All that for this?
France must be one of the only democracies which publishes the official estimates of election results while the polling booths are still functioning. The results are announced officially at 8.00 pm on election day, the same moment that the booths are supposed to close - but because of the long queues (up to an hour’s wait in some places), the prefects said that those caught in a queue at 8.00 pm would be allowed to shuffle on to the ballot box - even though the streets around them were full of screams of joy and pain.
In fact disappointment is the immediate reaction amongst most of the people I have spoken to. Disappointment of a promise unfulfilled, disappointment over the two candidates chosen. The result is so tame when so much was on offer – a real chance to change political attitudes and thus bring about the changes that France needs. A chance to upset the media who, since September last year, have promised us an election between Sarkozy and Royal, as though they were the only two candidates. The fact they have been proved right does not cover them with glory, but rather the opposite: a feeling that, as candidates like Bayrou and Le Pen have said from the outset, they are in cahoots with each other and the forces and sources of power in the country. Anything which wrong-footed the press, as for example the rapid rise of François Bayrou from 6% to around 20% at times during the campaign, was greeted with an extraordinary mix of ridicule, disdain and alarm. Many hoped that for the third time (after 2002 and the referendum of 2005), French voters would surprise the world and unsettle the over-confident media, so often accused of being out-of-touch. But no.
Perhaps the greatest disappointment has been the knowledge that before us we have five more years of the old left against right, both set in their predictable, unexciting policies, constantly bickering, automatically refusing the other’s propositions with knee-jerk lack of thought, simply to please their own vested interests. The country divided, at war with the other half. Us and Them. Reforms all but impossible. For both candidates have that within them and their policies to take France even further downwards in its present slow descent away from economic viability and full employment: Ségolène Royal, much like Britain’s Old Labour, promising to strengthen trade union membership, keep the Code du Travail intact and make it difficult for small companies to innovate. Sarkozy simply divisive, aggressive. Already the young in the tower-block estates are against him and he, during the three month campaign, only once dared set foot within them, knowing the bad pictures that could result. How will he, how can he, given his past, ease this terrible wound in France? But it’s not just the tower-block estates: elsewhere in the country there is a climate of fear about Sarkozy. Over the next couple of days on this blog I shall be writing about a book by Serge Portelli, a member of the magistrate’s union, called “Ruptures”, a balance-sheet up of Sarkozy’s time as minister of the interior. Accepted by a publisher, Michalon, and set for publication a month ago it was withdrawn at the last minute amid rumours of pressure from above, at the same time Michalon apparently refused to let the author take it elsewhere until after the elections. Of course those who write against Sarkozy, like the philosopher Michel Onfray or the weekly magazine Marianne are politically in the other camp, but they nevertheless express a real fear felt amongst many open-minded and reasonable French people.
But regardless of personalities, it is that old left/right black/white bi-polar vision of the world which disappoints me most, that 56% of the French electorate still believe the complexities of today’s world can be reduced to one of only two solutions, and the right solution can only be found in one of the two old, traditional parties.
The campaign will of course continue to fill the front pages for the next fortnight until the second round decides whether Royal or Sarkozy is going to rule us. In the scores of polls done before the elections, Royal has not once defeated Sarkozy. Everything hangs on Bayrou’s voters – a number greater than voted for Chirac in the first round of the 2002 elections but whose desire for national unity the system has now side-lined. Doubtless offers will be made to Bayrou: it will be a time of difficult choices for him. We shall finally learn what he is made of.
Then, immediately after the second round there will be the parliamentary elections. Aiming at unified government, they were put so close to the presidential election because it was assumed voters would be consistent, but perhaps this time the conflict will be so intense, the country so divided that whichever party gets their candidate into the Elysée will be defeated a month later, resulting in a cohabitation which will further weaken any chance for constructive change.
April 23rd, 2007 at 10:44 am
Tim King is wrong – firstly Segolène is not representative of the old left and this is precisely why her position has been weakened by ‘the elephants’ as she was seen to take too much from the Blairite camp and not enough from the consistent old guard. But as we all know, it is precisely because the old guard had been a disappointment in the last election that we have them to thank for effectively putting in place Jacques Chirac in order to stop Le Pen becoming President. Tim King is also wrong in his analysis because he does not take into account the historical precedent that ensured the vote for the constitution failed as this was partly due to the importance of social programmes which the Mitterand and Jospin governments had put in place and the understandable intransigence of the Left to lose any of the hardly fought social rights for the benefit of an economic alliance. We in this country have lost much of that in the name of progress but this is what is coming back to haunt us and bite us where it hurts. What is sourly lacking in the UK is a social programme that will go a long way to stop the alienation that the poorest fringe of our society feels. Also, our so called economic success is surely on its way down if not out soon and we will see unemployment rise and more misery as more houses are being repossessed as well as a rapid increase in youth crime. So, yes the right solution should be far more radical than what Segolène proposes, but the third way is a myth that allows capitalism to carry on undeterred and social progress to be gently massaged but not sufficiently radicalised to ensure the right to work, the right to housing and the right to decent life and care remain visibly at the top of the agenda. At least Ms Royal is defending what is already there and encourages economic progress in partnership with social advancement and not at its detriment.