Leaders of France’s Socialist Party Defy Its Orthodoxy
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Version 0 of 1. PARIS — One is the bad boy of France’s Socialist government, the young former banker who has infuriated party die-hards by questioning France’s devotion to the 35-hour workweek and wondering aloud about coddled civil servants. The other is the government’s tough guy — on crime and immigration — equally obnoxious to the Socialist Party’s old guard. That two men — the economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, and Prime Minister Manuel Valls — so at odds with French Socialism’s orthodoxy are its de facto leaders is a measure of the depths of the party’s struggle for direction. With the far-right National Front party surging in polls as local elections approach in December, France’s politics is being relentlessly driven from the right. Yet it remains a country where public spending is 56 percent of gross domestic product, government workers are well over 20 percent of the labor force, and any hint of a loosening of economic rules prompts strikes and street protests. The emergence of the youthful tandem at the top of the Socialist government is provoking fundamental questions about the future of the party and whether it can remake — or at least moderate — itself in an era of stubborn 10 percent unemployment, chronic deficits and flat growth. It is a challenge that has become all the more urgent as the threat presented by the National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, has grown and the old Socialist Party, embodied in President François Hollande, who came up through its ranks, has shown little traction with voters. Mr. Macron, the former banker, likes financiers, and Mr. Valls, the government’s tough guy, likes the police. Neither speaks much about redistributing wealth. But both are far more popular now than Mr. Hollande, who drew a 22 percent approval rating in a recent poll. Through the late summer and early fall Mr. Macron has unapologetically launched pinpricks at Socialist dogma. In other contexts they would have appeared mild, but in France they have been incendiary. Mr. Macron’s sorties have provoked sputters of rage from tradition-minded activists and the party’s still solid base, but the economy minister, a self-confident 37-year-old, keeps on talking. On Tuesday, as Mr. Macron spoke at a conference in Lyon, a protester threw a yogurt pot at him, yelling: “You are murdering the unemployed!” Two op-ed columnists wrote recently in the newspaper Le Monde of “the disgust that the Macron-Valls axis inspires,” asking, “How could the left have arrived at this point?” The answer, no doubt, derives from a political calculation of their boss, Mr. Hollande, who put them in place in a nod to his own unpopularity and lack of success in taking on his party’s old guard. Despite the turbulence Mr. Macron and Mr. Valls have stirred, the president has shown no sign of reining in the two men, who may soon be serious political rivals. Mr. Hollande has pledged not to run for re-election if he cannot bring down unemployment. If Mr. Macron and Mr. Valls represent a vision of the party’s future, it is one seemingly out of step with the traditions of its past. Mr. Macron appears more at ease with business leaders than workers, and through the criticism he has continued to address corporate executives and others who do not normally sit still for speeches from Socialist government ministers. Mr. Valls, 53, was recently accused by a leading Socialist parliamentarian of being nothing more than a “fount of liberal ideas” — in the French context, a defender of free markets. He was forced to push through a signature piece of the government’s economic agenda over the heads of his own legislators this year. As the divisions within the party become ever more evident — and antagonistic — French analysts are having difficulty identifying what the Socialists actually stand for. “The governing party has neither a project nor intellectual consistency,” Marcel Gauchet, a historian and philosopher, wrote last year in a leading political journal, Le Débat. “At its top all ideological credibility has vanished.” Nor is it clear whom the left now represents, Mr. Gauchet said. “It prospered on its identification with ‘the people,’ ” he said in the review, which he edits. “But it is less and less of the working class.” The National Front, on the other hand, represents “the strongest synthesis in French politics,” Mr. Gauchet said: “the confluence of nationalist claims and social welfare claims.” In fact, most analysts say the National Front will make it at least to the final round of presidential elections in 2017, if not beyond. In a poll published Sunday, Ms. Le Pen drew 31 percent support in the 2017 presidential race. Already, some analysts say the National Front could be unbeatable, having also left the conservative party led by former President Nicolas Sarkozy in early disarray. In Le Débat, Le Monde’s national editor said this month of the National Front: “I don’t see what could stop it.” The contempt Ms. Le Pen showed Mr. Hollande to his face last week at the European Parliament in Strasbourg demonstrated her party’s confidence and ascendancy. She mockingly thanked the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, also present, for “coming with your vice-chancellor administrator of province-France,” Mr. Hollande. Mr. Hollande did not address Ms. Le Pen’s insult — a veiled reference to France’s conquered status in World War II — directly. Ms. Le Pen then further mocked his response as “lightweight.” In their effort to restore the stature of their party and country, Mr. Valls and Mr. Macron have pushed forward a program closer to those of the Social Democratic parties of Europe than those of traditional Socialists. Last week, after workers publicly ripped the shirts off Air France executives in a labor dispute turned violent, Mr. Valls leapt up in Parliament. But instead of defending the workers, he denounced them, saying their actions were “intolerable,” calling for “exemplary punishments,” and faulting the pilots’ union for lack of “responsibility.” Traditional left leaders, by contrast, defended the shirt rippers, who have since been arrested. Likewise, on Wednesday, Mr. Valls quickly moved to mollify angry police officers demonstrating over a recent shooting of one of their own, announcing new measures to strengthen law enforcement. Mr. Macron, whose past as a banker at Rothschild and Company is a constant source of reproach for Socialist Party activists, upset them this year with an economic reform law that tried to open up some professions to greater competition and has yet to make much of an impact. And he has been at it again, upsetting them consistently since late August. “The left might have thought, some time ago, that France could do better in working less,” Mr. Macron told an employers’ federation, in an indirect reference to the 35-hour workweek, sacred to the left but derided by economists. “All of that is now behind us,” Mr. Macron said. Then he infuriated the Socialist old guard by appearing to call into question the protected status of civil servants — “no longer adapted to the world as it is,” Mr. Macron was quoted as saying in a briefing meant to be off the record. He has also been at war with the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, over opening up sections of the city to Sunday shopping, regarded warily by Socialists as an infringement on workers’ rights and a cave-in to consumerism. Mr. Macron’s Sunday-shopping plans “reveal the fantasy of a city turned over entirely to tourist consumerism,” Ms. Hidalgo wrote in a recent letter to the economy minister. One of the staunchest of the old-line Socialist bosses, the mayor of Lille, Martine Aubry, said she was “fed up” with the ex-banker who appears to have taken over the party’s economic policy. But the prime minister has backed him. And in the French Parliament, there has been silence: A movement in its ranks dedicated to fighting the free-market turn of government policy has barely uttered a word all fall. At a meeting of producers and retailers of consumer goods, executives listened to Mr. Macron respectfully one morning recently. He told the business leaders that the state would be watching over their negotiations, especially attentive to signs that competition was being hindered. But his message on the state’s limits, not its powers, was strongest. “The role of the state is not to block initiatives,” the economy minister said. “The state can’t do everything, and it can’t be in every negotiation.” |