At the moment this blog is focussed mainly on the French elections. I am hoping that as well as giving a daily commentary and explanation, I’ll be able to show aspects of the election campaigns not often reported but important, nevertheless: like the French political blogs.

French blogs fall into two groups: the blogs of the candidates, and the blogs of those dissatisfied with what the candidates are offering. The candidates are using the net simply as a platform, little different from a TV or newspaper interview, reaching out to people they hope will vote for them. The obviously far more numerous “others” are using the internet for something else: bloggers like Thierry Crouzet, Thierry Maillet start from the premise that the internet is a force in its own right, not merely a means of communication. The 5^th power, according to the French press.

Certainly blogs are very popular in France: it is second only to the United States for the number of blogs per inhabitant (maybe that should be inhabitants per blog). ADSL has caught on very fast (it has even reached France profonde, though the service is pretty tattered by the time it gets out here and if anyone’s got a better idea for fast, reliable internet service, I’d love to hear it) and the French repeatedly tell each other they love talking to each other – traditionally in cafés (as oppose to the Brits in pubs who yell at each other). Most important, the French always have an opinion and they like that opinion to be different from other people’s – which may be why there are so far 38 candidates for the presidential election.

It’s worth having a look at an edited video on Thierry Crouzet’s blog. It’s a presentation he gave, in English, at the recent Web 3.0 conference in Paris, attended not only by some of the leading web-people from 36 countries, but by politicians and decision-makers. In the video Thierry explains how Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory – familiar to economists and star-gazers – is applicable to French politics. A comet, blazing across the sky leaves an ever-broadening and lengthening trail behind it – until very recently graphs of retail sales used to look just the same: one product was a tear-away best-seller (the comet), leaving in its wake an ever-broadening trail of increasingly dead, unsellable products – independent writers, film-makers and musicians were all victims of that “best-seller only” approach! But the internet is changing that: now people down-load what they want to see – or buy off the internet what they want as oppose to what the man in the shop has on his shelves – with the result that there is wider choice, the market is no longer dominated by a handful of products and a handful of producers (we hope!). Thierry Crouzet reckons the theory holds for politics too – that democracy is no longer represented by big star politicians. In the 1965 French presidential elections there were 6 candidates, and the two who went through to the second round, De Gaulle and Mitterrand, took between them 76% of the vote. In 2002, the first when candidates had their own web-sites, there were 16 candidates, showing the desire to participate in democracy is growing. But in that election, the top two only got 38% of the vote between them, which shows that the best sellers are selling less and less – it also shows that 62% of French voters were, in a sense, not represented at the second round. Thus democracy is changing, but the existing system does not accommodate the growing pressure from below. I know that’s a bit simplistic, but if you’re after democracy, and that is precisely what the French are after, then those two figures are worth bearing in mind. This year, so far, there are 38 candidates.

The threat is that if the existing political system does not accommodate the changes taking place, then more and more people will abstain from voting, and claim that those elected don’t really represent the country. You get universal dissatisfaction. The retail industry, of course, is famous for the speed with which it reacts to changing public demand – it has to change in order to survive. Politicians cling desperately to the wreckage they themselves have caused.

Secondly, can the long tail theory be applied to government in Britain, which runs obsessively on the (arguably now out-dated) two party, best-seller system? There simply is not the scope, within the British electoral system, for 38 candidates wanting to be prime minister (subject for a BBC sit-com?). But is there a feeling within Britain (or the United States, Canada or Australia which also run two, or two-and-a-half horse races) that greater participation is essential if an increasingly well-educated, well-informed electorate is going to remain satisfied?

All French politicians pay lip-service to the power of blogs. They fully understand, for example, that the 2005 referendum on the European Constitution was dominated and won not by TV homilies or newspaper editorials, but by a network of people outside politics connecting with each other and asking What is all this? Politicians now know they cannot live without the web, but at the same time they are fundamentally afraid of it – with good reason.

Ségolène Royal has used Web 2.0 more intelligently than her rivals in the race for the French presidency. A year ago she created a participative web-site, Désirs d’Avenir, inviting comments and suggestions, collaboratively writing a web-book with bloggers and encouraging each region of France to start its own Désirs d’Avenir web-site to discuss local problems. The party stalwarts in Paris pooh-poohed it all as gimmickry. The French public, however, found it was exactly what they wanted. Madame Royal’s popularity soared. At the same time, as Thierry Maillet points out, Ségolène Royal surrounded herself with women, and not necessarily women who had excelled at the schools of administration, but women who are good at marketing and communication. As a result, she amassed a huge following, mainly from the internet, and used that popularity to trounce the party stalwarts standing against her in the primaries.

So why did I say she is afraid of Web 2.00? Look at the video-clip at YouTube. It shows Ségolène Royal at a meeting of local party officials, announcing an idea which she does not want shouted from the roof-tops, “because I don’t want to be clobbered by the teaching unions.” Her “revolutionary” idea is that secondary school teachers must work their full 35 hours a week at school, not the “17 hours” which is “accepted practice (droits aquis)”. This will stop them sloping off to teach in private crammers (“quoted on the stock market”) – something Madame Royal finds outrageous. Her remarks caused nervous laughter at the meeting: teachers are to the French Socialist Party what miners, steel-workers and railway workers used to be to the old British Labour Party – at once a core and an un-reformable thorn in its side. They were shocked by what this video revealed – the gap between what Mme Royal declares in public and what she says in private meetings (shocked as well, of course, that they might lose a good source of pocket-money). But their anger was nothing compared to Mme Royal’s.

Such a security lapse will not be allowed to happen again – doubtless many French politicians wish they could take a leaf from China’s stranglehold on the net – indeed there has recently been a new spate of calls for regulation and control. But the whole point of Web 2.0 is that it is people talking to each other in public, beyond the control of those who wish to contain everything in rehearsed sound-bytes and carefully staged appearances.

At the last vote (the referendum), French politicians not only lost, collectively, but were all shown up for being out of touch. So how are they going to remedy that before the April elections? How are they trying to prove that, contrary to appearances, they are in touch with a large and probably younger section of French society? Ségolène Royal, as I have said, has a low-key, intelligent approach, creating a participative blog. However, it is running out of steam and now she is fully engaged on the “official” front, I wonder whether she will be able to keep the blog convincing. Her principal rival, Nicolas Sarkozy’s solution is typically American-style razzmatazz. His way of showing he’s part of the scene is to get one or several stars to come to a big public rally, and there they perform a variant of the medieval obeisance ritual: they approach each other on-stage and on-camera, one, by his body-language, clearly the presidential candidate, the other, despite being a star, doing a sort of mock-humility act which we know is temporary. They face each other stiffly and indulge in mutual jaw-holding (in France people do this where Americans hug and thump backs – anyway Sarko is too short to thump backs, his people must have told him that clamping people round the knees is not good for his “I’m your man” image). To show he is just a click away from the connected community he likes to have Loïc Lemeur, a (or perhaps the) key French blogger, beside him on stage at the big rallies, taking email reactions from people down-loading the podcast of Sarko’s speech. Loïc is quoted on BonVote as running the most influential of the 1,328 political French blogs. Sarkozy honed his web image by making a lightning appearance at Loïc’s recent Blog Fest in Paris, Web 3.0, organised with SixApart. Clearly he could not refuse the invitation to speak before web-people from 36 countries, but in the event he had nothing much to say, and left abruptly after his speech. He must have sensed something in the air, for many dismiss him on their subsequent blogs as irrelevant. In other words, like Ségolène Royal, he still has not really understood what it’s about. As Thierry Crouzet, a very astute, committed blogger points out, both Sarko and Ségo still see the world from the old top-down, command-and-control perspective which no longer fits with what many in France want.

So why a political blog about France? Who needs it? France is a place to go on holiday, right? To relax over long meals and perhaps, if you like it, buy a large house very cheap. Politically, what’s it got going for it? For years it has punched, rather pathetically, above its weight, and now it’s finally sinking. Who cares about yesterday’s also-rans? And why on earth should a daily blog on French politics be of the slightest interest to any English-speaking person? (more…)