, and after five years has always been defeated. Instead of learning from their mistakes the French left reinforced failure, ending with the defeats of Lionel Jospin in 1995, again in 2002 and Mme Royal in 2007.
Three historical eras are coming to an end in France. The first is fifth republicanism. Inaugurated by Charles de Gaulle in 1958, it was based on an elected monarch safeguarding for seven years the soul and status of France. Nicolas Sarkozy is more an executive prime minister with a five-year term. The second era that has ended is the hegemony of the 1968 generation and its solipsistic obsessions. It is time for the 68ers to go off into the sunset. The third cycle that is over is the one launched by Mitterrand in 1971 when he created the modern Parti Socialiste. A new left is now needed. The end of these key eras – the constitutional, the cultural, and the party political – in post-war French life has arrived at the same moment. We should all stand by for some dramatic tectonic-plate-shifting in French political philosophy and practice.
The French left will have to take the politics of the party seriously. The Parti Socialiste has always been an overlapping federation of regional baronies, with no authentic party leadership which commands respect, or a party base which can provide support. France has the lowest level of trade union organisation in the OECD – just eight per cent of the workforce are unionised and almost entirely consisting of state employees whose wages, short working hours, early retirement and pensions are paid for by taxpayers facing the biggest deductions on their pay slips in Europe.
Unlike the big unions of Germany, Sweden, and Britain, which impose a broader material reality on the intellectual and public service workers who constitute modern left parties, the working class is absent from French socialism. Twice as many French workers voted for Sarkozy and Jean Marie le Pen in the first round of the election as voted for Royal.
The French left will have to come to terms with the five million French Muslims in France who are denied economic and political profile. Unlike the scores of dozens of Labour MPs, ministers, councillors, mayor, writers and others from the new non-white, non-Christian British population, France’s BME activists have little or no place in the Socialist party.
The French socialists fell into the English trap of making Europe a target not a cause to support. Labour spent the 1980s believing Euroscepticism, which was popular with the public and the press, was a vote-winner. It isn’t, but Mme Royal forgot that lesson. She promoted anti-Europeans like Jean-Pierre Chevenement and Arnaud Montebourg to the forefront of her campaign. France may vote ‘Non’ in referendums on EU issues. It will not elect a president who tolerates rather then repudiates Euroscepticism.
Above all, the French socialists must have a material analysis of society. Mme Royal fought a socio-cultural election when the voters wanted an answer to questions relating to their material existence: Where will the new jobs come from? How does France get the rest of the world to invest in the French economy instead of France’s best brains fleeing to London or California to work and make money?
Interest payments on French national debt consume every cent of income tax paid in France, with nothing left for investment in the public sphere. What credible policies did the French socialists have to bring down debt so that tax revenues could invest in the social sphere? French socialists hoped that the spirit of 1968, all critique and no constructive believeable responses on material or economic questions, would be sufficient. It wasn’t.
The European left will have to learn from Royal’s defeat. In Germany, the SPD leader, Kurt Beck, has far lower ratings than Angela Merkel. Germany’s refound economic dynamism has benefited Merkel. But it is entirely due to the painful labour market reforms brought in by Gerhard Schröder, against the opposition of many of his MPs as well as the German unions and intellectual left. Labour under Gordon Brown will have hard decisions to take. While the Tories recentre themselves, the deputy leadership election shows 1980s Labour being called back to life every day in Guardian columns.
The British left should not take any satisfaction from the crisis of French socialism. In too many spheres Labour is beginning to rest on its oars, as if the unending race against the conservatisms of the Tories, the state, and Labour’s own comfort zones is now over, and Labour has won the right to govern in perpetuity. The right is organising at a European and global level to create a Fifth International of like-minded reactionaries who promote each others’ ideas and people. The absence of a coherent French left that can win power and stay in government over a long period weakens other democratic lefts in Europe.
What is to be done? First, French socialists need to write themselves a new dictionary. Without words, ideas cannot form. Second, the French left has to tell the truth to French trade unions, namely that they are the weakest in the world. Without some presence in the world of work, modern democratic left politics becomes the plaything of intellectuals and irrationalists like José Bové, or of the various fundamentalisms that claim to have the answers to world misery but almost always make matters worse.
Third, the French left have a priceless asset. There exists in Europe a group of leaders who have real experience in overcoming in their own countries the forces of right-wing politics to help shape democratic left governments that know how to win and keep power. The French socialists might invite Felipe Gonzalez from Spain, or Paul Nyrup Rasmussen from Denmark, or Gerhard Schröder from Germany, or Wim Kok from the Netherlands, or even, dare we mention his name, the Francophone, Francophile Tony Blair from Britain, to form an international commission to advise them on how to win power in 2012. It is time to look beyond France’s borders if the French left wants to survive and form governments in the 21st century.