In his farewell Letter, Alan writes about some of the main developments in French politics since the late 1990s, and examines the current crisis
As far as we can make out, I wrote my first Letter from France in 1999. If that is true, then this will be the 27th. It seems the moment to say “Adieu”. In doing so, I would like to thank Peter Howells for his patience and encouragement, and Jon Temple for taking up the baton with such success.
I wrote the first version of this farewell Letter with the idea that I could start with some reminiscences of these last 25 years and then move on to this year’s events. But developments here have been radical and the end of the tunnel is not in sight! So, the Letter will focus on what is happening in France on the political and economic front, with the aim of explaining how we got here and where we might be going.
The world is now a very different place from the way it was a quarter of a century ago: smartphones had not yet entered the scene in France, and people were still reading newspapers on the metro. I had just returned from Italy after eight years there, but noted that one thing had not changed. When I first arrived in France in 1977, people were all saying “Ca ne peut pas continuer comme ca” (it cannot go on like this). But in the eyes of the French in 1995, when I came back, it had gone on like that and something had to be done.
When I started writing the first Letter, in 1999, Francois Mitterand had finished his two terms. His election in 1981 had been greeted with wild scenes of joy, though a Swiss friend who was living in Aix en Provence, who had invited us to dinner, refused to open his door for fear of letting the “reds” in. Mitterand’s election had been our Obama moment. We were on the path to a more open liberal democracy, in more or less happy harmony with our neighbours.
Well it hasn’t worked out like that! Jacques Chirac brought us back to earth.
The last twenty-five years
There have been many events, some positive and some negative, which I will not enumerate, but rather look at a number which might give an understanding of the general trend, which is hardly reassuring. Here are a few:
The political environment
Since the eighties, there has been a growing current in favour of the National Front, originally an openly fascist party which, when the torch was handed by Jean-Marie Le Pen to his daughter Marine, has been working hard to make itself respectable and to establish itself as a force capable of running the country. This is not surprising in itself since the same phenomenon has been occurring in a number of countries in the European Union.
I start with this since it is a key element in the political evolution here. In figure 1 you see the votes obtained in the two rounds of the presidential elections from 2002 until 2022. In the Fifth Republic, there are two rounds, in the first of which all candidates are present, and for the second the two candidates who received the most votes in the first round remain. The Le Pen candidate has been in the second round with the exception of a brief return to “normality” with the classic right against classic left, in 2007 and 2012. The first Sarkozy, now serving a sentence for corruption, won. The second he lost to Francois Hollande, a socialist.
There was a “republican consensus” that opposed this trend earlier but this has withered away and the far right has come close to power. By 2022 the second round began to look like a real contest.
The Rassemblement National (RN) culminated its rise when it came out on top in the 2024 European elections with 31.4% of the vote. This means it will send 30 MEPs to the European Parliament, twelve more than four years ago. With the Reconquête! list led by Marion Maréchal, extreme right-wing parties took 36.9% of the vote, compared with 14.6% for the Presidential Majority (Renaissance).
Faced with this debacle, the President of the Republic decided to dissolve the National Assembly and call new legislative elections. for June 30 and July 7, 2024, as the constitution allows. This is a rare event, with the last dissolution dating back to 1997. That resulted in Jacques Chirac’s RPR party being outvoted and Lionel Jospin’s socialist party joining the government. Not exactly a success for the president at the time…
Given this track record, why did Emmanuel Macron take such a gamble? One of the obvious reasons is that Macron felt that there was a great risk of appearing as the president who allowed the RN to come to power. This would be the culmination of a long upward trend in the share of the vote obtained by the far right in France, and would have destroyed Macron’s political legacy.
The President of the Republic believed, as he has come to do, that he knew what was good for the country: he suffers from “Louis XIV syndrome” (l’état c’est moi). He gambled that the French would understand the dissolution, that they would change their vote in three weeks, and that the left would not be able to mount an effective campaign in the time available. None of this happened. All the electorate remembered was the need for clarity. So they inflicted a clear defeat on what has come to be called “Macronie”.
But, rather than clarity, what they got was confusion. Three forces emerged: the far right, the more conventional right together with the remains of Macron’s followers, and a coalition on the left which goes by the name of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP). What was particularly problematic for Macron was that the NFP was the largest of these groups and under normal conditions the new prime minister would have been a member of it. This would have been anathema for Macron, whose move to the right has been evident in recent months. In particular, he is a fervent believer in “trickle down” policies, and in difficult times thinks that the answer is to cut government spending and not to raise taxes, something that no NFP prime minister would have accepted. After months of wrangling, Macron appointed a right-wing prime minister, Michel Barnier, whose face is familiar in the UK as a result of his role in the Brexit negotiations.
His appointment as prime minister came after two months of political deadlock in France, with sources close to President Emmanuel Macron saying that Barnier’s profile finally fit the bill of the figure required for the job. The appointment met with outrage as an obvious denial of democracy. The NFP, who “won” the election under the banner of the need for change, found themselves faced with the same old ruling clique.
Barnier, 73, first became a French member of parliament in the 1970s, aged just 27, and first entered government in the mid-1990s under Chirac. He is more than twice the age of outgoing premier Gabriel Attal. While Attal was the youngest prime minister in the history of modern France, Barnier was the oldest. Serving stints as foreign minister and also two terms as an EU commissioner in Brussels, he is best known for taking on the thankless job he held from 2016, negotiating Britain’s exit from the European Union on behalf of the bloc.
He won considerable respect for his handling of the process. He wrote a book about Brexit, My Secret Brexit Diary: A Glorious Illusion. Its title already states clearly what he thought of the idea of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. He never ceased to express his amazement at how his British counterparts were handling the process.
“There is most definitely something wrong with the British system… every passing day shows that they have not realised the consequences of what is truly at stake here,” he wrote. After recent events in France he probably regrets those dismissive remarks.
The challenges facing him were immense: if he tried to push a bill through he faced a possible no-confidence motion in parliament, put forward by either his left-wing opponents or the far right, though a joint effort by the two did not seem to be on the cards. For those who thought that Barnier would bring a more conciliatory attitude than Attal and Macron, disappointment was on the menu. There was hope that the new governmental programme would include at least some recognition of the fact that the group that had obtained the largest share of the vote had voted for change. No such luck.
Austerity is back
As Barnier negotiated with the other groups over this bill, he revealed rapidly that he was what Paul Krugman refers to as a “deficit hawk”. Reverting to austerity, when servicing the French debt was showing no signs of being impossible, even though somewhat more costly, would seem to fit this definition.
One sign that austerity will have detrimental effects on our future welfare is the reaction to climate change. This is perhaps the greatest immediate threat that we all face. As a recent report from the UN shows, we are headed for an average global increase in temperature of over 3 degrees by 2050. This will not be evenly distributed. The effects have already been felt in France with unprecedented floods in the north and southwest, and drought elsewhere. France was playing a leading rule in the energy transition to offset this, but one austerity measure has been to cut back on subsidies for electric cars, for example, and not to consider this as a necessary investment. Myopia is the rule.
But the clearest immediate indication of this reversion to austerity was the recent announcement of the Social Security Financing Bill (PLFSS) for 2025, which showed who it was that had to tighten their belts. The announcement of a deficit of 18 billion euros for 2025 enables the government to justify new cost-cutting measures that will primarily affect households, especially the poorest. In all, five billion euros in savings are sought for 2025, compared with 3.5 billion for 2024.
The PLFSS proposes two main categories of measures. The first essentially involve a transfer of charges to households, which many consider constitutes a challenge to the rights of insured persons. The second category proposes savings in hospitals and on drugs and medical devices. The first set of measures is based on an increase in co-payments (the portion of the cost that households or their supplementary insurance must pay) from 30% to 40% in January 2025.
This measure is all the more problematic in that it coincides with an increase in the price of medical consultations from 26.5 to 30 euros. This increase will initially be passed on to complementary health insurance organizations — mutual insurance companies, provident institutions and insurance companies — which will automatically offset it by increasing their members’ premiums.
The additional cost for households is expected to translate into an 8% rise in the price of complementary insurance. Once again, households will finance the reform. This measure is all the more problematic given that a sizeable proportion (4%) of those insured by the social security system have no supplementary cover at all. Despite the efforts for Covid, the health system is creaking from the underinvestment that the pandemic revealed.
Forcing through this legislation was the last nail in the coffin for Barnier’s government. The two groups opposed to the government put down motions of no confidence. Despite calls for “responsibility” from Barnier’s followers, the first one secured a large majority with 331 for and 243 against. Despite Macron’s promise to nominate a new prime minister within 48 hours, negotiations took more time. In France, unlike other countries, when there is a problem, the power of decision reverts to the president and not to parliament. This is perhaps the part of the constitution that needs to be amended.
In the end a decision came on December 13th. At dawn that day, Emmanuel Macron called Francois Bayrou, one of the potential candidates, to tell him that he would not be nominated as prime minister as the headline in Le Monde duly related. Bayrou, furious, went to the Elysée, and after that meeting the decision was announced, a little later, that Bayrou would be the new prime minister. Bayrou leads a group of 36 deputies and a majority of 289 is needed to approve any decision. This is like a parody of the “Charge of the Light Brigade”:
Into the valley of death
Rode the thirty-six…
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the deputies knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
“Magnifique mais ce n’est pas la guerre” as someone remarked at the time. But there has been little that merits being described as “magnifique”. It seems highly unlikely that any order or stability can emerge from this. With a “new” government in power, one can only sit and watch; on ne sait jamais.
“Magnifique mais ce n’est pas la guerre” as someone remarked at the time. But there has been little that merits being described as “magnifique”. It seems highly unlikely that any order or stability can emerge from this. With a “new” government in power, one can only sit and watch; on ne sait jamais.
Conclusion
One of the depressing features of recent developments in the world, but particularly in the US, is that they are not an aberration, and developments in France show this. Even though people had voted for change, they did not get it, but the far right now plays a key role, as it does in the US. There people had experienced the first Trump term, and they knew what they were getting — and they still voted for it. It seems that we can no longer rely on the US as the leader of the West.
Given this, Thomas Piketty has argued recently in Le Monde that Europe should use its economic and political weight to play a leading role in world affairs. He claims that the world is sliding towards a situation which is no longer characterised by a respect for certain basic principles to which liberal democracies claim to adhere.
Why has Europe not picked up the ball? In the Council of Europe, unanimity of the partners is necessary in making decisions on certain “sensitive” issues, even if the number of such issues has been reduced over time. Unless there is common agreement on the goals, any participant has an effective veto. So the suggestion is that a much smaller group should be formed, based for example on France and Germany, and any other members of the EU who might want to commit themselves to a much tighter group than the current structure.
As Piketty says, “What does it matter if this reinforced union begins with just a few countries? The urgent need today is to react to the shock of Trumpism by asserting the strength of European values – those of parliamentary democracy, the social state and investment in the future.”
As General De Gaulle once said, when faced with a demonstrator holding up a sign saying “Mort aux cons” (Death to idiots), “Vaste projet, Monsieur”. Vaste projet indeed. But despite having watched the disintegration of our common project, there have been glimmers of hope that the French can still make common cause over some things. People are slowly coming to realise that the threat of immigration has been vastly overplayed. On another level, think of the 2024 Olympic Games and the magnificent restoration of Notre Dame. So even though these are but glimmers, I still have hope, at least for this country and our continent.
“Vive la France et vive l’Europe”
Alan Kirman
15 December 2024
References
Piketty, T. (2024). Unite France and Germany to save Europe. https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/