================================== NEW DEMOCRATS ONLINE -- NEW DEM DAILY -- Pithy news and commentary from the DLC. ================================== [ http://www.ndol.org ]
29-APR-02
The French Center-Left Melts Down
Most of the reaction in this country to the first round of French presidential voting on April 20 focused on the shocking second- place finish of the darling of the far right, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who will face incumbent Jacques Chirac in a runoff next month. But a closer look at the vote -- in which Le Pen performed only a few percentage points better than his customary showing as a perennial presidential candidate -- shows the real story is the failure of the French center-left, represented by Premier (and losing presidential candidate) Lionel Jospin's Socialist Party, to make any coherent case for reform to the French people.
When you add to Le Pen's vote that of another far right candidate, and two Trotskyist candidates on the far left, about three of ten French voters cast ballots for presidential aspirants far out of the political mainstream. In part, that's due to an electoral system that provides easy ballot access for minor candidates in a usually meaningless first round, thus encouraging protest voting against the same old Gaullist and Socialist candidates who invariably (up until now) meet in the runoff.
But Jospin's failure to outpace Le Pen reflects something deeper. During the 1990s, French Socialists were conspicuous dissenters from the international "Third Way" movement that led social democratic leaders in Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden, among others, to join New Democrats in the United States in pushing for a modernization of the progressive political tradition and the public sector systems created by past progressive governments.
With some of Europe's most entrenched centralized bureaucracies and expensive pension and social welfare systems, the French center-left could never quite bring itself to undertake the kind of internal debate on reform that became common in other countries. Leading a coalition government that included Communists and other Marxists, Jospin often refused to take credit for his own party's timorous efforts towards reform for fear of alienating those to his Left. "The party seems torn between proposing a modernizing agenda and perpetuating its traditional approach," notes Frederic Michel and Matthew Browne of the British think tank Policy Network, in an analysis of the presidential vote. "Having failed to present a moderate left argument to their voters, should they be surprised to see their supporters seduced by other camps?"
Not surprisingly, leftist opponents of the "Third Way" movement in Europe and elsewhere have argued that the French Socialists should have resolved their dilemma by moving not to the center, but to the left, pre-empting the Trotskyist protest vote. March and Browne warn that "to learn this lesson from defeat could be to consign the entire French left to a decade or more with no hope of power.... The Socialists have for too long delayed a real debate on the need to reform. The consequence of this is that it has bred animosity on the far-left, and annoyance among centrists."
Another French Socialist mistake should be familiar to Americans who remember the "politics of evasion" that led Democrats in the 1980s to concede important "toughness to govern" issues like crime to the conservative opposition. According to Policy Network, British M.P. Peter Mandelson, a key figure in Tony Blair's New Labour movement, commented: "There are sections of the left in Europe, just as there were in Britain in the 80s, who are just not comfortable dealing with issues like crime, asylum and immigration. But if you don't have a programme, or don't seem to be emotionally engaged with the public's fears, you are bound to cede ground to those who shamelessly exploit these issues to whip up emotion and paranoia. Blair put that right for us in the early 90s."
When Chirac crushes Le Pen in the second round of the French presidential election, many progressive leaders in France and elsewhere will probably express not only relief but self-satisfaction at a decisive public repudiation of the far right. But the French center-left, like its counterparts in Europe and even in the United States, must remember the larger lesson of Jospin's meltdown: if responsiveness to public opinion, and to the real need for effective government, are perpetually subordinated to considerations of party unity or to fidelity to old left-wing habits and traditions, the center-left will eventually stand for nothing but an increasingly distant past.
Related Material:
"Who can the French left blame?" by Frederic Michel and Matthew Browne, Policy Network, April 28, 2002: http://www.policy-network.org/show_art.phtml?art_id=1&art_date=2002-04-28
"The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency," by William Galston and Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, PPI Policy Report, September 1989: http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?contentid=2447&knlgAreaID=128&subsecid=174