Standing Fast

In three days French voters will go to the polls in the first round of voting to pick what will be their first president in over a decade. I doubt there are many French readers of this blog, but for what it's worth, this blogger is pulling for a Segolene Royal victory. Ms. Royal, a former minsiter under Mitterand is the Socialist Party candidate, and is currently running behind Gaullist candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy is the candidate of the right and his election could see a real conservative shift in French politics. Sarkozy is hardly a right-wing ogre like Le Pen and parts of his program as described in today's Washington Post are somewhat appealing and is someway a genuinely progressive break with with certain problematic French traditions.

"He supports affirmative action-style programs to give minorities equal opportunities -- a radical departure from the country's traditional stance that inequality does not exist within its borders...last month he invoked Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at a Paris rally and urged French minority youths to look to the U.S. civil rights leader as a role model.

That dream of brotherhood and justice he spoke of changed America," Sarkozy told thousands of young supporters packed into a Paris auditorium on March 18. "If the dream could change America, why might it not change France?"

He also opnely denounces knuckle headed anti-americanism, the French "Socialism of fools."

Still a Sarkozy victory could have bad reprecussion for US progressives as Jordan Stancil writes in the Nation:

"Nicolas Sarkozy is not a European Reagan, but some of his plans seem drawn from the Republican playbook. He proposes, for instance, a cut in the estate tax and the abolition of a surcharge on large fortunes. He also proposes other tax cuts, which he promises will put more money in the average person's pocket--paid for in part by not replacing half of all retiring civil service workers. You can almost hear him saying, "It's not the government's money--it's your money!" In addition, the at-will employment system the government tried to begin installing last year (but had to retract in the face of public protest) remains a centerpiece of Sarkozy's program. This is all part of his stated goal of bringing what he describes approvingly as Anglo-Saxon flexibility to France, a project that makes him the darling of the business associations even as his law-and-order image allows him simultaneously to cull votes from the populist far right...

If none of this seems to matter to the fate of progressive politics in the United States, consider this: If a kind of Reaganomics came to dominate Europe, there would no longer be any major Western economy to demonstrate the viability of the social market. An ever-growing list of health, pension and education "reforms"--all tending in the direction of greater inequality--would eviscerate Europe's societal model. The welfare-state Alamo would fall, and American progressives would lose a powerful, living argument that--for all its flaws--still gives the lie to the Bush/Norquist vision of the so-called "ownership society." Something to think about as French voters go to the polls."

Saying that, Royal and the Socialists have run a pretty lame campaign. At the moment when most Democrats are dumping DLC centrism in favor of neo-populism and talk of a "Third Way" has joined crystal Pepsi as just another 90's artifact, Royal openly talkes about her desire to turn the the SP into a Clinton-Blair like formation. She says nothing about growing income gaps or the problem of unfettered free trade except DLC style crap about training French workers to "compete in the global economy." Oh, and she studied closely the Hillary Clinton playbook and likes to talk a lot about family values and violent video games. Her response to Sarkozy's proposal for a Ministry of Immigration (a real if controversal response) was for every French citizen to stick a tricolor in front of their house. Not sure what that's supposed to do about integrating a very alienated and segregated immigrant population in French society. Its seems more like a stupid duck of a vital issue.

The Socialists are kind of like the Democrats were in the 80's. A lame shadow of its former self, torn between a grey technocratic and pro-neoliberal wing and the old dinosaurs still living off the memories of the party's last tenure in office.

Still, Royal is a candidate of the center-left. Despite her Third way centrism she still puts forward a progressive, if tepidly so, platform. To quote Stancil, Royal is calling for:

"proposals to give tax credits to companies that reinvest profits in France and to make companies reimburse the government for tax breaks if they turn around and send abroad the jobs the tax breaks were designed to subsidize. Royal's program also calls for raising the minimum wage and increasing pension benefits for the lowest-income retirees."

So my advice to French readers is this: Hold your nose like I did in 2004 and pull the lever for Ms. Royal. Yeah, you have 101 Trotskyist candidates and anti-globalization activist Jose Bove to choose from if you want to be purist. But a repeat of the 2002 election where National Front candidate Jean Marie Le Pen beat out the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin to make it to the second round of voting would be disastrous. Le Pen is already polling between 12 and 15 percent; better than he was in 02. The only left candidate who has a chance of making it to the second round is Royal.

Labels: French elections