[An editorial from the website of Mouvements, an independent French journal of the left (http://mouvements.asso.fr)]
Nicolas Sarkozy had been dreaming of the presidency for so long, and the polls had announced his victory for so long, that the result seemed foreordained and became something of a non-event. Nonetheless, the long and intense campaign aroused the passion of the French people, belied the idea that they had become ‘depoliticized’, reduced the score of the far right and mobilized crowds everywhere. Nonetheless, Ségolène Royal, whose presence in the runoff would have been predicted by very few observers a year ago, was able to invent a new style of campaign; her pugnacity reached its climax during the televised debate with her opponent. Nonetheless, the presidential race produced a significant shift in the political center of gravity and the overall balance of forces: the former ‘plural left’ (Socialists Communists Greens) is in pieces; the right is in a conquering mood and has lost all its inhibitions; and the success of centrist François Bayrou was a surprise to many.
So it goes in democracy. But the idea that the former Minister of the Interior could be elected in the name of ‘change’ leaves us somewhat perplexed about the state of French society and the uncertainties that haunt it. After all, Sarkozy, twice Minister of the Interior and generally omnipresent during the second term of Jacques Chirac, had come to embody all by himself the neoliberal, security-oriented tone of government, with strong accents of demagogy and populism and Sarkozy’s own tendency to pit ‘community’ vs. ‘community’. Such is the paradox of this election, that by shifting his discourse to the right, Sarkozy was able to convince many supporters of right-wing nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen that he, Sarkozy, was a better protector of the social groups left by the wayside of neoliberal globalization, and a better defender of the ‘national identity’.
But even as he cultivated the rhetoric of ‘innate inequalities’ (certain individuals are inferior because ‘they’re born that way’), he also promoted an ideology of opportunity (‘when you want to, you can’). Associating the rejection of society’s ‘bad seeds’ with the promotion of merit through hard work, he had no inhibitions about trying to win over voters of the center-left and left who believe in the ‘cult of performance’ and success through work. Placing the ‘value of work’, authority and morality at the heart of his discourse, he has clearly won over a considerable fraction of the middle and working classes whose situation has been made more precarious because of the same policies Sarkozy himself has helped to promote for nearly 15 years in government.
In this high-stakes game of political marketing, no segment of the electorate seems to have been neglected. Sarkozy triumphed thanks to his ideological card tricks, in the name of the principle that ‘to say is to do’, and his ability to cover the gamut from corporate bosses to workers. He managed to see that little attention was paid during the campaign to his record in government; nor to the law-and-order policies he aggressively promoted for five years as Minister of Interior and whose results are less brilliant than he claims; nor to his hateful declarations about human rights associations or youth in outlying urban areas (banlieues); nor to his management of the urban riots of November 2005. It must be admitted that he has pulled off a great magic trick. How was it possible? How could the man who has not ceased to divide group against group appear as a great unifier? It’s a real enigma.
Neither the governmental left, now embodied by the Socialist Party nearly alone, nor the other left – the one which would like to be radical but has in fact been powerless to define the stakes of the election – were able to weigh in strongly in framing of the campaign. It is true that the presence of Ségolène Royal in the second round of the election helped to shake off the traumatism of April 21, 2002, when Le Pen qualified for the runoff at the expense of Socialist Lionel Jospin. That in itself is a result to be appreciated. As for the candidates of the Greens, the Communist Party, Lutte ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle) and global justice activist José Bové, all coming in under 2%, and even the Revolutionary Communist League with its 4%, they were marginalized by the impulse to ‘vote useful’ – an impulse that was amplified by these groups’ own failure to unite around a common candidate. Unlike the period prior to the first round of balloting in 2002, the groups to the left of the Socialist Party put a damper on their reservations regarding the Socialists’ program in order to form a bloc against Sarkozy. In spite of this ‘sacred union’, and in the absence of a political agreement, the left’s total runoff score of 47% reached its upper limit – not a disgrace, but hardly a sign of great hope.
The Socialist candidate, after having committed her primary-election hold-up on her party, led it to break some of its taboos and to transform itself during this campaign. But her attempt to score goals took place without sufficient coordination with the rest of her team. Could it be that her proposals on participatory democracy challenged the interests of influential groups within the party? And yet, that phase of the campaign constituted a needed burst of oxygen, in which contradictory exchange was possible, before the candidate’s ‘Presidential Pact’, a 100-point program released in February, froze the discourse up again.
There is no doubt that machismo played a role in the problems she faced – not just the traditional conservative kind, but also the ‘softer’ left variety. A significant sector of opinion was not ready to see a woman gain access to the highest political functions.
We may further ask whether a major cause of her defeat was her inability to convince the majority of her ability to forge a credible and coherent program to fight the triple crisis – political, socio-economic and environmental – and whether her program was too centered on the middle classes (including the downwardly mobile middle classes). The Socialist candidate’s hesitations on the emblematic issue of the 35-hour working week, and the ensuing cacophony, which was exploited by her opponent, were one indication among others of this lack of precision. Royal’s reply to Sarkozy’s ‘work more to earn more’, which involved sharing out work by facilitating access to employment for the most excluded or precarious categories, was perfectly legitimate and audible; unfortunately, however, it was insufficient to gain majority support.
Was the proposed reform of the constitution and transition to a ‘VIth Republic’ too audacious – or, rather, was it too inaudible? Many observers noted that Ségolène Royal was the first to diagnose the deficit of representation in our political system and propose to bridge the gap between a caste of state technicians and the everyday life of the French people. This allowed her to register more than honorable scores in the first round of voting in popular districts long abandoned by the left. However, what she did was less to win over these groups than to take advantage of their rejection of Sarkozy, the man who stigmatized the ‘zones of lawlessness’ and the ‘scum’ who live there.
In any case, it is clear enough that all the tendencies of the left need to build new foundations; they all need to adapt their programs, their forms of organization and their strategy of alliances to the new situation revealed by this election. The slogan ‘Anybody but Sarkozy’ (‘Tous sauf Sarkozy‘) made the choice appear simple, as did the great number of anti-Sarkozy petitions and declarations that circulated on internet. Yet the formula was no doubt simplistic. The rhetoric of fear and the sometimes-excessive focus on the personality of Sarkozy was a trap that backfired on those who set it, for they could not, in such a manner, build positive support for the Socialist candidate.
Whatever happens, the new period will be difficult. This will be true first of all for the most fragile social categories, those referred to as ‘precarious’ or ‘excluded’ – or, in Sarkozy’s terms, the unemployed suspected of taking advantage of their situation, the ‘cheaters’ who ‘wake up late’. It will be true as well as for the undocumented, and more generally for immigrants and their children, and for categories – immigrants or not – who are victims of everyday racialization by the institutions of a republic that fails to respect its own proclaimed values of equality. It will be true for the inhabitants of the poorest districts, the youth in particular, and for young delinquents who are attributed full responsibility for their own fate (along with their parents, accused by Sarkozy of ‘negligence’). It will be true as well for the part-time cultural workers and downwardly mobile intellectuals who make up the vanguard of a broad ‘precariat’, not to mention the rap groups whose freedom of expression is likely to suffer due to lawsuits and public slander.
However, it would be wrong to imagine that the more ‘stable’ or ‘protected’ categories are sheltered from the changes promoted by Sarkozy and his team. Civil servants and other public sector employees understood this, voting noticeably less for Sarkozy than private-sector wage workers. Labor activism is likely to be more closely observed and more frequently criminalized. More broadly, freedom of public expression, the independence of the mass media, the social protection of the welfare state, the dialogue between employers and workers, democratic participation, and the defense of a certain idea of culture and education, are all likely to become more fragile – as we have known all along.
For the election of Nicolas Sarkozy is part of a ‘conservative revolution’ à la française already under way. The problem is not to demonize the man but to understand the kind of society he is promoting and the relationship between this project and broader tendencies affecting Western Europe and North America.
At the same time as the neo-conservative regimes of Berlusconi, Aznar or Bush, we have witnessed political recompositions that need to be examined in more depth. Movements within civil society have strengthened their ability to mobilize massively. The challenge will be, more than ever, to overcome the kind of actions limited to a single moment and a single issue theme in order to reinforce the movements’ ability to structure themselves in a more permanent way and thereby make themselves be heard by political parties, which now pay them little attention.
We need not only to understand how we have reached this point, but also how to define perspectives for the short and middle term. We cannot be content to adopt a reactive attitude of radical refusal that has imposed itself in these past few months of campagning, with limited success it must be said. What recomposition of the left is possible given a Socialist Party that is about to be engulfed in its own internal power struggles, with the return of the ‘elephants’ [the leaders of the party’s rival currents] and the departure of many of the new members, disappointed by the outcome of the election? What recomposition is possible when the Communist Party is bled dry and the Greens are hardly faring better? With the upcoming legislative elections (June 2007) and municipal elections (2008), will we be seeing a convergence between a portion of the Socialist Party and the centrists via the creation of François Bayrou’s new Mouvement démocrate? But in this case, how will the forces of the far left adapt? Possibly by taking accenting their radical stance – unless we could imagine, with these elections in mind, a serious attempt by the radical and reformist air their differences and reach a compromise. But around what common platform and what common organization could they possibly converge? Is it plausible to see Revolutionary Communist League, with its candidate at 4%, as the focal point of this recomposition? Could we witness the emergence of a new formation uniting the various sensibilities of the global justice movement (altermondialisme) and popular ecology?
In five years of opposition, the Socialist Party has not been able to reconstruct its political vision, while the ‘left of the left’, too, is still searching for its fundamentals. The right has finally found its neo-conservative coherence after a long period of hesitation. If the intellectual renovation of the left follows the lines indicated by Royal, there is a risk of disconnect between a social-democratic Socialist Party moving toward centrism while the left of the party, currently a satellite, drifts out of orbit toward the tired battalions of the anti-neoliberal left. Nothing about this process will be simple. More than ever, Mouvements (http://mouvements.asso.fr/) is an indispensable forum for the rebuilding of the left on new political foundations.
Translated and adapted by Jim Cohen (Mouvements, Paris)
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