La
disruption in France: Right hardens, Center sinks, Left laments
François
Fillon’s surprise win on Sunday casts new light on the race to be
president.
By PIERRE
BRIANÇON 11/21/16, 5:42 PM CET Updated 11/21/16, 6:41 PM CET
PARIS — France’s
presidential contenders were scrambling Monday to make sense of the
magnitude of dark horse François Fillon’s victory in the first
round of the conservative Les Républicains’ party primary.
While the center
Right was contemplating its possible demise, the center-left — so
far represented by former economy minister Emmanuel Macron — hoped
to appeal to voters repulsed by Fillon’s hard-line social and
cultural policies.
The Socialists, in
disarray, tried to gauge whether Fillon would be an easier foe for
President François Hollande, should he decide to run again. And the
far-right National Front played up its differences with Fillon, in
case its own supporters were tempted to look at him more closely —
and more favorably.
In other words, just
1.8 million voters — the number who voted for Fillon — brought
serious disruption to a French presidential race that was only
beginning to make sense.
The first major
victim of Sunday’s stunner was Alain Juppé, the former prime
minister who had been favorite until a few days before the vote and
was confident in the electorate’s desire for a safe pair of hands.
He now faces an uphill battle after Nicolas Sarkozy, conceding
defeat, backed Fillon in the second round saying “whatever the
differences” they have had, Fillon “understands France’s
challenges” better than Juppé.
To clinch the
nomination, Fillon needs only to convince a third of Sarkozy’s
first-round supporters. A poll published Sunday night saw him winning
by 56 percent to Juppé’s 44 percent in next Sunday’s playoff.
The Juppé camp
affected serenity on Monday. “This can be overcome within a week,
it’s doable,” said one aide, identifying the weaknesses in
Fillon’s platform as his radical plan to overhaul the public sector
and enthusiasm for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The key question is
whether people whose motivation for voting on Sunday was to get rid
of Sarkozy — as many as 42 percent, according to one poll — will
turn out in the second round. “Fillon doesn’t trigger the same
tension as Sarkozy did among centrist voters,” said Bruno Jeanbart
of polling firm OpinionWay.
Polls estimate that
12 to 15 percent of participants in Sunday’s primary were Socialist
sympathizers who may believe it is “mission accomplished” now
that Sarkozy is out of the race. If they stay away in the second
round, that could ensure Fillon an impressive win.
However, it is also
possible that the first-round’s high turnout, with more than 4
million voters in the first-ever primary election for the French
Right, will encourage even more people to turn out next Sunday, said
Jeanbart.
Status quo, or
backwards
Another first-round
victim of the conservative primary is Macron, the former Hollande
cabinet minister courting the same centrist, pro-reform segment of
the electorate as Juppé. Like Juppé, he is one of France’s most
popular politicians but must face up to the fact that popularity
means nothing if it doesn’t translate into votes, as the centrist
space of France’s political life seems to be disappearing.
Macron told Le Monde
on Monday that the Right’s remaining two candidates presented a
choice between “the status quo [Juppé] and going backwards
[Fillon]” — a reference to Fillon’s conservative stance on
social issues such as gay marriage. “Who can these guys turn to
now? Certainly not Fillon, who’s an arch-conservative on social
matters,” said one Macron adviser.
Macron’s fate,
however, will be determined by what happens in the Socialist camp,
which had bet on Sarkozy as an easier rival in next year’s
presidential contest. In a now infamous book of interviews with Le
Monde reporters, Hollande had confidently forecast that “Fillon has
no chance” in the conservative primary.
Hollande’s last
sliver of hope is that moderate and left-wing voters will cling to
him if the contest shapes up as a duel between the hard Right
(Fillon) and far Right (Marine Le Pen).
The Hollande team
was attempting on Monday to spin the conservatives’ first-round
result as proof that polls don’t mean much six months before an
election. Fillon was polling at around 5 percent in voter intentions
for the primaries back in the summer. That’s close to the 6 percent
of voters who believe Hollande is doing a good job, according to
polls.
But the French
president must also ponder a stark message: Sarkozy’s surprise
elimination in the first round gives him another reason to think
carefully before running in January’s Socialist primary — a
decision he must make by December 15. As one Socialist apparatchik
put it on Monday: “The largest party in France by far is the party
of those who want to send their last two presidents home and forget
about them.”
Hollande’s last
sliver of hope is that moderate and left-wing voters will cling to
him if the contest shapes up as a duel between the hard Right
(Fillon) and far Right (Marine Le Pen). But the many contenders from
the Left already lining up against him make that possibility remote.
Outside of the Socialist Party, leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the
current poll favorite; inside the party, former Hollande ministers
Benoît Hamon and Arnaud Montebourg seem determined to fight him to
the end.
Macron, for his
part, reiterated Monday his intention not to run in the Socialist
primary, but to fight it alone all the way to the election. If
Hollande decides not to run, his current prime minister, Manuel
Valls, is warming up as substitute, but he is almost as unpopular as
the president and like him has little chance of making it past the
first round of the election next April.
The final collateral
victim of Sunday’s vote may be Marine Le Pen, who remains confident
of making it to May’s second round. She faces competition from
Fillon on her core issues: Islam, immigration and school reforms. So
the Front has begun counterattacking against Fillon’s economic
platform, with deputy FN leader Florian Philippot accusing him of
planning “incredible violence” against French workers.
Front leaders are
also reminding French voters that Fillon was prime minister for
Sarkozy’s entire five-year term — which may give the ousted
Sarkozy a cameo role in next year’s general election.
François
Fillon, Thatcherite with a thing for Russia
He’s
quiet, has bold, sometimes controversial ideas and could well be the
next French president.
By NICHOLAS
VINOCUR 11/21/16, 7:25 PM CET Updated 11/21/16, 10:05 PM CET
PARIS — Call it
Droopy’s revenge.
For five years,
former French prime minister François Fillon worked obediently in
the shadow of a man who mocked him as a “loser” in private and
once berated him publicly as a mere “collaborator.” Nobody cared
much about Fillon, because he was there to carry out the bidding of
Nicolas Sarkozy.
Now Fillon has dealt
Sarkozy’s career a possibly fatal blow by knocking him out of the
conservative primary. The man whose phlegmatic demeanor earned him
the nickname “Droopy” pulled off a stunning comeback Sunday to
become clear favorite in the primary’s final round on November 27.
Next May, he may well end up as France’s next president.
All of a sudden, the
world wants to know: Who is this quiet man with bushy eyebrows who
has suddenly burst into the limelight?
As Fillon’s ideas
and policy prescriptions become known, everyone from French voters
who backed him on a hunch to policy analysts in Washington may be in
for a surprise. Far from being gray, Fillon is a politician who wants
radical change — with plans sure to ruffle feathers at home and
abroad if he is elected president.
It is in this
respect, in calling for a reset of France’s international
alliances, that Fillon stands apart from Juppé.
He is the most
economically liberal candidate the French Right has put forward since
Sarkozy’s 2007 run, perhaps going back even further. He is a
staunch social conservative and practising Catholic who wants to ban
adoption for gay couples. Perhaps of greater concern to Washington
and other European powers, he is a tireless defender of Russia who
blames the West for having provoked Moscow into lashing out against
Ukraine.
In short, François
Fillon is a man who, if elected, may well carry out his campaign vow
to “Bring down the house” — for better or worse.
Thatcher’s man in
France
But first, there is
the man himself. A commonly repeated refrain about 62-year-old Fillon
is that he is basically an Englishman who happens to have been born
in France. There is some truth to this.
Favoring bespoke
suits and expensive Italian shoes, Fillon is a notoriously careful
dresser who has moments of British exuberance (see his red socks from
Italy’s Gammerelli, provider to the Pope). Married to a Welsh
woman, he speaks serviceable if strongly accented English, and enjoys
the country life, indulging “sporting man” obsessions for car
racing. In public his manner is dry, understated, at times cutting.
But by far the most
English thing about Fillon is his economic outlook. A proud admirer
of Margaret Thatcher — he told the Financial Times in November he
wanted a “showdown” with unions — Fillon wants to inflict the
sort of tough love treatment on France that generations of French
leaders have avoided due to fear of backlash in the streets and
polling stations.
Instead of
sugar-coating his ideas, he has taken the opposite tack, warning
voters that this is going to hurt.
Only on Europe does
Fillon differ with Thatcher. Proposing an overhaul of institutions,
he wants to form a eurozone government, integrate EU defense
capabilities and beef up protection of exterior borders.
So far, his approach
has worked wonders. Fillon may have intuited that France, as some
polls have indicated, is in fact desperate for reform. But there is a
difference between wanting and getting, especially when he proposes
to slash public spending by €100 billion and cull 500,000 civil
servant jobs, far more than any of his rivals.
When such hardline
proposals, which also include abolishing the 35-hour work week,
become better known by the general public, then Fillon will face a
backlash. It will, almost certainly, be a very broad one that
stimulates everyone from Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls,
himself a presidential hopeful, to the statist leader of the National
Front party, Marine Le Pen.
“He is Thatcher
and Reagan wrapped into one,” Bertrand Dutheil de la Rochère, a
National Front cadre, said Monday.
Former French Prime
Ministers and UMP right-wing opposition party politicians Alain Juppe
(R) and Francois Fillon confer during a campaign meeting | Nicolas
Tucat/AFP via Getty
Former French Prime
Ministers and UMP right-wing opposition party politicians Alain Juppe
(R) and Francois Fillon confer during a campaign meeting | Nicolas
Tucat/AFP via Getty
Alain Juppé,
Fillon’s opponent next Sunday, is also primed to attack his
Thatcherism. Already, the 71-year-old mayor of Bordeaux has
criticized Fillon’s economic plan as the “least credible” of
any in the conservative field, an absurd wish-list belied by a weak
track record of reform during five years under Sarkozy.
Expect Juppé, who
is pushing a more cautious agenda, to raise the volume on those
attacks before the primary’s final round next Sunday.
The Catholics’
choice
If Fillon’s
philo-Thatcherism is well-known, his close ties to elements of
France’s traditional Catholic Right are less so. Yet they help to
explain why Fillon was able to outperform last Sunday, and give a
hint of what sort of president he could be.
Unlike Juppé or
Sarkozy, Fillon early on voiced support for an anti-gay marriage
movement known as “la Manif Pour Tous” (“The Rally for All,”
a deformation of the gay marriage law named “Marriage for All”).
Several aspirants to
the presidency, including Sarkozy, have called for dialogue with
Russia and made ceremonial visits to see Putin.
This won Fillon the
backing of a Catholic current of the Républicain party named “Sens
Commun” (“Common Sense”) that provided legions of campaign
volunteers in France’s traditional western regions. In return,
Fillon rewarded his Catholic backers with the most socially
conservative agenda of any candidate.
While he does not
want to repeal gay marriage, which was voted into law in 2012, he has
vowed to ban adoption for gay couples. He is also against medically
assisted procreation for female couples and for a universal ban on
surrogate mothers. In an open letter to Catholic bishops in October,
Fillon said the family was at the “heart” of his political
project, vowing to raise public benefits for large families.
“We welcome with
great joy François Fillon’s clear qualification to the second
round of the primary for the Center and the Right,” Sens Commun
cheered in a statement late Sunday.
Fillon’s religious
bent also colors the way he thinks and talks about terrorism. The
practice of Islam needs to be “controlled” and mosques’
financing “rendered transparent” to avoid a “clash of
civilizations” on French soil, he told the Catholic website Famille
Chrétienne.
In his book “Vaincre
le totalitarisme islamique“ (“Defeating Islamic Totalitarianism”)
published in September, Fillon wrote that France was “at war”
with radical Islam, and called for tough measures such as taking away
convicted terrorists’ French nationality. “With the Islamic State
we have entered a different universe,” he wrote.
In order to defeat
ISIL, Fillon argues that France must rid itself of diplomatic taboos
— notably the one that stops Paris from forming an alliance with
Moscow and Tehran.
For Russia, with
love
It is in this
respect, in calling for a reset of France’s international
alliances, that Fillon stands apart from Juppé.
Several aspirants to
the presidency, including Sarkozy, have called for dialogue with
Russia and made ceremonial visits to see Putin. But none has been as
consistently and staunchly pro-Russian as Fillon since he left office
in 2012, though he rejects the description that he is Putin’s
“friend.”
Tirelessly, on radio
shows and TV panels, Fillon comes to Russia’s defense. When
Russian-backed troops were sneaking into eastern Ukraine, he argued
that it was mostly Russian-speaking and more or less belonged to
Moscow. When the West imposed sanctions on Moscow over the annexation
of Crimea, he called them “negative” and demanded they be lifted.
When Russia went into Syria to assist President Bashar Assad, he
brushed off human rights violations and pressed for Europeans to join
an alliance with Iran, Syria and Russia against ISIL.
During the U.S.
election campaign, some Western officials expressed concern about
Donald Trump’s warm words for Putin. Not so Fillon, who said: “I
do not fear [a Putin-Trump alliance]. I wish for it.”
Meanwhile, he has
harsh words for NATO, accusing Western powers of provoking Russia by
expanding too close to its borders. Denouncing “American
imperialism,” he wants the euro to become a reserve currency to
rival the U.S. dollar and the Japanese yen.
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