The two candidates who could have breathed a fresh spirit into this election, breaking it from the grip of professional politicians and pushing it towards a different form of democracy, have both disappointed. Nicolas Hulot, because he decided in the end not to stand, believing he can be of more use as a green goad, and José Bové because in the end he did decide to stand.

Like many media-made icons, in himself José Bové may have less real substance than he is credited for, it’s just that he has that about him which absorbs our dreams and reflects them back to us. We invest him with what we want to see. He may share that gift with Ségolène Royal – and perhaps the American Democrat, Howard Dean, in the last American presidential election. But anyone who has that quality and is compelled to reveal what they really stand for, as a presidential candidate must, can only disappoint.

Many thought that if he ran, Bové would be, like Nicolas Hulot, a genuine independent. A man who comes from the people and is prepared to go to prison for his ideas, blessed with a sense of anarchy, fun and a sincere desire to help the unrepresented. He is a paysan, who hold a powerful place in French sentiment, working the earth, that eternal (unfortunately now much-polluted) source of wisdom, and in Bové’s case a particular kind of earth, the Larzac plateau, harsh, unforgiving desert – “crossing the desert” is what every great Frenchman has had to do.

However, many who had hopes of this one were deeply disappointed by his first policy speech on Thursday. He launched straight into a piece of ancient dogma dragged from soviet text-books: “A big boss earns 300 times the minimum wage.” The vocabulary, the sweeping generalisation, it’s so…well, as George W. would say “It’s a shame the French don’t have a word for passé”. Playing on envy and our own greed, it brings the debate down to the base level of money before it’s even started. 300 times the minimum wage is a little over 4.5 million euro a year. Undoubtedly a handful do earn that, for a short time, but I would guess most of the men and women who run ordinary companies do not take home much more than the average lawyer or surgeon. And sometimes much less.

What were Bové’s concrete proposals? “Un plan d’urgence sociale”. The intention is good, but plans? More of the old top-down, soviet-speak. “Imposing strict regulations about making anyone redundant”. If M. Bové is honest with himself, he is the last person to want anyone else to “impose regulations” on him, why is his priority to impose them on others? Because, he says: “we need to fight financial speculation and counter-act the power of the shareholder.” In the next paragraph “We have to attack the all-powerful multinationals and the financial markets.” And later “With the countries of the South, we will end the major institutions’ capacity to do harm (the World Bank, IMF, WTO), institutions which reinforce inequality and provoke the suffering which results in war.”

And many hoped for something imaginative, a bit creative even, a new way of looking at democracy. Certainly Bové says “I am not the candidate of a party. I am not a professional politician….we want to be the porte-voix des sans-voix”, an elegant phrase, voix meaning both voice and vote: he wants to bring a voice and a vote to those who have neither. Excellent. But why all the tired old mumbo-jumbo? The far left already has three candidates (Marie-George Buffet of the communists, Olivier Besançenot of the Trotskyist LCR (whose opening salvo at the beginning of the 2002 presidential campaign, when he was 28, was far more inspired: “Our lives are worth more than their profits”) and Arlette Laguiller of Force Ouvrière), all of whom are in the doldrums at the moment. If he wants to do well he has to break clear of them, not swell their ranks.

To reply to Wint Discontent’s comment about Bové’s destruction of the Millau MacDo: that gesture, romantic, visceral, unfortunately back-fired, as grand gestures often do. As Wint Discontent says, it seared the popular imagination, is remembered still. Indeed so well remembered that the MacDonald’s in question, which I drive past often, is one of the busiest and most profitable in France (the country alleged to have the highest consumption of MacDo’s per capita in Europe). After the new viaduct, it is Millau’s second-most visited tourist attraction. Bové did MacDonald, fast food (and bad health) a huge and lasting service that day!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 8:42 am and is filed under Political, The pack. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.