The fog has not lifted
Ten days to go before the first round, the candidates, the press and perhaps even the voters seem to have run out of steam as they obsessively compare this moment in the campaign with its equivalents 5, 12, 19 years ago. Predictably they all conclude: ”Anything could happen”.
Nicolas Sarkozy, threatened by Le Pen, and Ségolène Royal, threatened by Bayrou, are both trying to shore up their own camp: Sarkozy, having veered hard right for the past month, is going back to a more reasonable line and asking ingenuously why would anyone be afraid of him? Soon he’ll have himself photographed with his son, to prove what a nice, ordinary guy he is and his son will say: “If I was old enough to vote, I ‘d vote for my dad!” Which will make the headlines because no one else has anything to say.
Royal, having tried to fight off the centrist threat of Bayrou taking her moderate voters, now faces the harder task of winning back the traditional and more intransigent left. Otherwise, with at least six left-wing rivals sucking out her votes, she won’t get enough to go through to the second round. The most recent poll has her rivals between them (but not counting the Green candidate) taking 10.5% of the vote to her 24% and Sarkozy’s 28%. But worse than the figures is the growing rumour that she won’t make it - that alone is enough to drive many of her moderate supporters to believe there’s no point in voting Royal, better to vote Bayrou in order to stop Sarkozy. So Royal is now back on firmer socialist ground, caring for those who find it hard to get work, particularly a first job.
From the start Royal’s campaign has muddled to traditional lines of left and right: she has promised military style camps for young offenders and suggested everyone hang out the French flag on national holidays, as they do in America. She wants to soften the hard-and-fast rule about school catchment areas, giving people more choice. But then on employment and the economy she keeps to the ideology of jobs guaranteed for life and high employers’ charges, insisting that these have no effect on unemployment. She also puts a lot of emphasis on education and equality of opportunity: at the moment there is a great difference between universities (which are not selective and rarely guarantee a job at the end of the course) and the grandes écoles (which demand at least a year’s preparation before a highly competitive entrance exam, but are much better suited to finding a well-paid job at the end). This mix-and-match policy may be her undoing, since three quarters of French people say they personally conform to the old left or right party lines. While many feel the Socialist Party needed modernising, evolving away from its Marxist origins, she may have taken it too far - which is why the far left can mobilise 10.5%. But then 42% of the electorate still haven’t made up their mind. So perhaps the only positive thing one can say is that “Anything could happen.”