Smoke screens
The press and media this morning are having a field-day rubbing salt into Ségolène Royal’s wounds. After a brilliant 2006, she has started the new year badly, and her popularity is slipping. Rumours abound: rifts within the Royalist camp, gossip about domestic tensions, dissections by learned psychologists about the unsustainable pressure on the male (François Holland) seeing his partner in the driving seat. Most of all, the press are piling on the agony after Royal’s forced admission that she and her partner own enough property to qualify for ISF, an annual tax levied on those with property worth more than 760,000 euro. Many old-school socialists claim they are scandalised, but really the whole story is being blown out of all proportion: the Royal/Holland couple are not rich, they have simply saved and spent wisely, thinking no doubt of their four children. But the response, as Jean-Michel Aphatie says, shows the French attitude to money: “In our country we stigmatise getting rich so much, we have thought so little collectively about how a society gets rich, about the creation of wealth within a society, that now we have the Holland/Royal couple hoist by their own petard.” Perhaps that’s why politicians’ exhortations to create a wealthy France get nowhere. François Holland himself has said on television “I don’t like the rich.” None of the above will, in my view, have any bearing on the election, but what must be most galling for Royal is that the so-called scandal broke on the web, the very same which so powerfully pushed up her fortunes last year. This year it could be her undoing. That is, of course, the curse inherent in the uncontrolled web: while citizens’ news and opinions spread like wildfire, so do scurrilous rumours and lies. If that sort of thing persists, it could discredit the whole idea of the web, leading to a back-lash, pushing power back firmly to the carefully controlled centre. Many political bloggers say their sites are being inundated with spam sent by angry socialist party members, getting their revenge for this property/tax story by “killing” the blogosphere.
All this media fuss is of course taking everyone’s eye off the ball. Ségolène Royal’s over-hyped problems are superficial compared to Sarkozy’s, which characteristically are not mentioned at all as he basks in post-coronation euphoria. But he would do well to spare a thought for those around him in his party. The day after Sarkozy’s coronation, prime minister De Villepin gave his new year’s wishes to the press. Last year you had to fight for standing room at the back, this year I could have brought the (extended) family. What changed? Very simple: he tried to reform one small part of France’s archaic employment laws, those dealing with first-time employment, so crucial, particularly for the dispossessed in the ghettoes. The man who thrilled us as, with Gaullist rhetoric, he defied Bush at the UN, is forgotten by those he sought to save. Defying America is a piece of cake compared with trying to reform France, even though everyone knows both need to be done.
Mais ce n’est pas tout, as my favourite TV presenter says. Sitting on Sarkozy’s right-hand is Alain Juppé, another prime minister who tried to reform France and for his pains was invited to inspect the inside of Matignon’s dustbins. Both men have cringed before their television sets, watching the rioting street mob baying for their blood. And then there’s the boss, Jacques Chirac, destroyed because he tried to get his compatriots to accept the European Constitution. Three extremely clever men (whatever one thinks of their politics) incapacitated by trying to make essential changes. I feel little compassion for them personally, but much for France, today whooping with joy because it fondly imagines that all its problems are solved, not by reform, but because it has the second highest birth-rate in Europe. A glorification of motherhood, with echoes of Pétain, as if finally French women understood their real role in life. But those 830,900 babies born last year are only going to make things worse! Each one, educated and kept alive at great public expense, is going to grow up into a rioting, cobble-throwing young person demanding nothing more adventurous than a secure, well-feathered job for life because that is his/her droit aquis. And as for being proud of now having a population of 63.4 million, they should contemplate De Gaulle’s wise words about the impossibility of governing a country of 368 cheeses.
January 23rd, 2007 at 7:45 am
I don’t like the way you say “everyone knows” France needs to be reformed. People always do, of course. But even if there are good reasons for thinking it, it is no good to simply assert it without justification and turn it into a joke, when a significant proportion of intelligent and politically aware people, in France but also elsewhere, do not think France needs those kinds of liberalising reforms at all. My view would be that French employment law does need some liberalising, and that life needs to be made far, far easier for small businesses here. But it does not follow from that that Villepin was right to try to push the first job contract through in the way that he did. Anyone with minimal awareness of how the French public tends to react to such things would have done it more carefully, and even the employers union, the MEDEF, thought it was a badly thought-out plan. Nor does it follow, from the admission that some of France’s more socialistic laws probably do need to be made more liberal, that what France needs is Thatcherism. And I think that the common tendency in the English language press to simply state again and again how desperately France needs reform, and how everyone knows it, gives the impression that we think that is what France needs. Don’t forget the number of French people living below the poverty line is about a third what it is in Britain, apparently less in need of reform. Also you spelt Hollande wrong. But I am following your blog with interest.
January 23rd, 2007 at 9:15 am
I clearly express myself badly, for which I apologise: I certainly don’t mean to turn France’s need to reform into a joke. As for justifying whether reforms are needed - you are right, a proper essay on the subject, or article in Prospect, would do that, but I don’t consider blogs the best place for long, detailed analysis. But I don’t see them as the place for glib comments either, so I try to keep within what I think my unknown reader knows, while trying show him/her things perhaps she/he does not. I think many people, inside and outside France, see the need for reform in its employment laws, its pension scheme, its health system and, as you say, in its attitude towards small business. But reform is a wide word and I do not intend it to mean “radical overhaul from top to bottom”. M. de Villepin’s way of putting the CPE on the statute book was certainly kack-handed, but that does not mean what he was trying to do did not have a core of good sense. It might have helped some of the young people in the deprived cités. As to miss-spelling Hollande, again I apologise, this time for my spell-checker which is too anglo-centric. As to comparing levels of British and French poverty, all I would say is Beware. Comparing statistics, especially between two countries, is fraught and I try to avoid it, as I say in About This Blog. The French are not agreed on what % of their population live below the poverty level, or even how many are unemployed. But in any case, poverty is not something to argue about, it is something to do something about.