François
Hollande: the John Wayne of the Champs Élysées
Once
seen as a weakling, François Hollande has become France’s
lionheart. But from Bush to Erdoğan, many leaders have found the
tone they adopted in crisis coming back to haunt them later. Will
Hollande?
Simon
Tisdall
Saturday
21 November 2015 09.00 GMT
If the Islamic State
suicide bombers who attacked the Stade de France on Friday 13
November had succeeded in entering the stadium, as appears to have
been their intention, France might now be facing an additional crisis
of political, constitutional and existential significance: namely,
the assassination of the president of the republic.
It was no secret
that François Hollande, the Socialist leader who was elected to the
Élysées in 2012, was attending that evening’s football match
against Germany. It may reasonably be assumed he was the terrorists’
prime target. Pictures of Hollande’s ashen-faced security detail as
they hurried him away to safety indicate how close a shave this was.
Hollande’s
survival has been more than merely physical. In the torrid days
following the attacks, this unprepossessing politician, who styled
himself “Monsieur Normal” as he fought to unseat Nicolas Sarkozy,
has morphed into an extraordinary figure – a gritty leader, popular
commander and “chef de guerre” – who appears, for now, almost
larger than life.
In a whirlwind of
activity that included an historic address to parliament in
Versailles, Hollande declared France to be at war with Islamist
jihadism, called for a global military coalition with France at its
helm, demanded EU-wide support, imposed a national state of emergency
and border checks, put troops on the streets, and vowed to vastly
extend invasive state security powers.
For a man once
widely dismissed as a loser and a lightweight, it was a veritable
transformation. Abroad, he had perhaps been best known for his
furtive motorcycle tryst with his actor lover, Julie Gayet, and his
messy, public breakup with his First Lady, Valérie Trierweiler. At
home, he had endured the further indignity of being rated France’s
most useless president ever, with a dismal 16% approval rating
recorded exactly one year ago.
Coming from a
lifelong Socialist, Hollande’s dramatic talk of unbridled war, his
embrace of a highly conservative security agenda, and his stated
determination to mercilessly crush France’s foes seemed
incongruous, to say the least. A man of notoriously diminutive
stature, Hollande was suddenly walking tall, the John Wayne of the
Champs Élysées. After January’s Charlie Hebdo shootings, Hollande
went looking for causes – social exclusion, economic deprivation,
alienation of young Muslims. Last week, he went looking for culprits.
Modern leaders have
available a number of familiar crisis-management tools, as well as
some new ones. They range from patriotic rhetoric, appeals to
national sentiment and identity, claims of moral superiority, fear of
the other, and the delegitimisation and dehumanisation of the “enemy”
to real-time, mass-media communications, mass surveillance, and the
overweening power, reach and legal force of a modern-day government.
Unhesitating,
Hollande reached for them all. Faced with a fundamental and
outrageous challenge to the established state, the president, as the
embodiment, symbol and premier office holder of that same state,
shifted instantaneously to what might be termed crisis default
position one: that is to say, he stood up, took a stand, banished all
sense of doubt and self-blame, and boldly rallied the nation in
defence of the republic.
As events in other
countries have shown, at such moments of extreme national stress,
differences in political ideology and policy become effectively moot,
at least for a while. Political point-scoring, for example, over
glaring contradictions between the state’s latest, necessary
actions and traditional concerns about individual freedom, privacy
and civil liberties is temporarily set aside.
Ordinary citizens,
for the most part willingly, become party to this understanding. It
is as though they are saying, albeit without actually being asked,
that dissent is unwelcome and only serves to give comfort to the
“enemy”. Those who disagree, as Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn did in a
different context about shoot-to-kill policy, are booed down. The
unspoken, over-riding priority is for national unity, above all else,
in the face of a common threat – and this fundamental idea, at such
times, is fiercely held and almost tribal in origin.
This phenomenon is
by no means confined to France, nor is it particularly new. This
collective circling of wagons at moments of peril is at least as old
as the post-Enlightenment modern nation state. In terms of political
rhetoric and strongman leadership, the ancient Greeks would have no
trouble recognising recent behaviour.
A similar,
unscripted exercise in voluntary, collective obeisance, or
self-censorship, was evident in the US after 9/11, when overt
opposition and media criticism of White House counter-terrorism
policies was seen as almost treasonable for a time. It was a
development that thwarted accountability, discouraged transparency,
and was ultimately deeply injurious to American democracy and the
peoples of the Middle East.
So Hollande, so far,
has survived. He has ridden the tiger with aplomb. But there is a
weighty down side to such “take no prisoners” crisis management,
as other leaders have found. Hollande may yet come to rue some or
much of what he has lately set in train as normality returns; the
price of such from-the-gut leadership can be high.
The choices a leader
makes between a principled and populist path, between inspirational,
emotional reactivity and careful, thought-through policy adjustment
become clearer as the dust settles. And the consequences, as always,
are unpredictable and often unwelcome. As objective political
evaluations and daily judgments resume, so too does a more rigorous,
less credulous, less trustful scrutiny, replacing mindless grief,
anger and fear. This process is already gathering force in Paris.
Politics of
instinct … Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who won his
recent general election on a campaign of fear. Facebook Twitter
Pinterest
Politics of
instinct … Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who won his
recent general election on a campaign of fear. Photograph: Murad
Sezer/Reuters
Previous experience
should tell Hollande what to expect. Praised for his statesmanlike
reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the so-called “Charlie
effect” on his poll ratings quickly dissipated. Two months later,
the Socialists were trounced in the first round of local elections by
the Sarkozy-led, centre-right opposition and by the Front National
(FN) of Marine Le Pen.
History may soon
repeat itself, as the FN gears up for big advances in next month’s
nationwide municipal polls. Le Pen has been careful with what she has
said, tacitly acknowledging the immediate national urge to rally
round the flag and the president. She is evidently anxious about
being accused of exploiting the situation for political gain. But
both she and Sarkozy are merely biding their time.
When the dust has
settled, Hollande will likely face redoubled efforts, all the more
furious for having been delayed, to blame him and his administration
for fatal intelligence lapses and immigration policy failures, for a
misguided, Mitterrand-style tolerance for “la difference” in
French society, especially where Muslims are concerned, and for an
interventionist foreign policy, in the Middle East and Francophone
Africa, that has made France both the target and the victim of its
enemies.
Comparisons can be
instructive, though they are not encouraging. The Syrian civil war
and the parallel rise of international jihadi terrorism have
presented other national leaders with dilemmas and pitfalls akin to
those faced by Hollande.
In Turkey earlier
this month, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and
Development party (AKP) scored a famous general election victory. But
Erdoğan’s campaign was based on fear: of physical and economic
insecurity, of the Kurdish minority, of Isis and other extremists, of
Syrian refugees and European governments bent on exploiting Turkey
for their own ends.
Perhaps Erdoğan
truly believed his own rhetoric, that he had no choice but to cast
the vote in terms of friends versus enemies. But his politics of
instinct may yet prove disastrously contrary to his country’s
long-term interest.
Careless rhetoric …
George W Bush at Ground Zero after 9/11. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Careless rhetoric …
George W Bush at Ground Zero after 9/11. Photograph: Getty Images
The election has
left Turkey utterly divided, with 49% backing Erdoğan’s way of
doing things and 49% against, according to a Pew survey. Turkey is
half in and half out of the battle to replace Syria’s Bashar
al-Assad, half in and half out of a resumed war with Kurdish
separatists, half in and half out of Europe and of an agreement to
help stem the flow of refugees. If matters deteriorate, Erdoğan will
be blamed.
Angela Merkel,
Germany’s long-serving and apparently unassailable chancellor, was
hailed almost as a modern-day Mother Teresa when she opened her
borders in the summer to thousands of migrants advancing on Germany
via Greece and the Balkans. It was a heartfelt gesture, no doubt, and
one that was celebrated by many in Germany resentful of the country’s
post-Greece image as Europe’s heartless, penny-pinching boss.
But winter is
coming, in Berlin as elsewhere, and there have been a lot of second
thoughts. Merkel is facing a growing storm of opposition, not least
from within the ranks of her own conservative Christian Democrats.
She may yet be forced to change course.
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Merkel would say
that she made a quick decision when nobody else in Europe would. She
would say she acted from humanitarian motives, and that she acted for
the best. But as Hollande may soon discover, decisions reached at the
height of a crisis are no substitute for long-term policy making,
however popular they appear at the time.
Many other senior
politicians have faced similar moments of acute national emergency or
crisis when the pressure for swift action, tough words and strong –
or vainglorious – expressions of leadership is both irresistible
and, eventually, calamitous. George W Bush fell prey to rash choices
and careless rhetoric with his talk of a crusade against al-Qaida and
his vow to hunt down Osama bin Laden “dead or alive”. He
prematurely declared victory in a war that still had eight years to
run. Tony Blair, too keen to do what he personally considered the
right thing, so over-egged his Iraq invasion pudding that his
reputation never recovered.
Margaret Thatcher
greeted Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands with visceral,
violent, patriotic defiance. But her subsequent, improvised actions,
particularly the sinking of the Argentine cruiser Belgrano, remain
deeply controversial – and the Falklands issue remains dangerously
unresolved.
Political responses
to extreme crisis need not always be disastrous. Mikhail Gorbachev,
contemplating the imminent implosion of the Soviet Union, found
himself trapped in an historical cul-de-sac. It could all have become
very nasty as the nuclear-armed state fell apart. In the end, the
last general-secretary of the USSR did as well as anybody might have
expected. Yet he is still reviled on the Russian nationalist right as
the man who lost the empire.
In 1989, Helmut
Kohl, then chancellor of West Germany, was likewise unexpectedly
confronted with the fall of the Berlin Wall and a growing imperative
for German reunification. Like Hollande, he was, and perhaps deserved
to be, a much underestimated man. But Kohl pulled off an amazing
transformation, without bloodshed and without much fuss.
Like Hollande, these
modern-day leaders all resorted amid crisis to the language,
trappings and power of national will, unity, patriotism,
determination, defiance and unswerving dedication to victory. All
knew that, like him, their survival as leaders was on the line. And
nearly all paid a high personal, political or historical price for
the instinctive and often ill-thought-out manner in which they
responded.
In the past week,
Hollande has done the French proud. In the coming period, the French,
committed by their president to an open-ended war in the Middle East,
slowly absorbing the many negative, divisive longer-term consequences
of his recent actions at home, and ultimately forgetful of last
week’s magnificent sense of unity, will most likely do for
Hollande.
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