The French Socialists’ choice of the centrist François Hollande shows a new seriousness about winning next year’s presidential election, say Michael McTernan and Antoine Colombani
Since 1988, when François Mitterrand was re-elected, the Parti Socialiste has failed in three successive presidential elections and in three general elections, with the notable exception of 1997 when it benefited from an unexpected dissolution of parliament by Jacques Chirac. It has enjoyed widespread success at a local and regional level but has not been able to mirror such accomplishments at the national level.
This time aims to be different. The party adopted a common electoral programme, endorsed by all its prospective candidates, with newfound discipline evident in an agreement among the frontrunners – Martine Aubry, François Hollande and Ségolène Royal – that France had to reduce its public deficit to within three per cent of GDP by 2013. This mitigated expensive policy shopping lists and showed an awareness of how Nicolas Sarkozy might try to capatalise on them.
Hollande, the triumphant candidate at the ‘citizen primaries’, epitomises this safe-pair-of-hands approach, positioning himself firmly on the centre-ground of the Socialist camp. He won a final run-off against Martine Aubry, polling 56.5 per cent to her 43.5 per cent. In his campaign he insisted that reducing the level of debt was a top priority for the left and that this was not a concession to the right or to markets but a necessary step in recovering sovereignty from the markets. He also placed emphasis on education and improving the prospects of young people, vowing both to hire 60,000 teachers and to incentivise employers to hire 200,000 young people per year.
Hollande will not promise to ‘change life’ in 2012, as the PS’ 1981 slogan famously boasted: instead he will go into the election with a five-year programme to govern the country, suited to the economic priorities and fiscal constraints of the day.
As for the ‘war of egos’ between the party’s barons, all the ingredients were on the table: Hollande was competing against his former partner and mother of his four children, Royal; Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s New York hotel debacle and private ‘pact’ with Aubry that she would not run against him loomed over proceedings; and there was history in the fact that Hollande had been party leader for 10 years before handing over to Aubry in 2008.
Yet the debates were marked by consensus and courtesy – the lead candidates stayed true to the party programme – and it was only in the final days of the primary run-off that the tone sharpened, with Aubry accusing Hollande of representing the ‘soft left’ and not being strong enough to fight Sarkozy. But Hollande stayed above the provocation, underlining his appeal as the unification candidate. This was reinforced by the fact that all four defeated first round figures backed him, including Arnaud Montebourg, who had positioned himself on the ‘hard left’.
Indeed, Montebourg surprised many by polling 17 per cent in the first round. Campaigning on a ‘deglobalisation’ platform, his protectionist stance clearly resonated with voters, catapulting him into the limelight as potential king or queen maker. He duly indulged the political attention, including a cheery endorsement from Front National leader Marine Le Pen, before importantly declaring for Hollande two days before the final poll.
Le Pen and Montebourg make for curious bedfellows. Montebourg’s supporters insist that if the Socialists do not take his stance then there is a risk that Le Pen will poll very high: having succeeded her father at the start of the year, she has adopted left-leaning socioeconomic rhetoric, which includes a similar anti-globalisation stance, calls for protectionist measures and attacks on the banks, as well as a French withdrawal from the eurozone. Her party is now pushing 20 per cent in the polls.
Thus, the challenge for Hollande will be to respond to this climate of economic insecurity and palpable anger at unbridled free-market capitalism, while not allowing Sarkozy to paint him as untrustworthy on the economy and reckless with public finances. In this sense Aubry’s label as ‘lady of the 35 hour week’ left her particularly vulnerable and perhaps persuaded many on the French left to make a more hard-headed selection. After Strauss-Kahn’s fall, Hollande was always the candidate that Sarkozy feared most.
Hollande will assert that he wants to be a ‘normal’ president, moving away from the concentration and personalisation of power which reached extreme levels under Sarkozy, much to the frustration of the French public.
Furthermore, he will point out that the president is not best placed to deal with the current crisis given the aggravating effect his large tax reductions on the wealthy have had on France’s debt problem. The key message will be that Hollande would be able to deal with the crisis both more sensibly and with a concern for social justice.
However, Hollande’s challenge is twofold: he must also persuade French voters to give him enough votes to make the second round of the presidential election – unlike the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin who was stunningly overtaken by the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002. Today, the Front National is even stronger and there is a distinct possibility that either Sarkozy or Hollande could be eliminated. The president will be the only significant candidate on the centre-right whereas Hollande will have competitors on the left, mainly Eva Joly for the Greens and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (for the ‘Front de gauche’, a Linkspartei-like alliance of the Communist party and left-leaning former socialists). In this context, Hollande will have to get as many votes as possible in the first round, whilst simultaneously remembering that he will have to build a strong alliance with these two parties in a potential second round run-off.
So it is by no means an easy ride for Hollande. In putting forward a pragmatic, statesman-like candidate from the centre-ground, the French left appear to have voted with heads over hearts. In both his positioning against the centre-right and his coalition politics there will be many lessons for European social democrats over the coming months.
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Michael McTernan and is editor and senior researcher at Policy Network, and Antoine Colombani is ‘maître de conférences’ at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris and works with the French progressive thinktank Terra Nova
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