The crisis in France can be summed up simply. 25 years ago, the French economy was 15 per cent bigger than that of Britain and growing faster. Today, the French economy is 10 per cent smaller than Britain under Labour and is slowing down, again. France under both the socialist Francois Mitterrand or the centre-right Jacque Chirac refused reforms that would help the country by getting people back to work and helping new French businesses come into being, or encouraging overseas companies to invest in France.
Four hundred thousand of France’s best business brains work in Britain. A similar number of France’s best scientific and technological minds work in the United States. Under Napoleon III Victor Hugo or Louis Blanc left France for liberty in Britain. Today, no-one in France seems to ask why their country drives so much of its best talent into exile.
This week top leaders from the French Socialist Party come to London, to talk to Labour politicians and ministers about what lessons the French left might learn from Labour. In 1985, I wrote a Fabian pamphlet called ‘French lessons for Labour’ as I looked in dismay at the failure of the anti-European, anti-American, anti-economic modernisation politics of my party. Today, despite Gordon Brown’s local difficulties, Labour Britain remains a reference point for any reinvention of the French left. But such is the hostility to les Anglo-Saxons and the contempt for Tony Blair on the part of the Paris left there is no young politician or left-intellectual writing a pamphlet entitled ‘English lessons for the French left.’ French socialists still fondly believe their job is to teach the world how to understand France not how to encourage France to understand the world and those nations are left control like Britain or Spain which have been able both to sustain economic growth and redistributive social justice.
French critics of Labour point to the number of part-time jobs but fail to understand that for a party of the left the only way forward is to put people back into work under almost any conditions. The French left looked for mechanisms like one-size-fits-all working weeks of 35 hours to help combat unemployment as if work was a fixed amount of time that simply needed reallocation. But this weeek, Liberation, the main French left daily reports that 12 per cent of all French citizens live below the poverty line.
Has Sarkozy got any answers? Like General de Gaulle he has sought to open his government to politicians beyond the right, so exploiting weakness and division on the left. Top socialists like Bernard Kouchner, Eric Besson and Jean Bockel have all entered his administration. The closest France has to a European social democrat – Dominque Strauss Kahn has fled French politics to become boss of the IMF in Washington. Segolene Royal has just published her account of her presidential campaign which settles numerous scores with its attacks on her fellow socialist leaders, notably her ex-partner and general secretary of the Socialist Party, Francois Hollande.
A further sign of the state of the French left are the trade unions – the weakest and least representative in the world. Even American unions represent more workers and their incomes comes from membership dues unlike the occult financing of French unions, whose income come from companies or state agencies. A beginning for a renaissance of the French left would require an honest discussion of the failure of French unions to represent the mass of French workers.
The presidential system in France makes it hard for the left – which is by nature against single heroic leaders – to develop an alternative. But Sarkozy’s restless energy and desire to an omnipresent president cannot be sustained indefinitely. Margaret Thatcher had an enemy to vanquish in the form of poorly led trade unions and an unreformed leftism exemplied by the anti-European Labour Party of the early 1980s. After the long decline of Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, there was an alliance for change which combined the best elements of the state apparatus, the rising new business community coming into being in the dawn of the economic era of globalisation, plus the 1968 generation which was easily seduced by rightist anti-statist rhetoric.
Mrs Thatcher had an enemy and had allies. Mr Sarkozy has no clear enemy and if he is to achieve change he has to to defeat his own supporters within the protected state apparatus, the protected professions including the poor-quality universities in France and amongt many elements of the statist French capitalism. But Mr Sarkozy remains at heart a Gaullist statist and is unwilling to embrace truly radical reform.
Hence the probing strikes that have disrupted French rail services or seen universities shut down. Mr Sarkozy wants an economic revolution without pain. Key state employees want to protect their right to retire at 50 and the huge French state employee sector is not going to forgo its generous retirement benefits paid for by workers in the private sector who have none of these rights. Paris remains terrified of its streets. For the time being, French voters are cautiously endorsing the Sarkozy mini-reforms but he knows it will take very little to convert street protests into regime-shaking anger.
In that sense, for a British observer, Mr Sarkozy looks more like Edward Heath than Margaret Thatcher. Heath inherited a declining Britain and thought the answer was try and fudge his way to compromises between capital and labour, not altering the power relations which had caused Britain’s relative economic decline from 1950 onwards.
This can present an opportunity for an intelligent French left. Sarkozy’s Achilles heel remains the continuing and increasing unemployment and lack of economic energy in France. He has promised a radiant new dawn for a confident, modernised France. So far he is not delivering. His cuddling up to George W Bush and bellicose rhetoric on Iran looks curiously dated as America prepares to say goodbye to the Bush-Cheney years and America’s intelligence community downgrades Iran’s nuclear weapons threat.
In short, Sarkozy may be much more of an interim figure than a new de Gaulle or even a Mitterrand. He may be more like France’s Ted Heath than France’s Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair.
Much depends on whether the French left and especially the Socialist Party can rise to the challenge of whether it will be temped by the left populist deviation of hurling darts at Sarkozy’s policies without admitting that much of left thinking and practice in the last 20 years has been part of the French problem, not a solution to French relative decline.