Social Democracy in the Middle: the 2017 French Presidential Elections
W. E. Smith, Editor, The Social Democrat
This year's French presidential campaign, which ended May 7 with the election of Emmanuel Macron, was extraordinary in the eyes of observers both within and outside of France. Beleaguered by brutal terror attacks, struggling with the assimilation of immigrants and the effects of economic globalization, France, like other Western democracies, is experiencing a crisis of political affiliations. With its electoral system allowing a large field of candidates from across the ideological spectrum, France’s recent balloting afforded a remarkable glimpse into the nation’s current political cleavages—and social democracy’s place within the mix.
The French president, elected to a five-year term (the quinquennat) by a national majority, shares executive responsibilities with a prime minister answerable to the lower house of the French parliament. Thus, the French system, like the American, allows for a president of a different party than the parliamentary majority. This split system can result, as during the presidency of Jacques Chirac, in the sort of divided government (and attendant gridlock) with which we Americans are so familiar. When the president and the parliamentary majority are of the same party, however, as has been the case throughout the recent presidency of François Hollande, the president effectively leads the executive: choosing the prime and other ministers and directing the government’s priorities.
Even in cases of divided government, the French president wields considerable power: the president is the commander-in-chief of the French military, for example, and is responsible for France’s relations with foreign nations. Perhaps just as important, the president is the spiritual head of the nation, the chief-of-state, resuming in her or his person the aspirations of the French people. Unlike a prime minister, the president’s term of office is fixed; the president is the one national leader the French people know will be in place for the duration of each five-year term.
French law requires that successful presidential candidates achieve a majority of votes cast, so voting is divided into two rounds: a first round with multiple candidates, and a second, final round between the two front-runners from the first round.
The recent election presented an array of candidates covering the entirety of France’s nuanced political landscape: there were eleven in all. The classic right was represented by François Fillon, standard-bearer of the Republicans, France’s conservative, business-oriented party. Benoit Hamon, winner of the “left” primary, which included not only the French Socialist Party (the PS) but also the “Radical Party of the Left” and the “Union of Democrats and Ecologists,” appeared on the ballot for the Socialists. These two parties, the Republicans and the Socialists (in coalition with various partners), have provided every French president through the last several decades.
This was the election, however, that shattered that pattern. First, with both the traditional right and the traditional left in disarray, the candidacy of Marine Le Pen represented a wild card similar to Trump’s entrance into America’s elections last year. Le Pen is the youngest daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the National Front Party in 1971. Le Pen père’s long list of unsavory attitudes, including racialism, anti-semitism (including Holocaust denial) and calls to isolate AIDS sufferers from society led Marine, who became president of the National Front in 2011, to expel her father from the party he had led for 40 years. Marine Le Pen has attempted to “detoxify” the National Front, abandoning the more extreme of her father’s positions, but her party is still considered on the fringes of French politics by the majority of French citizens, with its unfriendly attitude toward immigrants, its wish to sever French ties with both the European Union and NATO and its general aura of French tribalism. At the same time, Le Pen’s professed concern for France’s working people, whose struggles she ties, not wholly without reason, to international trade, immigration and the European Union, helped her candidacy. Le Pen’s “France First” attitude, her protectionism and her appeals to the working class make analogies to Trump obvious, but unlike the American billionaire, Le Pen is a trained lawyer and lifelong political operative possessed of a thorough understanding both of France’s political system and of the issues. Nor is she a mouthpiece for corporate interests. Though she is typically referred to as “far right” in the American press, on many positions she ran to the left of centrists like Emmanuel Macron. She advocated a lowering of the retirement age to 60 from the current 62, proposed a national plan for equal pay for women and opposed last year’s revision of France’s worker-friendly employment code, on which more later (i.e., not positions normally associated with the “right.”) Her protectionism appealed to French farmers, who are chronically undersold by growers from Eastern European nations where wages are a fraction of France’s and taxes lower, and to tradespeople who see European guest workers take away construction jobs. Her candidacy cut across traditional conceptions of “left” and “right.” Unlike Trump a true populist, she combined “left” issues on economic justice (or at least one version of it) with “right” issues on ethnic diversity and immigration.
The surprise insurgency of a populist-nationalist is only one parallel between France’s presidential voting and America’s 2016 election. Just as the American electorate appeared tired of the traditional parties, the French people rejected the old standard bearers for new political voices. While the center-right Republicans saw votes drawn off by Le Pen, the Socialist Party, whose centrist, social-democratic tendencies were accentuated under François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls, failed to inspire confidence.
The PS’s (Parti Socialiste) difficulties stem from a number of causes, chief of which is an ongoing struggle at the heart of the French Socialist Party between more centrist social democrats like Hollande, Valls and Macron and the left wing of the party, more committed to a traditional socialist vision of class struggle. This division was epitomized last year by the debate and dissent over the Hollande-Valls administration’s attempt to revise France’s detailed employment code. Named after Hollande’s labor minister, Myriam El Khomri, the “Loi El Khomri” relaxed restrictions on employers, making it easier both to hire and to fire workers (under French law, employers must enter into either “temporary” or “permanent” contracts with workers; the latter can be terminated only after compliance with a host of onerous requirements). Like all good social democrats, Hollande’s chief pledge as a candidate for the presidency in 2012 was to focus on good jobs for all who desire them: more specifically, to make a serious dent in France’s 10% unemployment rate. His administration determined that the restrictions placed on hiring and firing were acting as a deterrent to employment.
The left wing of Hollande’s party (and other left groups) did not agree. They and their allies in the radical wing of the French labor movement mounted an intensive months-long campaign against passage of the bill. Industrial sites and national highways were blockaded in true French fashion; students, rallying to the call of the CGT (France’s most radical labor union, officially communist until the 1990s), filled the streets of Paris in frequent demonstrations. Windows were smashed and police pelted with bricks and molotov cocktails; a movement called “nuit debout” (“staying up all night”) brought thousands of students to the Place de la République after dark to hold rap sessions reflecting the anxieties of France’s youth, who face uncertain employment prospects.
The cries of protest, vociferous as they were, did not represent a parliamentary majority, and the bill passed in late summer. Many on the French left now saw François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls as traitors to the socialist cause. In reality, Hollande and Valls represent a more pragmatic, social democratic wing of the French left (and the French Socialist Party); one senses that their opponents on the more radical left, still nostalgic for the days of Che and Mao, remain unreconciled to a system grounded on private enterprise.
The great question for the PS throughout the autumn was whether President Hollande, whose poll numbers languished in the single digits, would stand for another term as president in 2017. Taking a particular toll, along with the internecine divisions over the Loi El Khomri, was the fact that Hollande had failed to deliver on his 2012 campaign pledge to bring down unemployment, which still hovered near 10%. In December Hollande finally announced that, for the good of party, he would not stand for reelection, another surprise development in an already extraordinary year. This opened the way for Prime Minister Valls, who had demurred out of loyalty to his political benefactor, to enter the Socialist primaries in January.
The Socialist primary delivered yet another shock to the French political system. Emerging from the first round of voting were Valls and Benoit Hamon, a former minister of education and far-left maverick who’s polling numbers in general election projections hovered in single digits. As in American primaries, the committed extremists turned out in the final round and delivered victory to Hamon. The French now faced a presidential race in which the sitting president and leader of one of the two traditional political blocks had decided to sit out the race, and his prime minister had been defeated in the Socialist primary, leaving a fringe candidate with single-digit poll numbers to carry the left cause. On the right, the standard-bearer for the other leading block, Republican François Fillon, was increasingly enmired in a misuse of funds scandal and running out of excuses (and supporters), leaving populist-nationalist Marine Le Pen as the front-runner in first-round projections with her 25% polling numbers.
As if things weren’t already complicated enough, enter Emmanuel Macron. Like Benoit Hamon, winner of the Socialist primary, the 39-year-old former investment banker served in the Hollande-Valls administration—as Minister of Economy, Industry and Digital affairs from 2014 until the summer of 2016. As might be suspected from his resume in finance, Macron is no anti-capitalist: he is, however, a committed social democrat who served as deputy-secretary of the Socialist Party from 2012 until his appointment to the cabinet in 2014. As a member of the Valls government, Macron advocated for reforms, like the Loi El Khomri, designed to free the private sector from what he and others on the center-left consider counter-productive restraints on private enterprise.
Sensing the vacuum in French politics created by a Socialist Party caught up in internal divisions among pragmatic social democrats and old-style radical leftists on the one hand, and a right wing peddling either laissez-faire capitalism or populism-nationalism on the other, in April of 2016, while serving in the Valls government, Macron had launched a new political movement called En Marche! (“Moving Forward”). In meetings around the country, throughout the spring and summer of 2016, Macron’s Third-Way vision drew enthusiastic and growing crowds; in July Macron resigned from the Valls government in order to launch a bid for the French presidency.
As the dust settled after the Socialist primary in January of this year, Macron was polling a respectable third behind Le Pen and Republican Fillon, who each counted about a quarter of French voters in their camps for first-round voting. But that was before the French judiciary decided to open a formal investigation of Fillon, accusing him of paying his wife and two children nearly a million Euros over two decades for public work they never performed. Fillon had vowed late in 2016 that if the judiciary opened a formal investigation he would abandon his candidacy but reneged on that promise in the face of pleas from across his center-right block. With Fillon’s wife under questioning, and the Fillon family’s comings and goings into offices of the French judiciary’s investigative offices a regular feature on the French news, all but die-hard Republican and Fillon supporters abandoned his candidacy.
A major beneficiary of the disintegration of the Fillon campaign was the wunderkind Emmanuel Macron. While a committed social democrat, a European Unionist and strong supporter of France’s social safety net and such progressive initiatives as the Paris climate change accords, Macron was able to draw off center-right voters who could support neither a candidate marred by credible accusations of fraud nor the toxic National Front. At the same time Macron garnered support from those in the Socialist camp who viewed many of the positions of their official candidate, Benoit Hamon—such as his proposal for a universal income for every French man, woman and child, unconnected to any work requirement—as utopian, inimical to a sound social contract and public finance, or all three. The divisions in the left camp, epitomized when ex-prime minister Valls officially announced his support for Macron against his own party’s nominee, soon reached a state of unalloyed bitterness—leaving commentators questioning whether the French Socialist Party is facing an imminent demise.
The final surprise of an extraordinary election campaign was the surge of support, as the first-round campaign neared its end, for leftist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Mélenchon has long been a fixture on the French political scene, having served in the Senat and as a minor minister in the Jospin government in the early years of the century. Finding the Socialist Party grown too moderate, in 2008 he participated in the formation of the more radical “Left Party” and in 2014 founded the political movement “France Insoumise” (normally translated as “France Unbowed,” the term literally means “France Un-submitted”). A professed admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, Mélenchon is an old-style leftist who speaks the language of revolution, anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism that a good bit of the French left finds appealing. He campaigned against free-trade deals and the austerity practices imposed by the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and advocates retiring France from the latter two institutions and renegotiating its relationship with the former. He opposed any relaxation of France's statutory 35-hour work week, instead proposing moving France toward a 4-day, 32-hour week—as against centrist Macron, who favored giving employees an option to extend their work weeks on a plant-by-plant basis. He opposed the El Khomri revision to the employment code, advocated a reduction of the retirement age to 60 and wanted to place a cap on executive pay of 20 times the pay of each enterprise’s lowest-paid employee. Perhaps most radical, his 100% marginal tax rate on incomes over 400,000 Euros would in effect create a cap on income. In a sense, Mélenchon could be seen as the left version of Le Pen: both shared a determination to put France’s interests first, whether against American-led international monetary and banking interests or against a German-dominated European Union. Meanwhile Le Pen’s attachment to France’s culture was mirrored in Mélenchon’s programs to support French culture and the French language around the globe. The comparison should not be taken too far, however: Le Pen proposed measures to shore up French workers and especially to protect them from “unfair” competition from outside of France; Mélenchon’s program, on the other hand, called for a thoroughgoing revamping of French society along left – social democrat lines. On the highly charged issue of immigration, Mélenchon’s traditionally leftist support for Third World people seeking a better life was opposed to Le Pen’s disavow of any obligation toward those who live beyond the Hexagon.
As first-round voting approached, Mélenchon, a charming public speaker, caught fire with those on the French left who felt uninspired by Socialist candidate Hamon. These voters were loathe to see Le Pen in the Elysée Palace yet couldn’t bring themselves to vote for centrist social democrat Macron: a choice between “the plague” and “cholera,” as the popular phrase went. These voters’ support brought Mélenchon within striking range of the two front-runners for first-round voting, registering 18% in late polls, as against 25% portions for the leaders.
Mélenchon, though wielding a number of interesting proposals, failed to pull-off a late-race win, and Macron and Le Pen emerged from the April 23rd first-round as predicted. Macron’s task during the “entre-les tours” period (“between the voting rounds”) was to hang on to his huge polling margins against Le Pen; he handily out-polled her in the May 7 final round, with 66% of the vote as against her 34%. As of this writing, Macron has assembled a cabinet from across the spectrum of French politics and appointed a prime minister from the center-right Republican Party, an act without precedent. He has expressed a determination to maintain France’s “social model” while making adjustments needed to achieve maximum output from the French economy. We will see how he does.
It was only in the 1990s that the French Socialist Party removed from its official credo the ultimate goal of attaining a fully socialist society—one in which the “means of production” are in the hands of the state, à la the Soviet Union, Communist China and other failed states of the 20th Century. The party’s subsequent shift into a more centrist social democrat line allowed the PS to hold its own in a political landscape no longer friendly to communist rabble-rousing. A significant segment of the French left, however, has not reconciled itself to the social-democratic acceptance of capitalism under careful state regulation and seems almost instinctually hostile to the private sector. We can recognize echoes of these dynamics in our own Democratic primary of 2016, with Sanders representing the anti-business American wing and Clinton the more centrist candidate (though everything in French politics must be shifted several degrees to the left when making comparisons with the United States: a French centrist is roughly equivalent to a liberal Democrat; all but the right-wing fringes of French politics have long-ago accepted such social democratic staples as universal health care). It is the view of The Social Democrat, and of social democrats in general, that a polity combining a private-enterprise economy and an activist government represents the best hope for creating societies conducive to human well-being. We see “business” and private enterprise not as the enemy, but as a vital and necessary part of the mix. We view the success of Macron’s candidacy as an indication that many ordinary people—certainly many ordinary French citizens—share our perspective (which is not to say that we endorse every one of Macron’s policies). Social democracy is, and always will be, a work-in-progress, and the devil is always in the details. We will continue to follow France’s ongoing experiment with keen interest.
W.E. Smith, June 2017
