“I have given myself one objective,” François Hollande said in a May Day speech in the Burgundy town of Nevers: “To be the long-awaited successor to François Mitterrand.”
From the man who is very likely to become the next French president when votes are counted Sunday night, this was a seemingly radical statement, suggesting a repeat of the jarring regime change France experienced in 1981, when the country became something of an ideological island.
Did he really mean it? Had the “vanilla pudding” candidate gone radical? Bond traders worried, driving up the price of French debt in anticipation. A stark cover of The Economist warned of “The rather dangerous Monsieur Hollande.”
Diplomats and foreign politicians scratched their heads. Only the previous year, when Mr. Hollande emerged from the Socialist Party backroom to seize the leadership amid the sex scandal engulfing the party’s popular reformer, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, they had declared him a reform-minded moderate, a compromise seeker, a figure sometimes likened to Tony Blair or Gerhard Schroeder, the centre-left leaders who had blended a free market with social investments in Britain and Germany at the turn of the century.
Now he was talking a kind of socialism that seemed to have skipped the market-friendly reforms of the 1990s entirely and returned to the earnest postwar years of government-mandated employment and central-planned projects, to the Mitterrand years of nationalized industries and banks, of central-planned state projects, of a decidedly chilly relationship with the Anglo-American powers of the Cold War.
Which was the real François Hollande? Is France going to become an island again? Or was it all a show, to attract France’s many far-left voters to the polls?
“It’s not really true that he’s ever been a compromise seeker or an indecisive moderate – he is a very determined man who has played his cards carefully,” says his biographer, Michel Richard. “But he won’t be another Mitterrand, even though he has respected the man ever since he worked for him. It’s a different world and a lot of the things he said in this campaign were for symbolic purposes.”
You begin to notice that the alarm subsides the closer you get to France. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who famously wouldn’t speak to Mr. Hollande and all but endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy, has been making conciliatory noises. French corporations and banks have been surprisingly calm about the prospect of a Socialist Party presidency, and in private they say they’re not expecting a major break from the French norm.
And the economic liberals and free-market figures within the Socialist Party have not generally been backing away from Mr. Hollande; some, like the centrist legislator Manuel Valls, have been running his campaign. The centrist-party leader François Bayrou, who has leaned closer to Mr. Sarkozy, gave Mr. Hollande a de facto endorsement on Thursday.
“This is not going to be a return to the 1980s. We want a flexible business environment and a robust social system,” says a centrist politician involved with the Hollande campaign. “You have to understand that in a French election it is necessary to frame your policies in a very dramatic-sounding way, in order to prevent the left from splintering. But if you examine his proposals, many are only symbolic.”
Indeed, some of the more shocking-sounding proposals aren’t quite what they seem. Mr. Hollande’s promise to hire 60,000 new teachers – noble but hardly prudent in the midst of a debt crisis – mainly involves extending existing contracts and preventing planned attrition. His talk of a 75-per-cent tax on annual incomes of a million euros would be temporary and subject to loopholes.
And Mr. Hollande’s most stress-inducing proposal – to renegotiate the hard-fought euro bailout treaty – may not be as cataclysmic as it seems. His proposal is to raise government spending limits in order to shift from debt-cutting austerity into growth-spurring spending. While Ms. Merkel is ardently opposed on the record, there has been a sharp move away from austerity policies toward support of growth in many European governments, including parts of Ms. Merkel’s coalition.
“Merkel needs to keep saying that she opposes Hollande’s growth proposals until Germany’s state elections are over this summer],” says François Heisbourg of Paris’s Foundation for Strategic Research. But privately, Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats aren’t completely opposed to a growth-based policy (just frightened of German voters who don't like the idea). Plus, in order to get the two-thirds majority she needs in the Bundestag, she’ll need the backing of the Hollande-supporting Social Democrats. In the end, he might be the treaty’s change leader rather than itsdeal breaker.
On the other hand, there is something oddly old-fashioned about his views. He really does seem determined to lower France’s retirement age from 62 back to 60, just as most Western European countries are raising theirs from 65 to 67. He bristled at the notion of opening up France’s impossible taxi-licensing system, even though Paris now has fewer cabs on the road than it did in 1935. And he seems unable to discuss policies that would ease France’s rigid employment laws to make life easier for entrepreneurs.
“Hollande is the old normal, in this sense,” says François Heisbourg of Paris’s Foundation for Strategic Research. “It is Sarkozy who was the odd man out from the five other presidents of the Fifth Republic, from de Gaulle onward. Hollande is part of that succession, whereas Sarkozy was the outlier.”
Indeed, Mr. Hollande is, in many ways, the establishment figure against Mr. Sarkozy’s renegade outsider. He, unlike Mr. Sarkozy, is an énarque, a graduate of the École nationale d’administration, the leadership school that has produced seven of the past 12 prime ministers. A former Mitterrand staffer, he’s seen by many as a return to the French traditions – more Gaullist than Mr. Sarkozy, even though the latter’s party was created by Charles de Gaulle.
As such, observers say he will be less cordial toward the United States, less interested in Canada and its free-trade agreement with the European Union, less interested in co-operating with NATO – but more devoted to close relations with his European neighbours.
“He will put open trade relations and a united Europe ahead of any of his promises,” says a member of his campaign, dismissing the idea that a rift with Germany is possible. “He is not a very compromising man, but he will compromise to keep those relations good.”
Original Article
Source: Globe
Author: DOUG SAUNDERS
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