French
Socialists look for best possible loser
François
Hollande is done. For this term at least. Now it’s all about 2017.
By PIERRE BRIANÇON
4/15/16, 5:30 AM CET
PARIS — François
Hollande’s term in office came to a premature end this spring, and
even the leaders of his party seem to have noticed. All eyes are now
on the 2017 presidential election.
While the political
outlook could change in the next year, the Socialists may already be
simply looking for the best possible loser: Polls so far don’t
leave them much hope of making it to the second round of that
contest, due in May next year.
The French
president’s failure to pass two major reforms on which he had
staked his political future — a package of constitutional changes
and a long-expected reform of the labor law — and his abysmal
popularity ratings have triggered an early start to the race. His
potential successors are circling. If Hollande doesn’t run, or if
he loses, the Socialist Party will need someone to repair the damage.
Whoever carries the
Socialist torch next year — whether current Prime Minister Manuel
Valls, former economy minister and anti-austerity campaigner Arnaud
Montebourg, or some other candidate — faces an uphill struggle.
“Hollande’s term
is basically finished. His twin failure means the end of action, so
there will be no serious initiative from the presidency until the
election,” said a political adviser to several government
ministers.
To be fair, the
labor market overhaul isn’t officially dead yet. Trade union
opposition to a reform that initially appeared radical by French
standards pushed the government to revise it a first time — albeit
on minor points. High school students keep demonstrating against the
bill, and Valls said he would “look at” their demands. Even if he
stands firm, however, and sees the bill through parliament, the
reform is unlikely to be considered as a significant achievement by
voters. Its impact will be felt only well after the election. What
will be remembered is that the clumsy way the government managed the
whole enterprise made it look amateurish.
Rival
Socialist leaders are hard at work preparing for a post-Hollande
scenario.
Hollande earlier
this month also put an end to the debate over a series of
constitutional changes, including a provision that would strip
convicted terrorists of French nationality, acknowledging that he had
failed to rally enough votes, either from Socialists or the
opposition conservatives.
Through all of this,
Hollande has kept his close associates guessing. “When he launched
the labor market reform I thought he had decided not to run in 2017,”
the government adviser said. “That maybe he wanted to go down as
the man who reformed France, even at the price of being a one-term
president. Now, I’m not so sure.”
Hollande’s
official line is that he will seek a new term only if French
unemployment has declined over a significant period of time. It is
now at 10.2 percent, above the 8.9 percent EU average, and has been
stable for four months even though jobless numbers have declined in
most major European economies. If the weak global recovery becomes
even weaker, Hollande will lose all hope of meeting his own
conditions for running again.
That explains why
rival Socialist leaders are hard at work preparing for a
post-Hollande scenario. Calls to hold a primary to choose the party’s
candidate even if Hollande runs again, launched by a petition of some
leftist leaders and intellectuals in January, have petered out. It
now looks all but certain that a primary will be organized only if
Hollande doesn’t seek reelection.
Socialist
free-for-all
Then the fun begins,
because a primary would have to be run in record time, and organized
in a way that would not lay bare the divisions of the Socialist camp
after five years of Hollande. That is, to put it mildly, rather
unlikely. “If [Hollande] doesn’t run, we’re talking Gunfight at
the OK Corral,” said a senior Socialist party figure who asked not
to be identified.
French President
François Hollande.
Would-be candidates
are holding their fire as long as they’re not sure about the
president’s intentions. So far only marginal candidates have
indicated they would run, while another potential serious one, Lille
mayor and Hollande critic Martine Aubry, said she is not interested
this time. She lost the primary to Hollande in 2012.
The most serious
contenders are Valls and Montebourg, assuming that current Economy
Minister Emmanuel Macron, who just launched a pro-reform political
“movement,” decides to sit one out in 2017 — a likely scenario.
In the current political setup, Macron can’t run against his mentor
Hollande, won’t run in a Socialist primary that he is unlikely to
win anyway, and won’t take the risk of running against the official
party candidate and guaranteeing the Socialists’ defeat.
Valls has
paradoxically staked out his own position as a contender by lauding
Hollande as the best possible candidate for 2017. His insistence that
“there is no alternative on the left” to Hollande’s candidacy
seemed mostly geared to express the view that no one would be
“legitimate” enough to defend the current policies. Subliminal
message: If the man doesn’t run, then I’d be the next best
choice.
Montebourg, for his
part, recently came out of self-imposed exile in the business world
by urging the French political system to “Uberize” — and
immediately described himself as an adept of “disruption” in
politics as well as in business. As for being a candidate, he said,
“I’m not there, I can’t answer this question.” Associates
doubt he will resist the temptation to run if Hollande bows out.
The numbers don’t
look good
For all Socialist
candidates, sobriety should be the order of the day. A recent poll by
Sciences Po’s Center for Political Research (Cevipof) shows that
Socialist voters have a poor opinion of their leaders’ capacity to
make it to the second round next year. Thirty-three percent of them
think Valls has the best chance of beating the conservative candidate
and face Marine Le Pen in the second round, compared to 21 percent
for Aubry, 16 percent for Macron and only 4 percent for Montebourg.
Just 19 percent of Socialists think Hollande is the candidate most
likely to make a second round — a record-low for a sitting
president.
Identity
is what’s left when you have failed to curb unemployment” —
Madani Cheurfa
The same poll showed
that if the election were held today, Hollande would come in third
place in the first round, with 16 percent of the vote, even against
his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy (21 percent), who would then go on to
face Le Pen (27 percent) in the run-off.
The choice of the
Socialist candidate will determine the tone of the campaign, as there
are wide differences between their priorities. Montebourg would
campaign on the end of austerity. Macron, in the unlikely event he
ran, would focus on the need to address the root causes of
unemployment and France’s torn social fabric. Valls has already
said he thinks the upcoming campaign should be on the theme of French
“identity” and the fight against terrorism and fundamentalist
Islam.
“ ‘Identity’
is what’s left when you have failed to curb unemployment,” notes
Madani Cheurfa, a political scientist and general secretary of
Cevipof, which organized the survey.
Once they have a
candidate, the Socialists can be expected to be as divided on his
platform as they are on their current president’s policies.
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