“Let’s march to victory!”, “It is time to storm the Bastille!”. These are some of the slogans on placards carried by 1 May demonstrators in Paris. Someone unfamiliar with French political folklore might assume that yet another revolution is under way.
No such luck. The time for revolution is all but gone for
good, even for France which is the birthplace of revolutionary ideas.
All that is happening in France these days is yet another
presidential election in which two wings of the same ruling elite are competing
for power.
Nicolas Sarkozy, a geyser of untamed energy who
represents the conservative coalition Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), leads
one wing. The other wing’s standard bearer is the Socialist candidate Francois
Hollande, a low-profile operator who, in one of those paradoxes of French
politics, is supposed to represent the revolutionary tradition.
In the current campaign the focus has been the economy.
This comes in a curious historical context. Here, for the first time, we have a
privileged majority that is concerned about the plight of the underprivileged
minority but is not ready to accept painful reforms.
In the past, those enjoying privileges formed a minority
of the population and always faced the danger of a revolution backed by the
underprivileged majority. For centuries, that was the pattern in French
history. When democracy came to France, the form of the interaction between the
privileged minority and the downtrodden minority changed while its substance
remained the same. On occasions, such as the 1936 general election that led to
the Popular Front reforms, the underprivileged majority would vote for a fairer
distribution of privileges.
In more recent decades, however, the situation in France
has been blocked because the majority, anxious to protect its privileges,
refuses change. Each time a government proposed reforms that threatened such
privileges as a five-week holiday stint, a shorter working week and a later
retirement age, it was chased out of power.
This time, however, the situation may be different if
only because many French realise that their economy may no longer be in a position
to provide the high living standards they have gotten used to. While
globalisation has nibbled at many markets for French goods, France has also
been losing is phenomenal competitive edge. In fact, French productivity, which
rose for a steady one per cent each year for three decades, has all but
stagnated since 2008.
The result is a 10 percent unemployment rate and a
general fall in the average French family’s purchasing power. Some fear that
the good times may well be over.
Such concerns have put two economists under the
limelight, once again.
At one end of the spectrum we have John Maynard Keynes,
the British economist whose ideas are supposed to have helped the Western world
emerge from the Great depression of the late 1920s. The core Keynesian idea is
that at a time of recession the government should intervene to create jobs,
even if, in normal circumstances, such jobs make no economic sense.
At the other end of the spectrum is the American
economist Milton Friedman whose recipe is built around a sound monetary policy
and a reduction of public expenditure.
In this election, Hollande represents the Keynesian
option while Sarkozy is inspired by Friedman’s ideas.
The trouble is that both men assume a freedom of choice
that France no longer has. As a member of the European Union and the Eurozone,
France is in no position to adopt either philosophy. It has no control over its
currency and is chained to narrow options by Eurozone’s strict budgetary rules.
In dealing with the economy, Sarkozy may be better placed
than Hollande because his views are more in tune with the philosophy currently
dominant in the EU where all the talk is about reducing public debt and curbing
budget deficits.
In the final analysis, however, whoever is elected
president on Sunday will not be able to do more than surf a tide formed in
places beyond his control.
It is in foreign policy that Sunday’s election might have
an impact.
Unable to make much of running the economy, Hollande may
well try to silence his radical leftist flank with a number of foreign policy
gesticulations. He has already hinted that he would try to withdraw French
troops from Afghanistan two years earlier than agreed with other NATO members.
He may also tone down Sarkozy’s tough line on Syria and his almost personal
campaign against the Islamic Republic in Tehran. Hollande also banks on the
possibility of finding new friends from among the regimes produced by the “Arab
Spring”.
That would be no easy trapeze for Hollande. The French
Socialist party has always been staunchly pro-American. In 1982, President
Francois Mitterrand, a Socialist, was part of the front line campaigning for
the installation of American nuclear missiles in Europe. And in 1991, it was
also Mitterrand who mobilised European backing for the US-led war against
Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
In contrast, the Gaullist family, of which Sarkozy is the
champion today, has always included a bit of anti-Americanism in its
ideological cocktail. And, yet, Sarkozy could be regarded as the most
pro-American French president ever.
In other words, this Sunday’s election is full of
paradoxes. With ideological demarcation lines blurred, it is difficult for the
French voter to know who he is electing and why.