Give him hell !

It is axiomatic that political leaders find it easier to make an impact on foreign policy than to shepherd through difficult reforms in their own country. France is no exception. Going back to the Chirac presidency that lasted a total of 12 years (from 1995 to 2007), Jacques Chirac will probably be most remembered for his dogged, and applauded, opposition to France’s participation in the American led invasion of Iraq than for anything he achieved at home – apart perhaps from abolishing compulsory military service. On his five-year watch, Nicolas Sarkozy introduced some minor reforms on universities and pensions but made a much greater impact on the European scene by his vigorous action to contain the financial and banking  crisis of 2007 and 2008. Even the hapless François Hollande showed greater decisiveness in dispatching French troops to fight terrorists in Sub-Saharan Africa than he ever showed on the domestic front. As for Emmanuel Macron, who passed the first anniversary of his election to the French presidency on May 7, it could be argued that he has already achieved as much on the international stage as his three predecessors in the last 20 years. His frenetic year of international and business diplomacy that I referred to in a previous post (“Looking outwards from Versailles” – February 6, 2018) has since been completed by a state visit to the United States and a trip to Australia. All this has put France fairly and squarely on the map again as the leading European power, actively involved in the crises of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa and talking to every world leader in the grand tradition of de Gaulle and Mitterrand. And the rest of the world has noticed. Despite the fact that domestic reforms are only just beginning, the single-minded determination to pursue them on the part of a youthful and energetic president has vastly improved France’s image as a country in which to live, invest and do business.  In an interview with America’s Fox News, in English, broadcast the day before his U.S. visit, Macron was asked whether there was any chance that he would back down on the contentious reform of the SNCF. His cryptic answer  - “No chance” -  was clearly meant for both international and domestic consumption (it was the only extract to be broadcast, with subtitles, on French prime time news). The sub-text was undoubtedly: “France has changed and I shall make sure that it continues to change”.

 All this being said, as the French saying goes, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!  (“The more things change, the more they stay the same”). On the domestic scene, many of the reforms that Macron’s government is implementing or in the process of introducing, have come up against predictable, and sometimes violent, resistance on the streets. Even if the strike at the SNCF seems to be petering out, it is far from over. Air France, which has also been strikebound for the past few weeks, has been dealt a nasty blow by the outcome of an ill-judged company-wide referendum on salary increases that attempted to go over the heads of particularly militant unions. The referendum was lost, the boss resigned and the very future of the airline is now in doubt. The financial daily “Les Echos” wrote the other day that both companies are slowly committing suicide by refusing to recognise that the world has changed.  The evacuation of Notre Dames des Landes  (“Cleared for take-off?” December 19,2017) has been more protracted than planned. A small number of universities are “occupied” and vandalised by a radical student fringe that seems intent on igniting another May 1968. And on top of these flash points, there is clearly a more diffuse feeling of discontent as reforms that were judged essential at election time are now starting to bite. Millions of pensioners are upset that their taxes have been raised to finance lower payroll taxes for those in work. Rural dwellers complain that in spite of Macron’s lofty declarations about reviving their communities, nothing has changed since May 2017. 

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s vocal party, “La France Insoumise”, intent on styling itself as the main party of opposition, did its best to capitalise on these discontents by organising a “festive” demonstration called “La Fête à Macron” in Paris on May 6. According to a media count, about 40 000 people attended. The title of the demonstration was deliberately ambiguous. “La fête” evokes the idea of a party, festive and non-violent, in marked contrast to the violence that marred the traditional Mayday marches in Paris this year, but the underlying criticism becomes clear if one considers the other sense of “faire la fete à Macron”, a popular expression meaning: “give Macron hell!”

Such demonstrations are designed of course to catch the cameras and inspire headline writers. And so they do. The underlying aim was to portray Macron as a heartless leader with a background in the ultra-capitalist world of investment banking, a “President of the rich”, insensitive, in typical left-wing parlance, to the sufferings and anger of the poor, downtrodden and dispossessed. Opinion polls would suggest that the attempt has not been entirely unsuccessful. And as politicians are not in the business of offering a balanced view of their opponents’ policies, and the media rarely make it their business either, it is easy to forget that Macron’s government has also introduced measures to give children from disadvantaged backgrounds a better start in school, increased benefits for the handicapped, abolished some local taxes for the less well-off and engineered a radical overhaul of apprenticeships and vocational training. Not to speak of Macron’s own repeated willingness to talk plainly and directly to ordinary people: onlookers at remembrance day celebrations, farmers at the annual agriculture show, pensioners in provincial towns or the victims of a devastating hurricane in the French Caribbean islands last winter.

Political life will undoubtedly continue like this for some time yet, in the time-honoured French tradition, dotted with carefully choreographed presidential walkabouts and interviews, inflamed parliamentary debates and colourful street demonstrations, their impact measured in almost real time by the ever present pollsters.  The next opportunity to test public opinion for real will come with the municipal elections in two years time. Next year will see elections to the European parliament too, but voters, if they go to the polls at all, will be voting on questions that are somewhat removed from the bread and butter issues that affect their daily lives. By then, Macron’s policies will have produced some effects. Just what policies and what effects will be the subject of the next post.

Train spotting

The good news about the rail strike is that it’s still possible to get around on strike days. Buses and metros are operating normally in Paris and its suburbs, some high-speed trains are running and although it’s difficult to get into work on time, it’s not impossible. Unlike the last big rail strike in 1995, which also affected the bus and metro network, mobile apps give up-to-the minute information about which trains are running on what lines.  The Internet also facilitates car-pooling and makes it possible for more and more people to do essential work from home.

A few days ago, I arrived five minutes before the time indicated on the app. at the station of a Western suburb of Paris to travel two stations down the line. The platform was crowded with building workers going home after work. They were mostly, I guess, of African origin although I also heard occasional snatches of East European languages.  The train was on time but already packed, so not everyone could squeeze in. The next day I joined a 100-meter long queue of bemused Chinese tourists outside the Château de Versailles. They were waiting for a bus to take the 25-minute ride to the nearest terminus of the Paris metro. The bus was packed too. At one stop an old man in a wheelchair watched forlornly as the bus arrived and left again, leaving him no chance whatsoever of getting on.

As usual, a public transport strike affects most acutely those who have little choice but to use it to get from A to B.

As the series of rolling strikes ends its second week, prime time news still focuses on colourful street demonstrations with banners, flares and megaphones or resigned passengers stuck at mainline stations and union leaders continue to repeat their much rehearsed sound bites about the destruction of public services and the extinction of their “statut” (“A fair hearing” - March 2017). But out of the media spotlight, there are signs that the number of strikers is slowly dwindling. On Thursday in a TV interview, Emmanuel Macron chose his words carefully so as not to antagonise railway workers, but gently chided that they should refrain from spreading “irrational fears” like the bogeyman of SNCF privatisation which, he promised, was not on the agenda, pledging that the company would remain 100% public. Media attention has also been diverted to the long promised evacuation of the area around Notre Dame des Landes (“Cleared for take-off?”- December 2017) with its action packed pictures of fearsome looking riot police facing masked and helmeted demonstrators and trails of tear gas from grenades. Macron commented soberly that, “as the French would expect… republican order is being restored”. Coming back to the causes of the rail strikes, two days after the Assemblée Nationale voted to change the legal structure of the SNCF, he conceded that the state would gradually take on a part of its massive debt. As to the rest of the reform, he would, he said, “see it through”.

My feeling is that he will.

The state of the state

The Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, but it is only the past 30 years that France has become used to living within a larger European land mass and single trading area and sharing a currency with 18 other countries. Relinquishing some national sovereignty started in 1985 with the Schengen agreement. In 1986 the single European market legislation was introduced and in 1992 the Maastricht treaty was signed and ratified. Shortly after the turn of the century, people could travel across France’s borders with minimum immigration and customs checks and no longer had to change francs into D-marks, lira or pesetas because crisp Euro banknotes and freshly minted coins had supplanted them all. And, as Marine Le Pen found out to her cost at the presidential election in May 2017, a majority of the French have no desire to put the clock back.

At about the same time that power in these crucial areas of national sovereignty was being delegated upwards to supranational institutions, the government of France, under François Mitterrand, started a process of delegating power downwards to regional and local authorities.  A policy of decentralisation, initiated in 1982 was expanded in 2003 and again by François Hollande’s landmark regional reform in 2014.

So what then of the centralised state? Article 1 of the 1958 constitution of the Fifth Republic states that  “France is a republic that is one and indivisible” – a notion that originated with the French Revolution. An amendment stating that it has a “decentralised organisation” was approved in 2003. Paradoxically though, instead of reducing the influence of central government, as might be logically expected from a country that sets great store by logic, decentralisation, instead of flattening and rationalising layers of administration, has tended to pile them on top of each other. Many considered for instance that the regional reform of 2014 was a golden opportunity to dispense with the “département”, introduced by Napoleon Bonaparte, and delegate more power to variable geometry rural or urban local authorities answering increasingly to a larger regional authority. It was not to be. 22 regions were merged into 13 European-sized entities but “départements” survived, with their own governance and specific powers. A prefect and sub-prefects are still in attendance to represent the state. And although local authorities raise local taxes, they are still heavily dependant on dwindling subsidies from central government to balance their books.

The centralised state is thus increasingly caught between two conflicting constraints. The current reform proposals for the SNCF are a good illustration: within a few years, regional authorities, that have now been given the powers to organise their own transport needs, will be able to award tenders to competitors of the SNCF. Main line rail services on the other hand will be increasingly influenced by the four European Rail Packages to which France has finally, but reluctantly, agreed. 

Would not the logical conclusion be for France eventually to adopt a federal structure, with the state limiting itself to a smaller number of policy areas like defence and security, public finances, justice, possibly education, and health care? Some of which would be carried out in in cooperation with other federal countries within the EU?

Such an outcome seems highly unlikely. For any such move would go seriously against the grain of a country that has spent centuries building up and consolidating its national unity. Shortly before his death in 1985, the famous historian, Fernand Braudel, put it in the following terms in an interview with “Le Monde”: ……”(over the centuries) France has expended its most precious resources to build itself into a single entity..… in France’s identity, there is therefore this need for concentration and centralisation against which it is dangerous to act.”

In the eyes of the rest of the world, Emmanuel Macron passes for an energetic and reforming President, but the truth is that in adapting France’s highly centralised and costly state to the requirements of both European integration and regional decentralisation, he has barely scratched the surface. Amidst all the crowing over the reduction in 2017 of France’s annual budget deficit to less than the Maastricht yardstick of 3% of GDP, for the first time in nearly 20 years, it has hardly been noticed that growth-driven tax revenue can explain all of the improvement and that public sector spending has barely fallen. It was still a record 45.4 % of GDP last year. Spend some time, usually far longer than you would like, in any  government office and you will find that although computer screens have replaced ledgers and pen-pushers have become mouse-clickers, little else has changed in years. The government has announced that public sector workers will soon be able to volunteer, undoubtedly with a generous sweetener, to try their luck in the private sector. The youngest and most ambitious may take up the offer. The others, in the absence of any obligation, are more likely to stick to their job for life until retirement. Whether their advantageous pension scheme will have been merged with all the others by then, whether everyone in work in the public or private sector, or self-employed, will get the same basic pension for the same level of contribution remains to be seen. Macron had promised that reform for 2019 but its timetable is already slipping. For the time being, railway workers are about to go on strike to defend an employment contract that was initially drafted in 1920 and are protesting about the possible effects of greater competition on the railways. As to the long march towards greater integration of the Euro area and the EU it will only happen on terms that France finds acceptable - and that are not too far removed from its own proposals. As always, most other Europeans would say.

It seems fairly safe to assume therefore that, like a top-heavy super-tanker, the French ship of state will sail slowly on, changing course only if it risks running out of fuel or is rocked by an occasional violent storm. Jean Monnet was indeed wise not to attach any deadline to his determination to bring about “an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.”

A fair hearing

Ten months after taking power, Emmanuel Macron, his Prime Minister and his government will be facing their first real taste of opposition in the next few weeks. As so often happens in France, it will come from the street and as so often in the past, it will be mounted by railway workers.  This time they are protesting about the government’s proposals for  reform of the SNCF. There is a general impression in the media and public opinion that the future of Macron’s reforming agenda will be determined by the outcome of this dispute

The objective reasons for reforming the wholly state-owned SNCF can be summarised in a few sentences and are hardly in dispute: the company has a quasi monopoly of rail services in France, a debt of over €50 billion, about 160,000 employees for just over 300,000 pensioners and its running costs are roughly 30% higher than those of its European competitors. The main reason for this is that train drivers, maintenance and sales staff and on-board ticket inspectors work shorter hours and are entitled to longer holidays and earlier retirement than most other public and private sector workers. Their highly specific labour contract, their “statut” as it is called, dates back to 1920 when a large part of their job consisted in shovelling coal into the boilers of steam-powered locomotives. The government is intent on abandoning the “statut” for new recruits and turning the SNCF, currently an integral part of the public sector and therefore immune to normal market pressures, into a still publicly owned but normal joint stock company to be run on a more commercial basis.  It should be noted in passing that the SNCF, through its majority owned subsidiary, Keolis, is successfully and profitably running railway, tramway and bus service all over the world, from Boston, Massachusetts, to India to Australia.  But in France, it has never been able to do so. In protest against the reform plans, the railway unions have announced a two-day strike every three days from the beginning of April to the end of June, a strike mode designed, as a union official quite openly admitted on television a few nights ago, “to combine maximum disruption to train services with minimum loss of earnings for railway workers”.

As previous French governments have accepted, after much procrastination, an EU-wide regulation introducing greater competition in rail services, while doing nothing to prepare the SNCF to meet it, it is clear enough to most people why these fairly minimal reforms are necessary.  But the unions see the reform as the thin end of the wedge towards more flexible working practices, longer hours and more commercial management. And yet, the government has been careful to stake out its ground: existing employees will keep their statut until they retire, and no proposal is being made at this stage to reform their generous pension scheme or close down unprofitable rail services, both of which will be dealt with in 2019 or later. The government has promised consultation with the unions, presumably one of the reasons why they haven’t called a strike until after the Easter weekend. There will undoubtedly be many such consultations, out of the media spotlight, between now and April 3.

This ritual process of consultation is probably the key to the outcome of the dispute. In France, no more than anywhere else, employees are understandably reluctant to give up employment privileges, however out-dated. But in France, much more than anywhere else, people in general insist on being consulted, expressing their views and being listened to. In the somewhat futile “what-if” approach to history, many are those who wonder whether the French Revolution, for instance, would have taken the course it did if Louis XVI had listened more carefully to the complaints of his downtrodden subjects. The fact is that every French person feels that everyone has a right to speak out and be listened to. Having lived in France for so many years, I have lost count of the number of meetings of committees, associations or other groups I have attended in which participants did not necessarily want to answer the chairperson’s questions, react to what someone else had just said or propose a practical way forward but simply to sound off about what was on their mind. In an Anglo-Saxon culture, a meeting of any kind usually has a chairperson, whose job it is to guide the meeting through an agenda, give the floor to people who ask for it, sum up the discussion and suggest a way forward. In France, and I suspect in most countries with a more Latin culture, the chairperson is seen as more of an honorific title than a function, the agenda is vague, contributions to the discussion are spontaneous and not necessarily about the point at issue, there is little attempt to sum up and once everybody has had a chance to express their views, the meeting goes on to talk about something else or breaks up. Subsequently, whatever needs to be done gets done - those with executive power have to find a way of reconciling conflicting views and constraints, often an impossible task. But the essential thing for most people is not necessarily that decisions are taken but that everyone has had a chance to air their views.  

French labour unions, far stronger in the public than the private sector, have become extraordinarily skilled at exploiting these foibles of the national psyche. On top of presenting labour conflicts in the usual guise of workers fighting for their rights against an uncaring and technocratic government, they frequently complain that governments “don’t listen”, have already “made up their mind” or refuse to engage in “real negotiations”, which is usually union speak for the refusal to meet their demands. Other bogeymen designed to resonate powerfully with the public are often conjured up too, like “an all-out attempt to destroy”, or - even more prominent in union demonology  - to “privatise” public services. For their part, ministers fall over themselves to declare that they are “negotiating in good faith” and that “their door is always open”.

It is of course the unions’ role to defend their members' interests as best they can. As for the government, it may have picked its fight carefully over SNCF reform but it has not made life easier for itself by announcing that it will legislate through the French equivalent of executive orders (ordonnances), which makes it sound as if it will not listen to the other side and is refusing a proper parliamentary debate. And for the first time since the start of the Macron presidency, the unions are apparently united in their chosen course of action.

The cause of the last major transport strike of 1995, that paralysed the whole country for six long weeks, was that Prime Minister Alain Juppé unexpectedly foisted radical reform proposals on unsuspecting public sector employees, including railway workers, and they were justifiably angry. The government eventually had to back down and abandon much of its proposed reform.  And it was not because the unions won the argument but because a majority of the general public, in spite of the chaos in the country and the extreme difficulty of getting to work or anywhere else, ultimately chose to back the public sector employees and not the government. I suspect that the key to averting or ending the promised rail strike this time will not be the merits of each side’s arguments but, once again, whether people generally feel that the railway workers have been given not necessarily a fair deal but a fair hearing in the court of public opinion. Today, railway workers’ “anger”, faced with a reform that Macron has abundantly trailed and that will not affect them much anyway, sounds more rhetorical than real. But the government does not have much ground to give. If it does come to a protracted strike, both sides will appeal to public opinion  - and public opinion will decide.

One thing is therefore abundantly clear.  If the government manages to attain the limited goals of this reform and is considered to have won its fight with the unions, it will have a freer hand to move on to the more ambitious reforms that Macron has promised in other areas. If it has to back down, it will have seriously weakened its capacity to take on more intractable issues like pension reform or the reorganisation of the tentacular civil service. It is worth recalling that many of those who voted for Macron in May of last year did not necessarily support his reforming ambitions but wanted, quite simply, to prevent Marine le Pen from coming to power. His reforms to date, of the labour code, vocational training and university access have not caused much protest, but on the other hand, for all except the very wealthy, taxes have risen. Sooner or later, men and women in the street will deliver their verdict on his efforts so far and decide whether they want him to continue.

The right stuff - Marion in Maryland

The French chattering classes registered surprise a couple of weeks ago at a very political speech that Marion Maréchal Le Pen delivered to the American Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland. Marion is the youngest of the Le Pen political dynasty, the granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the Front National party and the niece of Marine Le Pen, the party’s current leader. Surprise, because after having served one term as France’s youngest ever MP, Marion announced that she would not seek re-election to parliament following Emmanuel Macron’s victory in May of last year. Instead she said that she was leaving politics altogether. How – and why - she was on the bill at CPAC has not been revealed. But her presence there served as a reminder that when her aunt, Marine, was running for the presidency of France, she singularly failed to get a photo-op with Donald Trump despite making a trip to New York for that very purpose.

For somebody who has decided to leave politics and devote the next years of her career to setting up an academy for young leaders in France, Marion’s political instincts are clearly as sharp as ever. During a ten minute presentation in highly accented and sometimes incomprehensible English, she borrowed largely from the ideology and vocabulary of Brexit and Donald Trump with well-rehearsed lines like “make France great again”, “we want our country back”, “never underestimate the people” and “France used to be the eldest daughter of the Catholic church and is now the little niece of Islam”. Her audience applauded loudly when they recognised a familiar point and obviously warmed to a young woman who must fit every American male’s fantasy about French girls.  Interviewed on French TV, shortly afterwards, her aunt Marine looked distinctly dowdy and ill-at-ease, saying only that Marion was in America to pursue her business ventures.

However fresh and attractive Marion may have looked to the CPAC audience however, the ideas she expressed were neither fresh nor particularly attractive. They seem to come straight out of what Sudhir Hazareesingh refers to in his book “How the French think”  (Penguin Random House, 2015) as “the demonology of French conservative nationalism”: the decay of the nation, an elite that is out of touch and the malevolent influence of Islam. That did not prevent her admirers in France from loving it. “Macron is the not the only one who can speak English”, commented one clearly adoring supporter in the comments section of the YouTube video of her presentation. Others made it clear that they wanted her back in politics and running the Front National. Facing a party conference in a week or so, Marine Le Pen is still fighting the headwinds of her lacklustre presidential campaign. She conceded magnanimously a couple of days later however that if Marion wanted to take on responsibilities within the Front National again, she would be welcome to do so.

All this being said, Marion is certainly more popular in her party than is the abrasive Laurent Wauquiez, new leader of the right-wing Républicains in his. Braving no serious opposition, he was predictably elected to the leadership a few weeks ago. Despite his impeccable educational background and considerable political experience though, Wauquiez is not everyone’s cup of tea. Centrist leaning party worthies like Alain Juppé, Xavier Bertrand or Valerie Pécresse have publicly criticised him and some have left the party altogether. No sooner had he been elected than he was embroiled in controversy when a speech he gave to business school students in Lyon was recorded, against his will we are assured, and widely broadcast on social media and the radio. The speech was full of derogatory and largely unfounded remarks not only about his political opponents like Emmanuel Macron but also, and more significantly, about his supposed political allies like Nicolas Sarkozy. Wauquiez subsequently apologised to Sarkozy and sought to justify his comments by claiming that he was only indulging in plain speaking, something he said that politicians should do more of.  Most observers heard only gratuitous insults.

All in all therefore, very little has happened in the past few months to advance the cause of the right-wing opposition in France. Marion Maréchal le Pen has ruled out returning to politics any time soon and Laurent Wauquiez is struggling to define a political line that does sound fresh and attractive, within a party that appears to be losing an increasing number of activists and sympathisers.  In a fund-raising mail shot that I received the other day, he refers to the values his party wishes to uphold, like work, merit and authority but also calls for a “reaction” to the government’s “passivity” in the face of a “massive” increase in crime and immigration. As his former colleague, Xavier Bertrand, pointed out perfidiously, if people didn’t know that such language had been cooked up by the Républicains, they could be forgiven for thinking that it was describing the policies of the Front National.

The biggest issue before the party therefore is how porous the border will turn out to be between its traditional voters and those of the Front National.  Or as Jean-Marie Le Pen has put it on many occasions, whether they will they vote for the real thing or only for the copy. Elections to the European Parliament next year and municipal elections in 2020 will be the first opportunities to find out. But to make a mark once again, Républicains leaders will have to work out quickly how to mount a credible opposition to Emmanuel Macron’s reforms, which, in their heart of hearts, they approve of and would have liked to undertake during Sarkozy’s presidency  - but didn’t. From his safe new vantage point as senior advisor to a venture capital firm, the once presidential hopeful, François Fillon, must be looking on wistfully as, one by one, the planks of what most people would consider a right-wing political platform are being torn up and put to use elsewhere.

A new sense of reality ?

The French in general and their ruling classes in particular have often been criticised for being unrealistic in their outlook and expectations. Foreigners are usually the first to notice it. The Nobel Prize winning American economist, Paul Krugman, for instance, in an essay written in 1997 (“Unmitigated Gauls: Liberté, Egalité, Inanité” in “The Accidental Theorist”- 1998) writes, among other things, about “the refusal of French elites to face up to what looks like reality to the rest of us…. “ in connection with the economic policies he observed  at the time. But French commentators too can be sensitive to the same characteristic in their fellow countrymen. In his well-known book “Le Mal Français” (1977) Alain Peyrefitte reports a conversation with Doctor Albert Schweitzer at his hospital in Lambarene in 1959. Schweitzer of course had both a German and a French background and was from Alsace, where the prevailing culture has always been more Germanic than French. He told Peyrefitte, in no uncertain terms, that he preferred to work with other nationalities than the French, because “they are not afraid to face reality – one of the prime conditions for changing it. Latin peoples”, he added dismissively, “prefer theory!”

There is undoubtedly more than a grain of truth in such assertions. You don’t have to live in France for very long before you start to understand the familiar jibe about the French who will not be satisfied that something works in practice unless it also works in theory! After living in France for so long however, it is interesting to look back and consider the changes that have occurred in attitudes and culture over time. A number of recent developments give me reason to think that over a period of 30 years or so, there has been a gradual embrace of greater realism in many areas of national life. While this slow evolution has probably been going on in the background for many years, it has definitely become more visible since Emmanuel Macron’s election to the Presidency in May 2017 and the first eight months in office of Prime Minister Philippe and his government. Two examples that have been in the news recently are good illustrations of what I mean: the first concerns the long-running debate about access to university and the second attitudes to fiscal deficits and public debt.

Draft legislation on conditions of access to universities is currently completing its passage through parliament and may soon become law. For the first time ever, the legislation lays down a general rule that publicly run universities may require a particular academic profile and/or school record to approve admission to certain courses. What it amounts to is greater freedom for universities to select the candidates they think are most likely to succeed.  Now, the word “selection” has always been like a red rag to a bull to many prospective students and their representative organisations. It is often forgotten, for instance, that a government proposal to allow universities to select their students was one of the triggers for the events of May 1968. It sank without trace.  In 1986, a fresh attempt to introduce a selection process was made by the government of Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. Once again, it caused massive demonstrations by high-school and university students as well as the death of a demonstrator at the hands of riot police. The proposal was withdrawn and the minister responsible resigned. Over 30 years later, the subject is once again on the table but this time, thanks perhaps to some skilful political manoeuvring and the studious avoidance of the actual word “selection", opposition has so far been muted. Some student organisations have even said, initially at least, that they are not opposed to the new system.

If this new legislation is finally adopted as presented  - and subsequently implemented - it would indeed herald a big change in attitudes. After all, it would curtail a right that has been held dear for over a hundred years, which is that success at the high-school leaving exam, the baccalauréat, automatically gives access to free higher education in a state run university. When only 1% of an age group passed the famous exam, first year students were well equipped to meet the challenges of higher education. Now that 80% of an age group pass a baccalauréat of one kind or another, many would-be students are not so equipped, and yet they, their parents and their teachers still consider that they are entitled to claim a university place. The result is that universities are full of students who benefit from the advantages of being a student but never actually finish their course. According to statistics, only 27% of students complete their first-degree course in three years, 40% in four years. As I have written before (“Nice work if you can get it” – November 23, 2017) the French higher education system, however paradoxical it may sound, is in fact highly selective, with the best high-school pupils competing hard for places at engineering, technical, business or medical schools that select their students on the toughest possible criteria. To the extent that a leader writer in “Le Monde” could write recently (November 6, 2017) in a rare admission of reality, that:” …these reactions demonstrate a singular denial of reality that perpetuates one of the most astonishing examples of French hypocrisy ……in which almost everyone rejects the idea of selective entry to higher education…. and yet everyone knows that the whole system is based on the most rigorous selection.”

The other area in which reality seems to have set in concerns the recurring deficit of the annual state budget. For the past 30 years or so, not one annual budget has been balanced when proposed and not one has been balanced, let alone in surplus, at the end of the fiscal year. As a result, public sector borrowing has ballooned and, after a big push as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, public debt now amounts to almost 100% of GDP. As late as the year 2000 however, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin yielded to political pressure from his left-wing parliamentary majority to devote a tax windfall  (“la cagnotte” as it was called, meaning literally “a pot of cash”) to cutting taxes and creating more public sector jobs, rather than using it to balance the budget and pay down debt. President Jacques Chirac, a centre-right President “co-habiting” with a left wing parliamentary majority at the time, could have exerted his authority to try and stop this extra public spending but he chose not to. Another recent editorial (January 31, 2018) in “Le Monde” summed up the outcome in this way: “disgruntled voters showed him (Jospin) no gratitude and the country as a whole lost out. Almost at the same time, Germany launched a programme of structural reform that enabled it, ten years later, to dominate Europe.” This year, as the editorial goes on to point out, there is once again a fiscal windfall due to higher than expected tax revenue at the end of last year – a trend that is likely to continue. But this time, the ministers responsible for public finances and the budget have stated very publicly that any fiscal surplus resulting from faster than expected economic growth will be devoted exclusively to paying down debt. The Minister of Finance, Bruno Le Maire, has even gone so far as to say that the state will sell some of its corporate holdings to raise more money and pay down more debt. Nobody, not even Jean-Luc Melenchon and his party, has made a serious case for spending more money, despite the fact that, to take just a few recent examples abundantly covered in the media, prisons are overcrowded and understaffed, hospital Accident and Emergency departments are bursting at the seams and social care for the elderly is in crisis.

The reasons for what appears to be a new realism among politicians and in public opinion are not entirely clear, but in both the issues referred to above, it is definitely clear that the status quo is no longer tenable. In both cases too, the single-minded and clearly stated ambition of Emmanuel Macron to “profoundly transform” his country have undoubtedly triggered a greater readiness to face up to reality and imitate other countries in the EU and elsewhere that have long since taken and implemented the tough decisions that France has so often shirked.

It is again too early to say whether this greater willingness to face reality will stay the course or whether fierce resistance will appear once again, as it has so often in the past, as voters reject the consequences of what they voted for at election time. If it doesn’t occur beforehand, the ultimate test will come with a proposed root-and-branch reform of the French pension system, with it myriad special schemes, different retirement ages and pension outcomes, that has now been postponed until 2019. Emmanuel Macron promised such a reform in his election campaign and many consider it an essential step towards seriously curbing public spending, as, unlike in many other countries, pensions in France are very largely the responsibility of the state. If the proposed reform culminates in a merger of all pension schemes, the harmonisation of retirement ages and pension outcomes (Macron promised that each €1 of contribution would give the same entitlement to every future pensioner, whether from the private or public sector) then it will indeed be possible to conclude that the French have adopted a new sense of reality. But it hasn’t happened yet and on past form, the road ahead will be extraordinarily difficult to navigate.

Looking outwards ....from Versailles

The day before the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 23rd, President Emmanuel Macron hosted a dinner in the Château de Versailles for 1400 international business leaders. Contrary to all his predecessors, he made his presentation in English. No journalists were present and the French employers’ federation was not even represented. "France is back" Macron declared to the best and the brightest of the business world, a phrase he repeated in his speech, half of which was in English too, in Davos two days later.

Many in France, in the media and the political opposition have been quick to pour scorn on Macron’s  active political and business diplomacy. The satirical weekly "Le Canard Enchainé" for example, titled its leading article that week: "It’s the reign of the Moi Soleil" (an allusion to Louis XIV, the “Roi Soleil”, who reigned over the court at Versailles at the time of its greatest splendour) assimilating Macron’s gesture to a public relations stunt, mere posturing, of which the French ruling classes have often and rightly been accused.  As I have written before in this blog, Macron is certainly not averse to draping himself in all the trappings of state, but in his case there is surely a more serious purpose behind it. It is worth recalling that just eight months into his five-year mandate, Macron has already hosted in Paris, among others, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Recip Tayip Erdogan, been on a state visit to China and participated in a Franco-British summit.  Nor can he be accused of simply trying to butter up the world’s most powerful leaders. Making Donald Trump the guest of honour at last year’s Bastille Day parade did not prevent him from denouncing the U.S withdrawl from the Paris climate agreement and inviting American experts to pursue their research on climate change in France if they were prevented from doing so at home. Inviting Vladimir Putin to inaugurate an exhibition, in Versailles, to the glory of imperial Russia did not prevent him, during the ensuing press conference, and in front of a stony-faced Putin, from making it clear that he was under no illusion about the antics of Kremlin financed media during the French presidential campaign. Presenting a horse from the stable of the Republican Guard to Xi Jingping was an elegant way of expressing gratitude for the loan of a Chinese panda to a French zoo and threw an aura of bonhomie over the visit that culminated in the signature of some high-value contracts. And the master stroke of offering to lend the Bayeux Tapestry to Britain in the lead-up to the Franco-British summit undoubtedly facilitated the pledging by Prime Minister May of an extra 50 million Euros for border security on the French coast around Calais.

The conclusion I draw from all this is that Macron is not only skilled at choosing the gesture that will touch and impress his opposite numbers but that his charm offensive, alongside his domestic reform programme, is indeed directed towards putting France back at the core of Europe and the centre of the international stage. He is clearly helped by circumstances: The U.S is becoming more isolationist, Germany is temporarily weakened by its lack of government and the impending end of the Merkel era and the U.K is obsessed by Brexit alone. Henry Kissinger used to ask: "Who should I call when I want to talk to Europe?” The assumption was always that the leader of Germany should be on the other end of the line. If he were to ask the same question today, the answer might well be "Call Macron".

It helps of course that Macron, contrary to his predecessors, speaks creditable English and is not afraid to use it, ignoring the tut-tutting of those in France who consider that their Head of State should always speak French to international audiences. Listening to him answering questions from BBC’s Andrew Marr before the Franco-British summit, I concluded that he doesn’t always get it quite right: “My willingness” repeated several times, does not convey the ambition and determination of “ma volonté" and the oft repeated "for sure" could better be rendered by the more anglo-saxon "clearly" or "obviously". He also has an irritating tendency to drop his voice and slur his words at the end of sentences, something he does not do in his native tongue. But linguistic quibbling aside, his intention is lauded and his message comes across; practice will undoubtedly make perfect.

All that however is surely only half the story. The really big difference with Macron is a clear ambition to project the image of an outward-looking France, rather than one that focuses, as it tends to do too far too much, on its internal quarrels and divisions, a France that wishes, and considers itself able, to carve out a new role for itself in a globalised economy and an interdependent world. The intention has not gone unnoticed. Hardly a day goes by without a French business leader with international experience reporting that foreign partners are favourably impressed by the new image of France that Macron embodies - outward looking, engaging with the rest of the word and not afraid of becoming vigorously involved in its affairs. The French business radio and TV station “BFM Business” has long encapsulated the idea in a slogan to which Macron would undoubtedly subscribe: “France has everything (it needs) to succeed” ("La France a tout pour réusssir”). In his New Year’s address to the French people, the man himself expressed a similar if somewhat loftier sentiment: “France is capable of the exceptional” (“La France est capable de l’exceptionnel”).

Once again, Macron is true to an idea he put forward during his election campaign, that of an open France at the core of Europe and within a globalised world, striving to project its own values, while capitalising on its own assets  - and not forgetting its own interests! It is of course too early to tell whether achievement will match ambition, both domestically and internationally. The direction of travel is refreshingly new. The end of his first mandate in 2022 will be an appropriate juncture to look back and take stock.

No later than this week though, Macron will find his diplomatic skills put to the test when he travels to Corsica, long a thorn in the flesh of the centralised state, and where a newly emboldened “nationalist” movement is demanding greater autonomy, and in some quarters even, independence. As Spain has recently found, keeping one’s own country together can often be just as difficult, if not more so, than strutting one’s stuff on the world’s stage.