Are all candidates equal?
With only three more days for the press and media to discuss the election, emphasis quite naturally is on the four candidates most likely to succeed, their solutions to today’s problems weighed up and analysed in great detail. The eight other candidates are treated like children, with nodding condescension. The media have to give them all equal air-time, but nobody really cares what the eight also-rans have to say because no one believes for one moment they’re going to be president, which, in the end, is what this story is about.
Regardless of media condescension, however, the eight outsiders are working their socks off, knowing that in just a few days they can put their feet up, take a long cold drink – and think about paying the bills. A candidate polling 5% or less will automatically receive 685,000€ campaign expenses from the state, calculated as 5% of the official spending limit, 13.7 million. If they poll more, they can get up to 50% of the spending limit, but not more than they have spent. All remaining bills must be paid either by a political party or individuals. Private businesses are not allowed to contribute towards election campaigns, and individuals cannot pay more than 4,574€ each.
Some of the eight are proper politicians, like Marie-George Buffet of the Communist Party and Dominique Voynet, the Green candidate, who has been a minister, but most are not. I’m thinking about Arlette Laguiller, 68 years old running her sixth and final campaign or Olivier Besançenot, another far-left candidate, who I imagine going back to the Post Office on Monday morning to resume his round. José Bové, who Le Monde calls the Don Quixote of the Larzac, will go back to his sheep on the Larzac plateau. Although it’s easy to raise an eyebrow at the idea of so many candidates who don’t stand a chance of winning, it is rather wonderful that the system allows them to have their moment, for unlike the American system, personal wealth does not come into it, these are not rich men and women. Unlike the British system they don’t have to be hardened smoothies counting sound bytes. They run ramshackle campaigns with mates, they talk about matters they care passionately about (as oppose to the Sarko’s and Ségos of this world who tackle society’s problems with clinical solutions culled from professional experts in each field - which is why they are so often essentially similar) and they talk to ordinary people as equals: no hopers on a six week roll.
Bové has received a sympathetic press, not for his ideas but for his person. Journalists arrive at his somewhat chaotic campaign headquarters to find that no one knows where the candidate is: “He’ll be here in a minute…well, he usually arrives about this time. What is the time?” No one is quite sure what José will do today. He has his fixed meetings, which are well attended by the already converted, travelling round France by rail because unlike the main candidates he cannot afford a private jet. He has spent a lot of time in the tower-block estates talking to the unemployed, whose problems, he has found, are similar to those who live in rural France: neglect. He listens. I am not sure he spends much time with the leaders of industry or the head of the employers’ organisation, which is a shame for they might learn about a different aspect of France from talking with him quietly. He shares with George Bush a simple view of the world, that it is divided into the good and the bad. For Bové the good are the workers, the bad the bosses. Like a fair percentage of his compatriots, he is utterly convinced that globalisation is a bad thing.
“Bové is much less of a revolutionary than he seems,” says Eddy Fougier for Telos, a French think-tank. Fougier compares Bové’s programme to that of the Socialists back in the 1980’s and earlier. His 125 propositions, which came out of the anti-free-market collectives after the rejection of the EU Constitution, are remarkably similar to Mitterrand’s 100 campaign propositions of 1981. Well, that’s hardly surprising: faced with unemployment what else is a candidate going to say but “We’ll create more jobs”, faced with a shortage of housing, what else would he say but “We’ll build more houses”? Fougier’s argument is that Bové appeals to the left which is nostalgic for the programme they voted through Mitterrand but which Mitterrand was forced to abandon, two years into his presidency, realising it was unworkable and ill-adapted to the real world. All Bové has done, according to Fougier, is dress yesterday’s theories in today’s language, dropping the 1970’s vocabulary of class struggle, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Which again is all any politician does, though perhaps Bové, like Besançenot and Arlette Laguiller, not being politicians in the smooth sense, are a bit more obvious about it. But the combined support for these three, let’s say around 10% of the electorate, shows their ideas are far from redundant and if they are the same ideas put forward by Mitterrand 26 years ago, that mirrors Le Pen hammering home his pet theories unchanged over the same length of time. There is something honourable about that.
Bové is apparently not at all bitter about his lack of success in the opinion polls so far – around 2%. On the contrary, he is happy and relaxed, still unable to believe that he got his 500 signatures from the mayors of France. That alone, he says, is a sign that in France anything is possible. He also hints that he’ll be back next time, still quixotically dreaming of a better world, doubtless tilting at the same windmills. For if one thing is certain, there will still be plenty of them about in five years’ time.