France’s next
revolution
The
vote that could wreck the European Union
Why
the French presidential election will have consequences far beyond
its borders
Mar 4th 2017
IT HAS been many
years since France last had a revolution, or even a serious attempt
at reform. Stagnation, both political and economic, has been the
hallmark of a country where little has changed for decades, even as
power has rotated between the established parties of left and right.
Until now. This
year’s presidential election, the most exciting in living memory,
promises an upheaval. The Socialist and Republican parties, which
have held power since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958,
could be eliminated in the first round of a presidential ballot on
April 23rd. French voters may face a choice between two insurgent
candidates: Marine Le Pen, the charismatic leader of the National
Front, and Emmanuel Macron, the upstart leader of a liberal movement,
En Marche! (On the Move!), which he founded only last year.
The implications of
these insurgencies are hard to exaggerate. They are the clearest
example yet of a global trend: that the old divide between left and
right is growing less important than a new one between open and
closed. The resulting realignment will have reverberations far beyond
France’s borders. It could revitalise the European Union, or wreck
it.
Les misérables
The revolution’s
proximate cause is voters’ fury at the uselessness and self-dealing
of their ruling class. The Socialist president, François Hollande,
is so unpopular that he is not running for re-election. The
established opposition, the centre-right Republican party, saw its
chances sink on March 1st when its standard-bearer, François Fillon,
revealed that he was being formally investigated for paying his wife
and children nearly €1m ($1.05m) of public money for allegedly fake
jobs. Mr Fillon did not withdraw from the race, despite having
promised to do so. But his chances of winning are dramatically
weakened.
Further fuelling
voters’ anger is their anguish at the state of France (see
article). One poll last year found that French people are the most
pessimistic on Earth, with 81% grumbling that the world is getting
worse and only 3% saying that it is getting better. Much of that
gloom is economic. France’s economy has long been sluggish; its
vast state, which absorbs 57% of GDP, has sapped the country’s
vitality. A quarter of French youths are unemployed. Of those who
have jobs, few can find permanent ones of the sort their parents
enjoyed. In the face of high taxes and heavy regulation those with
entrepreneurial vim have long headed abroad, often to London. But the
malaise goes well beyond stagnant living standards. Repeated
terrorist attacks have jangled nerves, forced citizens to live under
a state of emergency and exposed deep cultural rifts in the country
with Europe’s largest Muslim community.
Many of these
problems have built up over decades, but neither the left nor the
right has been able to get to grips with them. France’s last
serious attempt at ambitious economic reform, an overhaul of pensions
and social security, was in the mid-1990s under President Jacques
Chirac. It collapsed in the face of massive strikes. Since then, few
have even tried. Nicolas Sarkozy talked a big game, but his reform
agenda was felled by the financial crisis of 2007-08. Mr Hollande had
a disastrous start, introducing a 75% top tax rate. He was then too
unpopular to get much done. After decades of stasis, it is hardly
surprising that French voters want to throw the bums out.
Both Mr Macron and
Ms Le Pen tap into that frustration. But they offer radically
different diagnoses of what ails France and radically different
remedies. Ms Le Pen blames outside forces and promises to protect
voters with a combination of more barriers and greater social
welfare. She has effectively distanced herself from her party’s
anti-Semitic past (even evicting her father from the party he
founded), but she appeals to those who want to shut out the rest of
the world. She decries globalisation as a threat to French jobs and
Islamists as fomenters of terror who make it perilous to wear a short
skirt in public. The EU is “an anti-democratic monster”. She vows
to close radical mosques, stanch the flow of immigrants to a trickle,
obstruct foreign trade, swap the euro for a resurrected French franc
and call a referendum on leaving the EU.
Mr Macron’s
instincts are the opposite. He thinks that more openness would make
France stronger. He is staunchly pro-trade, pro-competition,
pro-immigration and pro-EU. He embraces cultural change and
technological disruption. He thinks the way to get more French people
working is to reduce cumbersome labour protections, not add to them.
Though he has long been short on precise policies (he was due to
publish a manifesto as The Economist went to press), Mr Macron is
pitching himself as the pro-globalisation revolutionary.
Look carefully, and
neither insurgent is a convincing outsider. Ms Le Pen has spent her
life in politics; her success has been to make a hitherto extremist
party socially acceptable. Mr Macron was Mr Hollande’s economy
minister. His liberalising programme will probably be less bold than
that of the beleaguered Mr Fillon, who has promised to trim the state
payroll by 500,000 workers and slash the labour code. Both
revolutionaries would have difficulty enacting their agendas. Even if
she were to prevail, Ms Le Pen’s party would not win a majority in
the national assembly. Mr Macron barely has a party.
La France ouverte ou
la France forteresse?
Nonetheless, they
represent a repudiation of the status quo. A victory for Mr Macron
would be evidence that liberalism still appeals to Europeans. A
victory for Ms Le Pen would make France poorer, more insular and
nastier. If she pulls France out of the euro, it would trigger a
financial crisis and doom a union that, for all its flaws, has
promoted peace and prosperity in Europe for six decades. Vladimir
Putin would love that. It is perhaps no coincidence that Ms Le Pen’s
party has received a hefty loan from a Russian bank and Mr Macron’s
organisation has suffered more than 4,000 hacking attacks.
With just over two
months to go, it seems Ms Le Pen is unlikely to clinch the
presidency. Polls show her winning the first round but losing the
run-off. But in this extraordinary election, anything could happen.
France has shaken the world before. It could do so again.
French
farmers flock to Le Pen — and hope for the best
In
the vineyards of Chablis, Daniel Seguinot is choosing patriotism over
economic self interest.
By NICHOLAS
VINOCUR 3/1/17, 8:04 PM CET Updated 3/3/17, 4:08 AM CET
MALIGNY, France —
If the European Union had to choose a poster child for its
agricultural policy in France, vintner Daniel Seguinot would make a
solid candidate.
For the last 30
years, the producer of premium wine from the northeastern Chablis
region has grown his operation in lockstep with the deepening
integration and expansion of the EU. Seguinot acknowledges that the
introduction of the euro helped him to boost exports, which now
account for nearly two-thirds of his wine sales. EU subsidies also
support his non-grape crops, which make up a third of his revenue.
You wouldn’t
suspect that Seguinot, 69, would be preparing to vote for Marine Le
Pen: the far-right presidential candidate who wants to destroy the
European Union.
The central plank of
Le Pen’s presidential platform is leaving the EU, which means
quitting Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy. And yet she remains,
to Seguinot’s eyes, a better alternative than former Prime Minister
François Fillon, under investigation on suspicion of using public
funds to pay his wife for a fake job, and former Economy Minister
Emmanuel Macron, a former banker and remote member of the elite who
said he was likely to support free trade accords.
“I think our
political class is making a mockery of us,” said Seguinot from his
farmhouse overlooking hills of vines planted in orderly rows of light
and dark green. “They say one thing in public and then turn around
and do exactly the opposite. It’s time to change the guard.”
Greeted as a star
According to a poll
by Cevipof for Le Monde, Le Pen has the support of 35 percent of
agricultural workers, compared to 20 percent each for Fillon and
Macron. By comparison, some 27 percent of the French public supports
Le Pen.
That farmers like
Seguinot are flocking to Le Pen is one of the most paradoxical
aspects of France’s presidential campaign. The country has always
been, after all, one of the biggest beneficiaries of Brussels
largesse — and most of that has flowed toward the farming sector.
Farmers continue to
occupy an outsize role in France’s self-image as a nation of food
and wine.
France lobbied hard
for the establishment of the Common Agricultural Policy in the early
1960s, and it was the country’s farmers who dragged then President
Charles de Gaulle back to the European table during the “empty
chair crisis” later that decade. Massive financial support from
Brussels helped save the wine industry in the southwestern
Languedoc-Roussillon region, which otherwise was headed for collapse
after a series of crises starting in the 1970s.
To be sure, farmers
make up less than 4 percent of all professionals, and their numbers
are dwindling each year as their sector shrinks. But politically,
their support carries weight. Farmers continue to occupy an outsize
role in France’s self-image as a nation of food and wine. Each
year, presidential candidates flock to the Paris farm show, where Le
Pen was greeted as a star Tuesday.
National Front
officials explain their rural popularity with one word: Europe. They
argue that farmers are furious with the EU for having exposed them to
unfair competition from rivals in Eastern Europe, and for burdening
them with excessive regulations.
Farmers interviewed
by POLITICO echoed some of the Front’s critiques of the EU. But
they placed more emphasis on disappointment with French leaders, whom
they accused of betrayal.
“If farmers are
turning first to the National Front, it’s because Marine Le Pen has
set herself up as a spokeswoman for people in crisis, and the farming
world is in permanent crisis,” said Martial Foucault, head of the
Cevipof political research institute. “This is despite the fact
that her statist, protectionist program is totally opposed to their
vision of the economy, and that her plan for Europe threatens
subsidies that are crucial for many of them.”
“In Le Pen, they
see someone who can manage their crisis day to day,” he added.
‘A tingle down my
spine’
For most of his
adult life, Daniel Seguinot voted for mainstream conservative
candidates. His family, which has occupied a plot of land in the
village of Maligny since the French Revolution, consistently backed
Gaullist candidates who “defended French independence” and “let
farmers work without too much interference, for good or for bad,”
he said.
The Chablis region’s
ideal wine-growing conditions and top-notch reputation served
Seguinot well. After taking over a small plot from his father, he
quickly snapped up neighboring fields and expanded his operation more
than tenfold. Today his two daughters run the farm’s day-to-day
operations and preside over the production process in giant stainless
steel maturation tanks on site.
But Seguinot, who
greeted a visiting reporter in a checkered sweater and military-style
pants, started to lose confidence in his country’s political class
in the 1980s, he said. He never voted for then National Front
President Jean-Marie Le Pen, but he grew increasingly frustrated by
scandals that afflicted both the left and right, including a
fake-jobs case that resulted in the conviction of former Prime
Minister Alain Juppé.
When socialist
President François Hollande took power in 2012, Seguinot’s
frustration grew. Already angry over tax hikes he found unfair, he
was more outraged when he learned that Hollande’s own budget
minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, had evaded taxes by stashing money in
Swiss bank accounts.
Seguinot yearned for
a politician who would speak for France “without shame.”
He found one in
Gilbert Collard, a former celebrity lawyer and current National Front
MP who came to town in 2014.
“I felt a real
tingle down the length of my spine listening to him,” Seguinot
said, after offering a visitor a glass of his Chablis. “It was the
first speech I had heard in a long time that was truly patriotic. He
was telling us that it was acceptable to love your country, to love
the flag, to be proud of its history.”
The strains of
patriotism touched a chord with Seguinot, who sports a crew cut after
a lifetime in the military reserve, and whose family fought in both
world wars.
Shortly after the
rally, Seguinot signed up as a member of the National Front. The
move, he said, had more to do with his feelings about the French
establishment than with the EU, although he did criticize “idiotic”
international trade agreements.
But in other
respects, Seguinot was ambivalent about the EU’s merits and
failings. The euro had made it easier to sell his wines in other EU
countries; 50,000 of the 80,000 bottles he produced annually are sold
abroad, most in neighboring EU states, he said.
Seguinot criticized
the free circulation of goods — but only because it was
insufficiently implemented; he could not simply drive to Belgium and
start to sell his wine to resellers across the border.
Euro-anxiety
National Front
officials acknowledge that their program contains unknowns. Gilles
Ardinat, a National Front official in the Languedoc-Roussillon region
where vintners are heavily subsidized, acknowledged that there was
“apprehension” about plans to withdraw from the European Union.
“There is a big
part of public opinion in France that is worried,” he said. “But
the fear is not about [Le Pen’s] project itself. It has to do with
the fact that the whole media is playing on their fears.”
At the Paris farm
fair Tuesday, Le Pen told farmers that she would “Frenchify”
agricultural subsidies, replacing European grants with payouts from
the agriculture ministry. Some farmers who posed for photographs with
the party leader echoed her talking points, arguing that the EU had
burdened small operations with prohibitive amounts of regulation.
For
Seguinot, the prospect of losing the subsides was worrying — but
not enough to diminish his support.
But others expressed
doubts about the prospect of ending Europe’s subsidies.
“Why not [replace
the European subsidies with French ones]? But what do we do in the
meantime while all of this is put into place?” said a cattle
breeder from the central Limousin region who asked to be identified
as Gilles. “It’s not totally clear … The problem is that for
us, even one month without the aid can be fatal.”
For Seguinot, the
prospect of losing the subsides was worrying — but not enough to
diminish his support. Profitable vineyards do not receive EU payouts,
but Seguinot does receive them for other crops. If EU payouts dried
up, he was unclear about what might replace them.
“The government
will have to put its hand in its pocket,” said Seguinot. “With
all the trouble we will have because of [leaving] the euro, I’m not
sure how they will manage, but we need to have confidence.”
Authors:
Nicholas Vinocur
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