François Hollande and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, A Socialist Analysis.

 

The French Socialist Presidential candidate, François Hollande, “provides the first real response from the left to the policies Europe has pursed in reaction to the crisis which has engulfed it” writes Jonathan Fenby in the Observer. (29.1.12) Holland’s policies frighten “the world of finance”. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel is concerned enough to campaign for outgoing President, Nicolas Sarkozy. The wealthy are already preparing to ‘delocalise’ their fortunes (le Monde. 7.2.12). But some on the left are also hostile. For Manu Bichindaritz of the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA) Hollande will bring only a slightly softer austerity programme. Now is the time to start preparing an “anticapitalist” opposition. (Tout est à nous. 3.2.12)

Ahead in all the polls Hollande looks set to present a strong challenge in the first round, on April the 22^nd, of France’s Presidential elections. He stands at 32% to outgoing President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 25%. (Le Monde 8.2.12) The science of assessing public opinion, highly developed in France, is however, also an art form dosed with speculation. Many people have not made up their minds. Swings in support for other candidates, such as the centrist François Bayrou, (12,5%) indicate a reservoir of floating preferences.

Throwing all calculations into doubt is the place of the far-right Front National (FN). The ‘third’ candidate, the FN’s Marine Le Pen (16% – at least) has not got the required number of “parrinages” (sponsors from elected positions) to enter the lists. The French right is trying to appeal to her voters. Within the governing UMP, the Droite Nationale, has called for tighter controls on immigration and insecurity. Interior Minister Claude Guéant, has stated, “all civilisations do not have an equal value” (Le Monde 7.2.12) In another attempt to woo the hard-right Sarkozy has just launched the idea of holding a referendum on the rights of immigrants, and benefit rates for the long-term unemployed.

Victor of the Primaries.

Hollande enters the election after the unexpected disgrace of the once favoured candidate, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, known as DSK. He has been Parti Socialiste (PS) General Secretary, with a background in internal party management, and some experience as a deputy in the National Assembly. Hollande’s principal rival was Martine Aubry. She is a former Minister and Mayor of Lille strongly based in Northern France – roughly the equivalent of Labour’s Northern heartlands. The primaries were loosely modelled on the American primary selection system taken up in recent years by the Italian Democrats, the former Left Party. All candidates had to come from PS. The polling booths were open to everyone who paid a nominal sum, and declared that they shared the values of the left. Organised in two rounds the ‘primaires’ attracted 2,8 million electors. This gives Hollande a wider legitimacy than enjoyed by his Socialist predecessors.

In the first round there was no deep ideological clash between Hollande and Martine Aubry. Both were from (different) the reformist social democratic wings of the PS. Holland took the lead (39,17% to 30,42%). Arnaud Montebourg, from the Party’s left, and champion of “démondialisation” (de-globalisation) came third, with the more or less open support of the non-PS left, with an unexpected 17,19%. By the second round, last October Hollande won at 56,6% of the ballot. Unlike many previous – internal – party contests there was no legacy of rancour. Most people have quickly forgotten any differences, on the details of expanding public sector jobs, nuclear power and balanced budgets. Hollande, with his inclination to reach consensus (‘synthèse’), settled in smoothly. Apart from integrating Aubry’s supporters into his team he has moved to reassure the Party’s left, notably with his plans for job creation. The PS left represents up to 20% of its membership (though, see below, an important section of this had split to form the Parti de Gauche, PdG). The new Candidate was dubbed M. “normal”, an amiable undistinguished, unflappable,  character. But this is not necessarily a handicap after what became known about DSK’s private life.

Egalité!

Hollande made a far from routine start to his campaign. On the 22^nd of January, at Bourget, speaking before 20,000 supporters the Socialist was lyrical in his references to the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. The audience loved it, shouting “égalité”. Reports indicate that his speech resonated well with a wider public.

Hollande, like his rival Aubry (though from different internal PS currents) is a social democrat in the modern European sense. In Droit d’inventaires (2009) Hollaned stated that role of socialism was not to destroy capitalism but to “dominate it, put it in the service of humanity”. This meant “fair distribution” and “efficient production”.

The Socialist Party’s Declaration of Principles (2008) was prepared when Hollande was Party General Secretary. It is sometimes compared to the German SPD’s 1959 Bad Godesburg Programme, which turned the back on Marxism. The Declaration roots socialist politics in “humanism and the philosophy of the Enlightenment. But unlike those writing at the start of the post-war boom, the French Socialists are extremely critical of market economies. They draw on a “historical critique of capitalism” a system which “creates inequalities, brings irrationality and crises.” These features are made worse by “globalisation dominated by finance capitalism”

Like the SPD, the Socialists recognised (belatedly?) that they are a “reformist party” who will work by consent to create an alternative, “a market economy regulated by public authority” (rather than the Bad Godesberg formula, the ‘social market economy’) and a society based on the Enlightenment’s “universal values”. Solidarity, in which everybody enjoys the same “freedoms and rights”, will take shape in a “social State”. That is an expansion of democracy in all spheres, economic and social. This principle spans participation and much more radical ideas about self-management.

Notably absent was any reference to class struggle or previous Socialist ideas, explicitly indebted to Marxism, about a “rupture” with capitalism. The “projet de transformation sociale radicale” was simply one aspect of disembodied “progress”.

These themes form the backdrop to Hollande’s Presidential Manifesto, Le Changement, C’est Maintenant. It begins with putting responsibility for the economic crisis on 10 years of bad management. Finance has taken “control of the economy, society, and our lives”. National Sovereignty is threatened by the workings of the money and share markets. The candidate offers a programme to establish in an “exemplary republic” expressing hope, justice, and above all equality, the “soul of France”.

Fiscal reform, a way of asserting public authority over the market economy, and introducing equity, is at the heart of the programme. The Socialists propose to tax at 40% revenues over 150, 000 Euros, and an end to tax loopholes. Holland offers measures to control finance, ending speculation, restricting stock-options, and – a popular idea in the ‘alter-globalisation’ movement, a levy on financial transactions. Differences in incomes are addressed. It is proposed to enforce a 1 to 20 maximum difference of salaries in public companies. There will be employees’ representatives on Remuneration Committees.

For the ‘social’ state there is a defence of public services like the Post office, and to establish a Public Investment Bank. There are plans for job creation, 60, 000 posts in Education and 1500,000 jobs for young people, also figures. Sections tackle social issues, an amelioration of the laws raising the retirement age, supporting massive housing programmes, more consensual types of policing, and sexual equality. Hollande wants to re-assert French secularism, laïcité, the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State”. The programme proposes to end the exception that allows religion to retain its privileged state funded position in Alsace and Moselle.

Le Changement cannot avoid the Euro crisis, or the continent-wide push towards austerity. Addressing this, it poses to renegotiate the December European Treaty. A new agreement has to be found on the basis of plans for growth, public investment. There is nevertheless a commitment to deficit reduction and a “balanced budget” by the end of the 5-year term of office. Realistic ‘costing’ of all these proposals may make this a viable objective. Or it may not.

The French Socialists intend to challenge the way markets have dictated economic policy, and to benefit the majority of wage-earners and help the out-of-work. They are state focused, strengthening its role in regulation, control, and sanctioning. If the plans for youth unemployment and other aids to find jobs for the workless are welcome it is hard to see how they will make real inroads into persistently high (over 10%) levels of the out-of-work. This is a problem that stems from inside the market economy, and attempting to shape it from the outside has not, as schemes of a similar nature across Europe have shown, are likely to abolish the modern society of permanent mass unemployment and the ‘precariat’.

Le Changement stops short of extending democratic socialist measures further into the mechanisms of capitalism, the ownership and control of enterprises and the market. “Social partners”, that is workplace and union bodies, are seen as just that: one part of the National Economy. There is no renewal of the initial moves of the 1980s Mitterrand Presidency. During that period the Socialists attempted to increase workers’ rights to participate in wider decision making and control over their conditions. Today redundancies are of great importance. The problem of ‘de-localisation’ is mentioned, and some restraints offered, but whatever ‘social plans;’ for sackings are considered they do not go very far into detail.

Most people will not read this programme. But it is clear that it offers some serious social democratic reforms. From a British perspective it looks very radical, and is no doubt heartily disliked by the remnants of New Labour. How far a Hollande Presidency would manage to implement these aims, within a ‘balanced budget’ (though this will not be written into the Constitution, as Sarkozy intends) and within the constraints of the European Union, is unclear.

One important element has to be considered, the wider social basis of change. What kind of wider support in France do the Socialists have that could help them push their programme forward? The PS and Hollande only appear to enjoy manual working class backing to a moderate degree, at 31%, the same percentage that back Marine Le Pen. Indeed the ‘popular’ classes appear without any stable left-wing moorings. The PS no clear independent class base, other perhaps than public employees. Union organised manual workers and office employees (under 10% of the workforce) are more likely to back Hollande. But no trade union federation has organic links with the Socialists. And their role in political socialisation has declined, with their memberships, as has happened elsewhere in Europe. If Hollande, like Mitterrand, intends a state-centred programme of change, then outside the administration and its civil service, it has no obvious lever for the ‘transformation’ it proposes. Mass protest movements, which have risen and dispersed in France over the last decades, may return, but whether they will be helpful to a Socialist government is far from certain.

To the Left of the Socialists.

Hollande’s candidacy has largely reduced his opponents on the left to marginality. The Green Party, Europe-Ecology (EELV) selected Eva Joly, despite some of their leaders doubting the wisdom of competing with the Socialists and others disliking her out of spite. They are down to 2% in opinion surveys. To compound their difficulties their membership has halved in two years. On the far-left the NPA, which has also suffered a drastic drop in registered support, barely registers at 0,5%. They may not be able to gather the necessary 500 ‘parrinages’, which would perhaps be a welcome relief. The isolated ‘soldier monks’ of Lutte Ouvrière’s hover at 1-2%. Only the Front de Gauche Candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, at 8 – 9% has had an impact.

Mélenchon is standing for the Front de Gauche. This is an alliance of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) the Parti de Gauche (PdG), the Gauche Unitaire (GU) and some smaller left organisations. The Front thus includes orthodox Communists, former members of the Socialist Party (Mélenchon’s PdG), ex-members of a tendency within the Trotskyist forerunner of the NPA, to independent socialists and leftists from a variety of backgrounds.

It was their common stand for the victorious (but ignored) ‘non’ vote in the 2005 European Constitutional Treaty Referendum that unites the FdG. This has also played a role in attracting an audience amongst people fearing drastic austerity in the present Euro crisis. Mélenchon hammers home the message that the public debt is used to instil ‘fear’, and the need to question the Euro pact and the Lisbon treaty that forms its framework. On this basis the FdG has taken a critical stand of the power of banks, markets that goes much further than François Holland. They intend to share the country’s wealth, to introduce social and ‘green’ planning, and to democratise France through a 6^th Republic. Parts of the British left see criticism of the way the European Union works are present as a reason to withdraw to national autarchy. By contrast the FdG proposes a Europe that respects its diverse people’s sovereignty, and engages in a fundamental transformation to promote equitable economic co-operation and democratic solidarity. .

The FdG’s programme, L’Humain d’abord contains immediate demands (‘agir tout de suite’) and maximum ones (‘agir pour un changement durable’). The document begins with a call for immediate salary increases, the re-establishment of retirement rights at 6o years (the demand of mass strikes and demonstration in 2009), the 35 hour week (weakened under Sarkozy), student grant rises, free medical care, and no rent raises. It continues in the same radical vein up to ideas to introduce world-wide democratic co-operation and economic justice. Notable are its commitment to ecologically durable development, the rights of workers, and citizens’ participation. L’Humain ends with a flourish, for “human emancipation”. It is one of the most advanced left platforms that Europe has yet seen.

The FdG has not indulged in railing against François Hollande and his supposed ‘betrayals’, although Mélenchon has dismissed the 60 Propositions as a “trickle of tepid water”. They, and their Candidate, have concentrated their efforts on winning the popular vote away from Marine Le Pen: fighting their racist message with left ideas. This fight in the workplace and the housing estates has helped to bring politics into areas often abandoned by the left. The FdG marries two essential themes, militant secularism (laïcité) and anti-racism. They call for an end to all public subsidy of religion, complete state neutrality on issues of faith, and for bans on gender segregation (a demand of Islamists and, to a lesser extent, ultra-orthodox Jews) They also demand the regularisation of unregistered ‘sans papiers’, greater rights for immigrants and for measures against all forms of discrimination. Against the racist Right the FdG raises the standard of liberty, equality and fraternity.

A Decisive Battle.

There is little doubt that this year’s French Presidential election is of decisive importance for the European, and world, left. If Hollande can break through, if Mélenchon scores well, it will help the left in every country. One can have doubts about each candidate, Hollande’s equivocal stand on markets and balanced budgets or Mélenchon’s enduring admiration for François Mitterrand. Neither personality, an important factor in these elections, pleases everybody, the left included. But the personal decency of both figures, and their courage in shaping up to the forces of Finance and Reaction, are impressive. We wish both well.