More statistics for those who believe in them: a poll published this morning shows that only 45% of those asked want to work longer to earn more. That flies in the face of Sarkozy’s premise that millions of working people are desperate to increase their income by working a few more hours per week, and so back his plan to loosen up France’s working laws. 53% want to have their current working week sanctified by law.

A development to my blog about the devious practices to which candidates, or their supporters, will resort in order to get the necessary 500 signatures from rural mayors, there’s a story in today’s Le Monde that one rural mayor sent back a cheque for 1,000€ sent to him by the Front National. A spokesman at the Front admitted his party sent cheques to rural mayors, not in return for a signature, no, no, no, but because the Front National understands that rural communes are short of cash for little extras - heating bills for the elderly, for example. A kind thought. Anyway, this particular mayor thought it was a bribe and sent it back. Now added suspicion and calumny will fall on all those mayors (their names will be published on the 20th of this month) who have endorsed the Front. Jean-Marie Le Pen claims to be short of about 100 signatures, with 2 weeks to go.

And another piece of daft polling. Great excitement this morning because a BVA poll showed that if François Bayrou makes it into the second round, he will win the election, whether his rival is Nicolas Sarkozy or Ségolène Royal. The polls say he would beat Sarko by 54% and Royal by 55%. The problem is the same poll says that he won’t make it into the second round - he’ll only get 17% in the first round, well below Royal at 25% and Sarkozy at 31%.

The more I look at the photos of François Bayrou which are flooding the net, the more he looks like what he is - an affable, intelligent farmer. He doesn’t have that crisp slickness of Chirac in the old days or of Sarkozy and Royal today, a quality many find attractive and for some reason equate with efficiency and international know-how. Bayrou’s more the Gordon Brown of the election: it would be interesting to run a proper comparison on the two men. Bayrou is said to be difficult to get on with, certainly several MP’s close to him have left him after stormy disagreements, though he has many firm colleagues, particularly among his advisors like Charles de Courson. Neither man has an immediate telegenic charm, though nowadays that lack may be more appreciated than being at ease with the media. Their policies may be close too, an indefinite mix of vaguely free-market economics and social conscience. Bayrou has bravely overcome a serious stutter, and the effort makes him appear a little slower with words, but that may be seen as greater sincerity? He also fits the tradition that every president of the 5th Republic has had roots in the coutryside. Up until now that has been very important, since many French families only moved out of rural France in the last 40 years and still have close attachments there. Indeed for the parliamentary elections many city-dwellers vote in the country commune of their parents or grandparents because they feel their choice carries greater weight there. Both Royal and Sarkozy have made country folk guffaw by the way they hold a baby pig (important) or pick their way gingerly through cow shit. In many ways the current race is between the French who have moved to the slick city and those who have not: speedy Sarkozy and the slower, thoughtful Bayrou. Tortoise and hare?

“There are three kinds of lies,” according to that arch-politician Benjamin Disraeli: “lies, damned lies and statistics,” and an election campaign is the ideal time to see the last kind being hurled about as if they were the new gospel. Jacques Marseille, an economist who has made a career and reputation cutting two round holes in the wool which statistic-wielding politicians often pull over our eyes, recently published an excellent book called: “Les Bons chiffres pour ne pas voter nul en 2007” (There’s a play on words too elegant to translate, so let’s simply say The real figures to help you vote intelligently in 2007).

The format is good: each double page takes one subject, often something we assume we know all about, which Marseille then proceeds to reinterpret, for example the unemployment situation of the under-25’s, or which party builds the most council homes, or he shows how much each of us would receive if the bosses million-euro bonuses and golden parachutes were re-distributed amongst everybody. Not all of it is bad news for his compatriots – equally part of his Don’t-take –what-politicians-tell-you-for-granted message is that you are not suffering as much as you think you are..

Let’s start with a prime case of a politician hoistr by statistics, the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin. Why do we hear so little about him today? Why is he not running for president? Mainly because a year ago he totally mishandled a new law to help the under-25’s get a first job – particularly the young from the dispossessed housing estates. At that time it was generally bandied about that 21.8% of French youth were unemployed: “It’s not in fact 21.8% of the young aged 15-24 years who are on the dole, but 21.8% of the young between 15-24 years who are no longer following at school or university and who are actively looking for a job,” writes Marseille. “And the difference is enormous: in 2004 there were 7,800,000 young people aged between 15 and 24. Of that number 4 695 899 (59.9%) were at school or university [entry to university is not selective in France, but open to anyone who has passed the baccalauréat] 2,089,404 (26.7%) had a job, with more than half employed on a lifetime contract, 439,406 (5.6%) were inactive, that is neither being educated nor registered at the unemployment office (young mothers at home, for example). 609,000 (7.8%) were unemployed. Less than the European average (8.2%) – the UK is at 7.6%.

Which just goes to show how much misuse or abuse of statistics wrongly causes despair amongst the young……and leads governments to absurd policies whose only effect is to tip the population out on to the street. Misuse of statistics kills…..” Indeed they killed M. De Villepin’s dreams of glory. For a while, at least.

Or more briefly, Marseille shows that in a country still largely dominated by unions (they are discreetly called les partenaires sociaux – the social partners), there are nearly a million fewer paid up union members, 1,884,000, than bosses, 2,788,000. “If the bosses decided to take to the street to defend their rights would easily outnumber the people who are supposed to represent the world of work.”

We all know that the French bête noire is the United States, in particular its jungle work-ethic. Perhaps to provoke his compatriots, Marseille fits the American work model, scaled down to match the different population, over the top of the existing French model, to see whether, if France was run along American lines, its employment situation would be very different. The result is astonishing. “France would have 5.3 million jobs more, whereas at the moment there are a bit more than 2 million people seeking a job.” In areas such as transport, post and telecommunications the number of people employed is, within the ratio, about the same. In schools and public health the American model would add half a million jobs. Where it differs wildly is in shops, hotels and restaurants. This seems strange because tourism is one of France’s major industries. Yet if France employed the same ratio of people in hotels and restaurants as the Americans, the number of people employed would rise from 770,000 to 1,790,000 – over a million more jobs would be created in that area alone. In shops too there is the same problem: “For a comparable volume of sales, Toys’R’Us employs between 30 and 40% less personnel in its French shops than in its American ones.” The number of people employed in shops has practically not increased since 1973, and has actually gone done since 1982, whereas the same sector in the United States has created 8 million jobs in the US. The reason, according to Marseille, is that the “hourly cost of an employee on the minimum wage is about 60% higher in France than in the States, less because of the wage itself than the charges which the employer has to pay..” But this is precisely the sort of comparison which no politician, let alone presidential candidate, dares say. And it begs another thorny question tackled in the same book by M. Marseille: why does a country with the highest employer charges (to pay for social security) also have the highest level of social security debt? Ask that question of a candidate and you are guaranteed a lot of red-faced waffle.

Another aspect of Ségolène Royal’s lack of vision is her attitude towards what the French call statistiques ethniques. At the moment it is illegal in France to ask on any official form, such as the Census, questions about racial origins or religious beliefs. In France there are only French citizens. Thus any figures about how many people of North African origin there are, or how many Muslims, are based on guess-work, and published totals vary according to the political views of the editor of each newspaper or magazine. It is simply not possible to say with any certainty how many North African, black African or Asian French people there are – nor therefore to get proper statistics about unemployment, housing, scholastic success, public health. There have been attempts to do so, initially by Michèle Tribalat, a researcher and more recently by other CNRS researchers, but their work remains unacceptable to many of their own colleagues, as revealed by a petition launched today to keep ethnic origins out of statistics.

At the moment, the only way to get figures about non-white French people is to assume someone’s racial roots from their name – which contradicts the idea of anonymity: you have to know his name is Mohammed Hamoun before you guess he has North African roots. But from there to say he is or is not Muslim (let alone whether or not he’s a practising or lapsed Muslim) is a mind-boggling leap into stereo-type. (It has always intrigued me that the French, who claim all immigrants leave their cultural baggage at the frontier and willingly adopt total Frenchitude, never wonder why couples of North African origin still call their children by North African names, and indeed talk in Arabic amongst themselves – on a train approaching Montpellier last week the air was full of Arabic as the French passengers phoned their families or friends).

However, moving in a more open direction, the Representative Council for Black Associations recently sent a questionnaire to all the presidential candidates, asking for their views on the principal of statistiques ethniques. Nicolas Sarkozy replied they are “necessary and useful”, in keeping with his sympathy for some discreet form of positive discrimination. François Bayrou replied that “Nothing is gained by concealing the diversity of our people,” which seems consistent with his honesty in other matters. Marie-George Buffet (Communist) and Dominique Voynet (Green) also said they are in favour of using ethnic statistics. Only Ségolène Royal demurred, saying interpreting ethnic statistics is “very delicate” because of “the risk of labelling”.

The fear of labelling people from other backgrounds is a hang-over from Vichy, when of course it became literally that, a label pinned to the chest. But that was a period when most “foreigners” had white faces and, without a star on their chest, could blend into the crowd. That is not the case today, when people from North and West Africa are rightly called the “visible minorities”. Meeting them, you don’t have to ask their names to know their roots lie beyond Europe. Denying on paper the evidence of your own eyes seems to me a glorification of blindness.

An interesting article in the citizens’ newspaper, AgoraVox reacting to Nicolas Sarkozy’s Call from London. It’s written by a French chap, Stephane Rossard, who lives in Cape Town.
“Sarkozy says to us “Come back”: we say “Do something!”
There is of course a basic difference between the Brits who have moved to France and the French who have moved out. Whatever their individual reasons, most of the British taking up residence in France tend to be in the second half of their careers, often well into it, whereas the majority of French women and men who leave France are just beginning theirs. Another basic difference, which Stephane Rossard’s article unconsciously highlights, is that at some moment, fairly early on, I had to decide whether my principal residence was in France or in Britain. As soon as I ticked the former, I lost the right to vote in Britain (even though I still had a flat in London): my two expatriate French step-sons can still vote for a French president even though they have been living outside France for several years – as I guess M. Rossard and others can. Until I take French nationality, I am voteless (so this blog dedicated to the French elections is rather like a sex-manual written by a eunuch - no, that’s not true! I have vague memories of what it’s like inside a polling booth).
Back to M. Rossard (whose text I am ruthlessly pillaging, with sentences taken out of order (apologies), to keep brief, but if your French is OK, read the article): “The number of French leaving the country has risen by 40% in 10 years…..Some of course go to the UK, but many go elsewhere……It is one of the biggest waves of emigration France has ever known….This is a reality minimised by French politicians, either brushed off as irrelevant or ignored. It’s about time a candidate took an interest in us.
“However, calling on us to come back is not enough: French people abroad will judge on the evidence whether it’s worthwhile coming back or not. The future president is going to have to prove himself to convince us. For we are scalded cats. We know all about promises. It’s because in the past they were not kept that we left, and most of us have only a lukewarm desire to return unless there is a strong signal or something done.”
A theme I hear more and more from the current campaign and which I shall probably start repeating in different ways is: despite what they say, the principal candidates are completely out of touch with most of their compatriots.
Finally M. Rossard gives the address of a web-site dedicated to ex-patriot French people: http://francaisdumonde.canalblog.com/

As a post-script to the still running Quebec quote. Leigh Phillips rightly pulled me up for calling Jean Charest Quebec’s prime minister, when in fact he is the province’s premier. However, the rest of France does not know this (and may be taken as yet another example of their almost total ignorance of the province they claim to hold close to their hearts). As the affair has blown up, the French press and radio without exception as far as I can see refer to Jean Charest as “le premier ministre de Québec” (including Le Monde), and Gérald Dahan, the practical joker who rang up Mme Royal claiming to be Jean Charest with a personal message, introduced himself as “le premier ministre de Québec”. Mme Royal probably still has not realised that such a post does not exist, and that anyone calling himself le premier ministre de Québec must be faking it.
Gérald Dahan impersonating Jean Charest took in Mme Royal totally. They had a good conversation in which Dahan/Charest said: “It’s as if we said Corsica must be independant” To which Royal replied: “The French would not be against that either.” She then burst out laughing and said: “But don’t repeat that. It will start another incident. It’s a secret.”

Dahan, if readers don’t know him, is extremely good at his trade: he phoned the trainer of the French soccer team and Zinedine Zidane just before a big international, claiming to be Jacques Chirac. He asked both men that every player should press his hand to his heart as they stood on the turf during the national anthem. Solemnly, they all did.

Ségolène Royal is approaching a crucial moment in her campaign. According to one poll she has slipped 3 points against Nicolas Sarkozy and according to another she has lost 8 points to him in a month. Her now established habit of making naïve remarks about other countries is diminishing her in the eyes of her compatriots: only now 29% say she has the stature of a president, against 60% for Sarkozy.

That in itself could be of little importance at this early stage of the campaign, except for two things: one is that Sarkozy is such a professional. He is a machine for winning: since he is a keen and ruthless tennis-player I will allow myself a tennis metaphor and say that he reminds me of Björn Borg in the mid 1970’s, almost too focussed on winning. Once he gets a lead it is going to be very hard to catch up. People vote for success probably more than for cogent policies.

Royal’s drop in popularity is also important because she is being pulled down by her insistence on people’s democracy, and she is going to have to decide whether or not to jettison it. That’s a paradox, because it was people’s democracy which catapulted her into the driving seat of the Socialist Party. But she has yet to see the difference between fighting to be a party’s official candidate and fighting to be president of France. There is no doubt that her policy of participative democracy and the use of the internet gave her a huge popularity all last year amongst those disillusioned with the present political system. Learning from that, she announced she would spend the first month of the campaign listening. It sounds so refreshingly sensible – but that’s why she is losing ground so fast. Her rival is out there making rousing speeches, promising the earth while she quietly listens to ordinary people. And when she does speak, she puts her foot right in it. When it’s not her, it’s either her partner or her official spokesman. It is a very ragged, amateur team. What she is doing makes a lot of sense to those fed-up with conventional politics, but tactically it is a no-hoper: by the time she has decided what her policies are going to be (February 11^th, 2½ weeks away), Sarkozy’s lead will be beyond her. Unless of course he makes a major mistake. Which is what the Socialist Party is now looking for. At the beginning of the campaign Royal promised she would not demean herself to making personal attacks. It has not yet come to that, but the party did admit that as of Tuesday there is now a dedicated cell scouring Sarkozy’s speeches looking to capitalise on any possible weak link. They were helped in this by yesterday’s “Canard Enchainé”, a satirical but also probingly investigative weekly, which announced that Sarkozy’s party has used the Renseignements généraux, a sort of information gathering branch of internal security, controlled by the minister of the interior, to dig up dirt on Royal’s ecology spokesman, Bruno Rebelle, former No.2 of Greenpeace International. In riposte, the Socialist Party has asked Jacques Chirac to force Sarkozy to resign as Minister of the Interior, claiming that he is abusing the considerable means at his disposal to order such investigations.

The time for dreaming is fast drawing to a close, and the campaign is turning into yet another dirty little war.

I get worried when politicians say that when elected they will make something normally considered a right into an obligation, and that this will make us all better citizens. Making a right compulsory is seen as a quick fix to make people feel they’re all part of the same community, working together in the same direction and loving every moment of it. In this election the list includes compulsory voting, compulsory membership of unions and compulsory civic service.

Three of the four principal candidates in this French election have said that when elected they will set up a system of “service civique obligatoire” – comparable to the old national service which was abandoned (in France) only six years ago. The idea is not a bad one, getting young people involved in the community, broadening their horizons and teaching them to help those who can’t help themselves: la cohésion sociale. But why add the word obligatoire? Or, more provocatively, why does not its presence create a storm of protest? I think all of the several projets de loi put forward over the past year or so, by both parties, have included the O word. As I understand it (and comments from French readers about this would be very welcome), the basis of the French Republic is equality, and so what goes for one must, obligatoirement, go for all. You cannot have some people doing civic service and others not. Whereas, for reasons that escape me, in Britain and north America that is felt to be, if not wrong then unnecessary. Since that struck Tocqueville when he visited north America 175 years ago, it is not something new.

Each candidate has a slightly different scheme – with the period of work ranging from a few weeks to six months. Some see it as a mix of military and civic service, others as purely civic. Then there is the thorny question of pay: some candidates are in favour of direct payment (the Socialist Party suggests one third of the minimum wage) others prefer to set the work against paying for the young person’s studies. But in reality either way would cancel out what is heralded as one of the scheme’s great benefits: le brassage, the meeting and mixing of people from different backgrounds. On a third of the minimum wage you can only afford to live with your parents and work as close to home as possible: it would be no different from school.

A recent study by the senate shows that organised civic service failed in four European countries: Belgium, Holland and Italy, where it was to have been compulsory, and Spain where it was to have been voluntary. In all four cases it came unstuck because of union opposition and/or spiralling costs, and I see no reason why that should not be the case in France too. I know in Britain, after a couple of experiments (Millenium Volunteers and Young Volunteer Challenge), the government launched “Youth Volunteering” last May, shortened to “V”, which is actually run mainly by 16 to 25 year olds. The Conservative party launched something similar last October. But always the emphasis is on voluntary. Does it work in the UK? And if so why does the idea of voluntary not catch on in France? Are the two concepts, voluntary and republican, incompatible?