Lots of Talk, but Nobody’s Listening

France is up in arms again. but this time it is a lack of passion rather than an excess of it that has embattled the nation. The first French presidential election of the 21st century is being universally decried as lackluster and boring. The same two men who lined up seven years ago, Socialist Lionel Jospin and neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac, are vying for the post again. But having shared power as Prime Minister and President for the last five years, they both run as incumbents, and neither seems able to profit from that status. Pundits are predicting the highest abstention rate ever for next Sunday’s first round. Have the French lost interest in politics?

Clearly, they are not much moved by its traditional agents. Jospin and Chirac are all but certain to be the top two candidates and go on to the second round on May 5. But the two of them together are unlikely to get even half of the votes cast in the first. Most voters will choose from the 14 other candidates running toward certain elimination. On the right, polling as much as 13%, is the perennial untouchable, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who wants an end to the euro and to immigration. On the left are three Trotskyites, including one, Arlette Laguiller, whose call for a ban on all firings has made her a kind of national mascot; she is expected to get as much as 10%. Jean Saint-Josse, a defender of hunting and fishing rights, is polling better than Alain Madelin, an economic liberal whose platform isn’t much different from the one that took British Prime Minister Tony Blair to power.

Never before has the chasm been so obvious between the august stature of the President of the Republic and his fragile power. Not until after parliamentary elections on June 16 will the new President know whether he will be an active leader of French policy, working with a Prime Minister of his own party, or another “spectator President” like Chirac, who since 1997 has only been able to carp about domestic policy, which is in the hands of the Prime Minister.

Chirac’s inability to influence government policy during the last five years of “cohabitation” raises an uncomfortable question: What is so great about the presidency anyway? The strictures imposed by the European Union over everything from state industrial aid to budgetary discipline give any French president or government less room for maneuver. The domination of the United States and the predations of a globalized marketplace constrain France’s ability to put forward an alternative vision. Clearly, this isn’t Charles de Gaulle’s presidency anymore. But neither candidate seems able to acknowledge those changes in their campaigns. “France is in mental gridlock,” says Albert Bressand, managing director of the economic think tank Promethée in Paris. “We can’t seem to look at the future except in the mirror.” The burden of past grandeur casts a long shadow on a country that is a lot more average than it considers itself to be. “There’s a great nostalgia on both the right and the left for real power,” says Christian-Marie Wallon-Leducq, dean of the law faculty at the University of Lille. “This nostalgia is France, and the feeling is that if we abandon it we aren’t ourselves.”

Part of the nostalgia is for the kind of old-fashioned ideological battle that animates the French spirit. Instead the country is getting a sobering taste of centrist campaigning, to which many of its European partners have long since adjusted. “In France people still have the idea that you have to declare for the right or the left,” says Henrik Uterwedde, deputy director of the German-French Institute in Ludwigsburg, Germany. “But it’s not about socialism or freedom anymore, but rather what are the most intelligent policies to keep the social balance.”

The two main parties are straining to highlight differences that so far leave much of the French electorate uninspired. Having launched a platform that he characterized as “not socialist,” Jospin has reacted to a late dip in the polls by calling himself “the candidate of social progress,” promising both new tax cuts of more than 113 billion and to balance the budget by 2004. Chirac has pledged 130 billion in tax relief, aimed primarily at the middle class and at corporations, and is in less of a hurry to balance the books. Both candidates want to preserve France’s pay-as-you-go pension system and expand tax-sheltered savings plans to include more private employees. Chirac goes further in promoting pension funds “á la française.” Chirac wants to make the law on the 35-hour week more flexible, but he isn’t going to reverse it. “That would mean a general strike, which would cost us more than the 35-hour week does,” admits his campaign spokesman, Jérôme Peyrat. “It’s a bad thing, but it’s done.”

The differences between the two main platforms are small, but their camps feel compelled to pump them up with philosophical cant. “We’re the party of De Tocqueville, who believed that individuals are responsible for their own acts,” says Philippe Douste-Blazy, mayor of Toulouse and an important ally of Jacques Chirac. “The Socialists are the party of Sartre, who put responsibility on society.” The distinction is debatable, but it’s an apt example of how to leave the public wondering what you’re talking about.

Whoever wins on May 5 will face a France disenchanted with the status quo. Here are three key issues — plus some prescriptions for injecting them into the political debate — that neither main candidate seems willing to tackle head-on.

The State
The French are famously attached to — and rightfully proud of — public services provided by the state. But it doesn’t take a neo-liberal Anglo-Saxon to point out that the state rules in many areas that other actors could master just fine. “France unfortunately needs laws to do things that other countries manage to negotiate,” says prominent Socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former Finance Minister. “That’s a weakness.” And it feeds a vicious circle. Take France’s fractious unions. Split into five confederations that together claim only 9% of the workforce as members, the unions could never have negotiated the 35-hour work week on their own. Yet they are so weak because for decades the French government has extended collective bargaining agreements to non-union employees. Thus French workers see little advantage in being union members, since the state will make sure they do fine.

Across the Rhine in Germany, where unions are mass organizations joined in a single confederation, metalworkers negotiated the 35-hour week on their own in 1995. If France’s unions were similarly broad-based and confident, they would be less prone to strike. France lost almost 2.5 million work days to strikes in 2000 and has averaged strike losses 10 times higher than Germany through the 1990s. Public employees in France are particularly prone to walk-outs despite being protected from lay-offs. The victims are members of the public, such as the residents of Lyon who had to walk to work during the three-week strike of public transport workers that ended earlier this month.

What needs to be done: The state has to stand back and leave more scope not just for unions, but for all the organizations that make up civil society.

Will it happen? Eventually, it must. Nicole Notat, outgoing leader of one of France’s most forward-looking union confederations, has said that “the most ferocious partisans for state intervention condemn the state to ineffectualness” because society is becoming too complex for the French civil service to continue to perform — and fund — its traditional paternalistic role.

The Regions
In the resurgent Mediterranean port city of Marseilles, shipbuilder Raymond Vidil sounds a theme that has long been heard outside Paris: the regions need more power. He says that it is still easier to mobilize funds at the county level than at the more workable level of the region. “Europe can’t exist on an axis among capitals,” Vidil says. “We’re in competition with the Piedmont in Italy, with Catalonia in Spain, and we have to be able to act.” In Toulouse, Mayor Douste-Blazy makes the same point. “If [Catalan President] Jordi Pujol in Barcelona wants to build a canal or an airport, he raises a tax. Here you have to be a very, very good friend of the Minister of Transport.” Paris comes in for a scolding in Lille, too, where 665 handicapped children are housed and schooled across the border in Belgium because the state hasn’t built local facilities for them in France. “It seems like we get more and more control from Paris and less and less money,” complains Elisabeth Dusol, whose daughter Sophie spent eight years in a Belgian boarding school for the handicapped. She is convinced that more local control of the budget would help redress shortfalls before they become acute.

France remains the most centralized state in Europe, and both main candidates have vowed to give the nation’s 26 regions more power. Regional politicians say they’ve often heard such promises, but that progress has been halting since François Mitterrand substantially strengthened the regions 20 years ago.

What needs to be done: The regions should not represent another layer of bureaucracy, but an active and more independent conduit of public services and economic planning.

Will it happen? Fitfully. As the E.U.’s influence grows, so will that of the regions. That doesn’t mean Burgundy will ever have the autonomy that Bavaria enjoys.

Cultural Diversity
Only with tweezers do French politicians approach the multiethnic nature of today’s France. That’s hardly surprising, since the political class has had limited dealings with France’s millions of non-white citizens. No member of parliament from the French mainland, no minister, no prominent figure in either main political camp is of Arab or African descent. And the politicians’ helplessness shows. In a campaign visit to the banlieue of Marne-la-Jolie in early March, Chirac found himself showered with spit and disdain. For his part, Jospin admitted his “naiveté” in thinking that he could resolve France’s growing crime problem by addressing unemployment without tackling the plight of French minorities.

As a result, this important and growing segment of the population isn’t addressed directly as a group of voters, but obliquely as an agent of insecurité. That fuzzy French term means crime, which rose by more than 7.5% last year alone. Jospin and Chirac have both proposed a new ministry of domestic security, meant to better coordinate the activities of police and judges. But an administrative solution alone, even if it channels more needed funding into the banlieues, isn’t likely to do the trick.

In a bow to France’s egalitarian tradition, the state does not even publish statistics on racial origin. But some experts contend that same tradition has allowed it to elude facing up to widespread discrimination. “French minorities are different from those in Germany or the United Kingdom: in our heads, we really feel French,” remarks Malek Boutih, the president of the advocacy group SOS-Racisme. “Most of us want the same thing everyone else does: a little house, two kids, a dog and a couple of nights a month at the cinema,” says Boutih, whose parents came from Algeria. For more minorities to realize that goal, it isn’t enough for the economy to improve. Social and psychological walls have to fall, too.

What needs to be done: A grand geste against the exclusion of France’s minorities from the corridors of power would be to name a minister from their midst.

Will it happen? Not soon enough. Breaking into the closed circle of the French élite has proven a tough task for women,and will be even harder for minorities. But the effort is vital if France’s republican ideals are to be honored.

Those ideals have stood France — and the rest of the world — in good stead for generations, and there is no reason why they should not continue to be a beacon for future generations. Perhaps the disenchantment of the current election campaign is a reminder that France’s expression of “liberty, fraternity and equality” needs to be adjusted to a new reality. Those aims don’t need to be protected by a paternalistic state, directed from Paris, or based on an old template of a more homogeneous French population. The people of France are perfectly aware of that. Sooner or later, the politicians will be, too.