Something Has Gone Rotten in France's Top Caste William Pfaff International Herald Tribune Tuesday, July 31, 2001
PARIS The two fundamental institutions of modern government in France - the Gaullist Fifth Republic's constitution and the professional governing class, the product of an institution also created by Charles de Gaulle, the postgraduate National School of Administration - have been greatly undermined in recent years. This means that the quality of government, in the past very high, has declined, and its perceived legitimacy has been corrupted by political cowardice, and intellectual and fiscal dishonesty.
The Gaullist constitution was subverted when President François Mitterrand in the 1980s and President Jacques Chirac in the 1990s decided to cling to the presidency despite their supporters' defeat in parliamentary elections. They named "cohabitation" prime ministers to carry out policies opposed to those which they themselves had been elected to carry out.
The intent of the constitution, as de Gaulle himself said, was that a president who lost his parliamentary majority should either resign, forcing a new presidential election, or, if the margin of defeat was small, continue with a government composed of nonpartisan figures. The result of cohabitation is that two deeply compromised individuals are expected to run in next year's presidential election. They are the currently "cohabiting" president and prime minister, Mr. Chirac and Lionel Jospin. Mr. Jospin's commitment to an anti-democratic Trotskyist sect, from the mid-1960s forward, has only recently been revealed. For more than 30 years he denied membership in this secretive group, practicing deliberate infiltration of democratic parties in order to manipulate them. For much of that time he was also a member of the Socialist Party, eventually becoming its leader, a government minister, its presidential candidate and, today, the prime minister of a Socialist-led coalition government.
Yet even now he declines to say when and how his Trotskyist commitment ended, or even whether it has ended. He says only that in 1971, when he joined the Socialist Party, he began "to act fully as a socialist militant." This does not answer the question. He says that Trotskyism was a youthful intellectual enthusiasm, and concerns only himself.
To talk about this is not to conduct a witch-hunt. The problem is not Trotskyism but that of intellectual honesty and telling the truth to voters.
Fellow members of his governing coalition have apparently found no reason to reproach Mr. Jospin. And few in the political opposition have offered more than trivially partisan comments, as if nothing important were at stake.
Opposition and government members are nearly all graduates of the National School of Administration - ENA, in its French acronym. They form an administrative/political caste which dominates politics as well as government. Party partisanship clearly does not erase class interest, as Trotsky himself understood. Mr. Jospin's presumed opponent next year, Mr. Chirac, has been in publicized trouble for many months, concerning his period as mayor of Paris. Allegations of partisan and personal favoritism, sham jobs and illegal kickbacks to political parties by public works contractors have been under investigation. The accusations originally concerned money supposedly meant for political party expenses. Now they concern personal use of that money, and of the "special" cash funds supplied since 1947 to the presidential office and to ministries. These funds are supposed to finance intelligence operations but actually have been used for election expenses and as tax-free supplements to the salaries of officials.
This money, voted by Parliament, is supposed to be accounted for by each minister, and the law (of April 27, 1946) says that any surplus must be returned to the Treasury at the end of each fiscal year. The law adds that "the prime minister is responsible to the Assembly for the use of these funds." These provisions seem to have been ignored for years. President Chirac has even defended himself against the charge that he spent kickback money on private travel and holidays by saying that the money really was leftover special funds from his time as prime minister, a decade earlier.
An American lawyer in Paris, Aram Kevorkian, comments that the president's defense is effectively this: "I simply took the money from the public treasury when I was entrusted with the funds as prime minister." In some other countries, Mr. Kevorkian says, that would be considered embezzlement.
That all this has gone on for so long is mainly due to the domination of public affairs and politics by the ENA graduates, and the sense of impunity that has developed among them. A French commentator, Max Gallo, asked as long ago as 1979: Who serves as guarantor of this elite "which considers itself indispensable?"
What if it really is no longer the brilliant and incorruptible elite it was meant to be? "Who can pose such questions, when from one end of the political horizon to the other the only people to testify are members of the same club?"
So far the public reaction to these abuses seems to be alienation rather than anger. A kind of corruption characteristic of the discredited Third and Fourth Republics has been reinstalled, in a country whose politicians like to say that the national vocation is to be "exemplary."