It did not come as a surprise that Mr. François Hollande
yesterday won the nomination as the Socialist candidate in the
election scheduled for next May for the French presidency. With
some 56 percent of the primary votes against his rival Martine
Aubry, the former party first secretary stated in solemn tones
yesterday evening at the Socialists’ rue de Solferino headquarters
— a handsome old hôtel particulier in the
7th arrondissement — that the hour is grave, the task is
heavy. He announced that the task ahead is to beat the incumbent,
Nicolas Sarkozy of the People’s Party (Union pour une Majorité
Populaire, in French), and restore the French dream.
Although this requires further research, it appears this
is the first time a presidential candidate in the famous old nation
that is separated from England by the Channel evoked “the French
dream,” and it undoubtedly will be much commented in the weeks and
months ahead. Who in the past has ever spoken of the French
dream? Or is it that, having introduced a five-year
presidential term in 2007 to replace the seven-year term Charles de
Gaulle preferred when he founded the Fifth Republic (in earlier
regimes the presidential term was seven years, but the office was
largely ceremonial), the French are evolving in an American
direction (despite all the mean things they say about us), with
party primaries to boot? In that case, perhaps
there must be a French dream to keep up with the American
dream.
There is to be sure a certain rhetorical tradition in
France that uses the make-dreams-real trope. This is fairly common
in democratic societies or even non-democratic societies whose
regimes wish to base their legitimacy on the popular will. You have
to keep things in perspective, however.
If you can dream — but not make dreams your
master…
Pending his clarification of what he means to do to
restore the French dream, Mr. Hollande is dreaming out loud, saying
that his priorities are “young people” and “education.” With the
French public debt approaching 90 percent of GNP, an unfinished war
in Libya, nearly complete loss of control over their own borders,
entire neighborhoods in major metropolitan areas occupied by
aliens, it would seem the first order of business for his campaign
staff is to straighten out what comes first when you are president
of France.
It is none of our business, what with France being our
staunch ally in the war against terror, but given the uncertainty
regarding the eurozone and everyone and his cousin offering plans
to change the European Union financial rules, the markets here as
well as in Europe and Asia will be listening keenly for hints of
just what the next French government, whether it is Sarkozy II or
another, plans to do to the banks, or for the banks, or both.
However, Mr. Hollande of all the possible Socialists was probably
the one closest to Mr. Sarkozy — though neither man will ever say
so — regarding the importance of firming up the euro and not
letting Greece or any other failing economy go into bankruptcy. Of
interest will be how the French react to German proposals, when
these are clarified, for a stronger “Euro-finance” ministry with
power over individuals member states in matters of economic
policy.
Still, it was a happy day for the elephants, as the
Socialist Party bigs are known. Despite a gloves off primary
season, they all came together on Sunday evening speaking of unity
against the common adversary, the incumbent. In polite news
coverage, Mr. Sarkozy is usually called mercurial or hyper-active
to indicate that he sometimes seems addicted to both multi-tasking
and micromanagement — to use fashionable American terms — but in
France he is referred to in terms unprintable in a family magazine
like TAS.
Mr. Sarkozy’s main problem is that he is not much better
liked on the right than on the left. This is due to the perception
of him as a vulgar person, the kind of person who, in New York,
spends his summer weekends at Jones Beach wearing gold chains. It
is also due to the fact that his fairly radical reform program has
not succeeded in reforming much. His campaign will emphasize that
you cannot reform education, an expensive social welfare system,
rigid labor laws, immigration, the mission of the armed forces, the
role of France in Africa, and other items that Mr. Sarkozy has
tackled, in five years, especially given the difficulties caused by
the global credit crisis.
Mr. Sarkozy could, but probably will not, point out that
it has taken Mr. Andy Murray a long time to get from the No 4 ATP
ranking to the No. 3 spot, which he did in a strong and steady
final against David Ferrer yesterday — even as the ballots were
being counted in every precinct of France — at the Shanghai
Masters. Which is another thing, how to deal with China, which Mr.
Sarkozy has had to ponder. As a short-attention span man, that must
have been a tough one, but maybe he has Henry Kissinger’s last book
at bedside. On the other hand, maybe he can point to the two top 10
French players in the ATP rankings, best showing for the
bleus in a generation. Whether he deserves any credit is
another issue, but one which can be debated in due course with all
the seriousness that will be accorded to the other indicators of
France’s destiny.
Change, of course, is the banner under which the
Socialists intend to go into united formation against the
center-right, or as one might say more accurately, liberal-right,
government led by the handsome Nicolas Sarkozy. Handsome lies in
the eyes of the beholder, and there are those who describe the
president as a vain little man with a Napoleon complex who wears
platform shoes and enormous watches (he put them in the drawer on
his wife’s advice, lately), but I see I am digressing. What matters
is what the Socialists mean by “change.”
Mr. Hollande’s main opponent in the primary, Martine
Aubry, who is mayor of the northern city of Lille and is anchored
politically and temperamentally in the
social-democratic/labor-union tradition of that region, represents,
according to the President’s supporters, the “hard” left. This is
utter rot, but it is true that by comparison with the “mushy left,”
as they term Mr. Hollande’s faction, the supporters of Mrs. Aubry
are more likely to favor policies that sock it to the rich and that
sort of thing. However, both the Aubristes and the
Hollandais, who earned their elephants’ hooves as
activists or junior ministers during the Mitterrand years, have at
least nominally made their peace with capitalism. Like Tony Blair,
the successful leader of Britain’s New Labour in the 1990s who
removed the famous clause four from the party manifesto, they do
not propose to do away with the private ownership of the means of
production and exchange, as the renown line had it.
If I may digress — again — it is worth thinking about
yonder old clauses and their subs. The famous old phrase, adopted
if I am not mistaken during World War I, is etched in the memory of
every man who ever walked and talked with the likes of Irving
Brown, Joe Godson, Sam Fishman, Al Shanker, giants who have left in
their wakes pygmies to run today’s American labor movement. It
says:
To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full
fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution
thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership
of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best
obtainable system of popular administration and control of each
industry or service.
Admit it, this may be mad, but it is poetry. Now this is what
Tony Blair replaced it with:
The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes
that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than
we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to
realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which
power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the
few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where
we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and
respect.
With all due respect, and without giving an inch to the
Blair fantasists like Robert Harris (whose novel The Ghost
Writer inspired the eponymous Roman Polanski film), the
glaring contrast in these formulations strikes me as worthy of
consideration. With Mrs. Aubry, or with the other strong primary
vote getter, Arnaud Montebourg, even with the weak primary vote
getter, Ségolène Royal (Mr. Hollande’s former girlfriend, though I
doubt that is the politically correct term on the mushy-left, and
the mother of his four children, all of whom he adores according to
reports), you sense a nostalgia and even more than that for the old
school. What is a political program, after all, that aims to
“realize our true potential” and other Jerry Brown type smoke? When
François Mitterrand led the Socialists to victory 30 years ago, it
was with manifestoes that for all intent and purpose read like the
old Clause Four. He did not believe a word of it — at least not as
much as he believed in getting re-elected, seven years later, even
if it meant pretending that old time religion had never really
existed. Mr. Hollande will have the comrades to his
left reminding him of the dreams they all shared once, when
Mitterrand sang lullabies. He will be pressed to
sing them too — while hoping they sound innocuous enough to serve
as an all-purpose “French dream.”
However, it is a four way race now. President Sarkozy is
in the saddle, and his line is going to be that you should not
change horses in midstream (somehow this always struck me as a
ridiculous image because how would you get to the horse to unseat
the horseman if they are already midstream?). There is unfinished
business and, compared to his challengers, he has experience, he
knows the great and mighty of this world (not to mention all the
richest people in France, to one of whom he once complained that
the presidency was okay but as soon as he got out he was going to
make some real money).
The ecologist-Greens, under the leadership of the
irreproachable and profoundly decent magistrate, Eva Joly, will
impress everyone with their irreproachable decency.
The National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, will hammer away
at the venality, the corruption, the shabbiness, all the sins all
democratic politicians have been blamed for by national-right
parties in Europe since the 19th century, plus laxity in the face
of the Muslim threat, the American threat, the threat of s*x
madness in TV commercials, and they will garner a fifth of the
votes, forcing a runoff.
The Socialist candidate, who is 57 — the exact same age
as Al Pacino when he played a Mafioso in Donnie Brasco, so
go figure — will insist that France is in need of “change” and
that priority must be give to “youth” and “education.” It will be
quite a show, and it will be interesting to see how many public
schools, in many of which Jewish teachers are physically assaulted
as “Zionist vermin” by their own students, he visits during the
campaign.
