Where the buck stops

When the full story of Covid 19 comes to be written in France, the date of January 29^th, 2021 will probably be considered as key. For it was on this date that France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, in the face of mounting evidence of an acceleration in the number of cases, chose to overrule his scientific advisers and decided that there would be no strict national lockdown, as everyone, even within his government, had been expecting. That evening, the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, visibly surprised by what he had just been told by the President, appeared at a press conference broadcast on national TV, fumbled nervously with his facemask and proceeded to announce that only a few further restrictions would apply from then on: stricter checks on the observance of the 6pm. curfew, closure, until further notice, of large shopping centres, but above all that schools would remain open and that employers should do everything in their power to impose working from home. 

 

Three months later seems a good time to consider the consequences of these decisions, both from a health and a political viewpoint. 

 In terms of the spread of the epidemic, at the end of January there were between 20 and 25 thousand new cases every day and just over 3000 patients in ICUs. Between 250 and 350 people were dying every day in hospital and over 200 in care homes. What the French call “the English variant” of the virus and the British call the “Kent variant” was only just beginning to make inroads in France. Today, it accounts for over 80% of new cases, there are twice as many patients in ICUs and the total number of deaths has exceeded 100 000.The number of new cases recorded every day is around 30 thousand. A larger proportion of Covid patients is therefore ending up in ICUs, meaning probably that the relatively new variant is more aggressive and possibly more lethal with the number of deaths continuing at around 300 every day. Indeed, two hospital doctors I have talked to in the last week have confirmed this impression and added that the patient profile has changed considerably since the beginning of the year, with more younger people seriously ill.

 

And yet, paradoxically perhaps, as shown by the Financial Times’ excellent Covid Tracker, even if the number of new cases and deaths at the end of April is slightly higher than in Italy, Spain, and the UK and lot  higher than in Germany, all countries which have imposed far tighter restrictions over the past three months and are only just starting to relax them, the number of deaths per 100 000 people in France remains below these comparable countries, with the exception of Germany.

 

In terms of everyday life and in spite of the “lockdown light” imposed by Macron at the end of March, to be relaxed at the beginning of May, little has changed since the end of January. Most shops remain open, with the exception of a much smaller sample than a year ago, schools, which had a convenient two-week holiday over the Easter period, have remained largely open and even if levels of traffic at rush hour are lower than before the pandemic, many people are clearly still driving to work in offices or factories every day. Cinemas, theaters, restaurants and gyms have now been closed for the best part of a year. After a chaotic start, the French vaccination campaign is now running at about 450 thousand jabs a day. The fact that most people over 75 have now been vaccinated probably explains the sharp fall in the number of older patients in hospital, while schools have not in general turned out to be super spreaders of the virus. Judging by the TV pictures from neighbouring countries on the nightly news, masks appear to be worn more widely in France than in the other countries referred to above. Most people in the street, and even sometimes in parks and on woodland paths, wear facemasks. In public transport, the “mask mandate”, as it is called in the US, is almost universally observed.

 

Politically, by his decision of January 29^th, Emmanuel Macron indubitably asserted his political leadership in the fight against the pandemic and has continued on the same path ever since. He chairs a meeting of ministers and advisers called “The Health Defence Council” (Conseil de Défense Sanitaire) every Wednesday morning before the regular cabinet meeting and it has become clear that he considers it a forum for information and discussion but that he alone is the final arbiter of what to do next.  Even by the standards of the Fifth Republic, the constitution of which was designed by General de Gaulle to vest ultimate power in the hands of an elected Head of State, it is a bold move, especially as Macron has made no attempt, like some of his predecessors, to hide the fact that he is in charge.  By all accounts, ministers and even the Prime Minister have been reduced to purely executive roles, implementing and explaining decisions taken by the President.

 

Of course, such a stance has many risks. The opposition from the left and the right, even if it is in no position to seriously challenge the President’s supremacy, at last until the presidential and parliamentary elections of May 2022, has not been slow to blame him for everything that has gone wrong, and there have indeed, as everywhere, been many bumps in the road since March 2020, hoping that the criticism will stick and influence the electoral outcome, when and if Macron stands for re-election. For the moment, he can take comfort from the fact that both the traditional left-and right-wing parties are in disarray, incapable of agreeing on common leadership and a common electoral platform, not even able to put forward a convincing narrative of what they would have done differently - or would do differently in the future. Marine le Pen, generally considered as Macron’s principal opponent once again in 2022, has of course jumped on the bandwagon. Will it be enough to win her the presidency, as some polls are predicting at the moment? Will those who voted for Macron in 2017 and who have told pollsters that they will not do so again, abstain or vote for Le Pen? Or will they hold their nose and vote for him again, just to keep Le Pen and her party at bay?

 

Notwithstanding these political hypotheses, Macron’s Covid strategy is now becoming clearer. He once said that the French will have to learn to live with the virus and that is precisely what they are having to do. Leaving schools open is clearly a case in point. Not only has Macron always made it clear that the fight for equal opportunities starts at primary school, but, given the very large number of working mothers in France, it has also enabled the economy to keep functioning as much as possible.  This is all the more important as the French expect the state to be generous with financial support to maintain their living standards. To meet those expectations, which are probably higher in France than in comparable countries, it has borrowed billions of Euros, propelling the national debt to record levels. Despite the brave promise of “Whatever it takes” (“Quoi qu’il en coûte”) made at a time when nobody could have predicted the extent of the second and third waves of the pandemic, this upward trend must have a limit. Living with the virus is also therefore a matter of economic necessity. Reading between the lines, the main yardstick guiding Macron’s decisions appears to be the number of patients in ICUs. The current figure of around 6000 has been flat for the past two weeks but capacity could be made available, by dint of a radical and ongoing reorganisation of hospital departments, to accommodate nearer 10 000 if necessary. There were about 7000 at the peak of the first wave a year ago.

 

In every country, the fight against Covid19 was always going to involve a balancing act between health and economic imperatives. Emmanuel Macron is staking his political future on the way he has struck that balance in France: keeping the country open as much as possible while supporting the hardest hit people and sectors with massive amounts of aid and subsidies; gambling that hospital capacity will be sufficient to treat a large number of patients in ICUs while tolerating around 300 deaths a day and pushing hard for high vaccination coverage as quickly as possible. By making it clear that he is, and will remain, responsible for the eventual consequences of his decisions, Macron is walking a tightrope. If he can keep his balance for a few more weeks, hoping that the warmer weather and high vaccination rates will allow a return to a semblance of normality by the autumn, he stands a good chance of standing for re-election in 2022, being re-elected and continuing to pursue the reform agenda he outlined in 2017. But if he falls, there will be no safety net to catch him.  

Marine Le Pen - past her sell-by date!

According to a recent opinion poll, 70% of the French electorate do not wish to see a re-run of the 2017 duel between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen at the presidential election in 2022.  For the time being in line with a time-honoured tradition observed by incumbents everywhere, Macron has not yet declared whether he will be stand for a second five-year term, but the general view is that, barring accidents, he will and that he will wait until the beginning of 2022 to announce it publicly. After all, the thinking among his supporters goes, the start of his first term was not entirely unsuccessful; the labour market was made more flexible, considerable emphasis was placed on education, with a 50% drop in class sizes for primary schools in deprived areas and the age for compulsory schooling reduced from 5 to 3 while, at school leaving level, vocational training opportunities and apprenticeships were successfully expanded. These promising measures and the concomitant slow but steady fall in unemployment that would have undoubtedly continued, were however overshadowed by the “gilets jaunes” protests which started at the end of 2018, followed by nationwide protests against proposed pension reform in 2019 and the plague of COVID 19 since the beginning of 2020. Many reforms are therefore on hold while the fight against the virus has monopolised the unceasing attention of political authorities at all levels, as in all other countries. Macron has let it be known that he will take up this and other reforms again in due course, but if he is to do so, he will need a second term to bring as many of them as possible to a conclusion.

 

Marine Le Pen on the other hand, on the grounds that no other opposition politician can in her view command nearly as many votes as she obtained in the presidential run off in 2017, continues to see herself as the main opposition figure and has already gone on record as saying that she will be a candidate again in 2022.

 

Given the lack of serious alternative candidates from one end of the political spectrum to the other, for the time being at least, her political gambit is clear: to act as magnet not only for her own long-standing supporters but also for more moderate “Republican” right-wing voters who have traditionally been hostile to her and everything she stands for. But is she a more credible candidate than she was in 2017? Despite some favourable opinion polls that give her a fighting chance of coming much closer, and perhaps even winning the presidency this time, there are several reasons to doubt it.

 

The first is that many French people, including her close political allies and supporters, still remember her disastrous performance during the televised presidential debate a few days before the second round of voting in 2017. In that debate she seemed incapable of landing a point, let alone a knock-out blow, and was visibly outclassed by Macron who seemed perfectly right when he said that she had nothing to propose. He emerged from that debate as the only one of the two candidates capable of running the country, even if some of those who voted for him were voting against Le Pen rather giving him their full endorsement.

 

Thinking back over that debate again however, there is surely a broader question about the credibility of Marine Le Pen’s current strategy. Does she simply lacks debating skills or, more seriously, is unable to propose a range of attractive and properly thought out policies?  These doubts returned when she squared off again Macron’s Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, a few weeks ago on TV. Darmanin is a young and ambitious politician, former member of the right wing RPR, and former ally of Nicolas Sarkozy. Many see him as bringing just the necessary touch of right wing authority, if not authoritarianism, to Macron’s government. Be that as it may, in a debate that focused on new draft legislation about “Safeguarding the principles of the Republic”, as it is now called, after starting life as a law against “separatism”, that Darmanin is defending in Parliament, he clearly gained the upper hand. Marine Le Pen who had brought along an ostensibly marked copy of Darmanin’s recent book “Le séparatisme islamiste  - Manifeste pour la laïcité” (Islamic separatism – a manifesto  for secularism) no doubt in an attempt to point up the contradictions between the views expressed in his book and the legislation he is sponsoring, was unable, once again, to land a point. As she has spent her political career denouncing “laxism” of all governments of the Fifth Republic on immigration and the link she constantly harps on between “uncontrolled” immigration, crime and terrorism, one would have expected her to tell Darmanin in so many words that his draft legislation does not go nearly far enough and denounce the Islamic threat to French society. Instead, she simply questioned whether the legislation should not treat all religions equally, in the secular tradition of French society since 1905, but mention the specific danger of Islamic extremism and its increasing hold on a number of deprived neighbourhoods in the suburbs of large cities. Darmanin was unrepentant, stating that the draft law does indeed aim to fight such tendencies and quoted a letter he had received from a Senator of Le Pen’s own party calling for the closure of a couple of mosques in the South of France that, the writer claimed, were hotbeds of Islamic radicalism. Darmanin asserted that he would be unable to take such a measure unless the law that he is sponsoring gives him power to do so!  Whether this is strictly true or not is debatable.  France has a definite tendency to pass new laws rather than properly applying existing ones and some go so far as to say that the 1905 legislation is fully up to the task in hand anyway. Be that as it may, in a tense televised debate, it was Darmanin who, throughout, appeared more on top of his brief. He even allowed himself the luxury of accusing Le Pen of being too “soft”, to which her only response was a pained and contorted expression.

 

It is of course a standard trick of political combat to try and steal the opposition’s clothes but for Le Pen, the problem surely goes deeper. Having spent most of her career roundly denouncing the French establishment and its craven deference to “Brussels” and “globalisation”, can she now ditch that stance, as she is attempting to do, and move toward to the centre in a bid to give herself an aura of responsibility and moderation without profoundly destabilising her party faithful and traditional voters? In the recent debate about whether the debt contracted by France to fight the pandemic should be gradually (and painfully) repaid or simply “cancelled”, for instance, while Jean-Luc Melenchon, the left-wing firebrand, has called for outright cancellation, Marine Le Pen has defended the orthodoxy. And this is the same candidate who in the run up to the 2017 election, seemed to be suggesting that France should “take back control” to coin a well-known phrase, by abandoning the Euro and strictly policing the countries’ border in defiance of the Schengen agreements.

 

By abandoning her rhetoric of protest, all the more radical as she was distant from real power, she therefore runs the serious risk of alienating her existing electorate while failing to attract the more moderate right-wing opinion that she now appears to be courting. She too is attempting to borrow other parties’ clothes but, for the time being at least, her disguise fits badly and looks unconvincing. She would do well to remember the words of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the uncompromising former leader of a party that simply called itself “The National Front”: “Don’t vote for the copy, vote for the real thing”.

 

Le Pen’s situation is not helped by the fact that, as an MEP (Member of the European Parliament), she is under investigation with a number of her colleagues for allegedly siphoning off the generous allowances granted by the European Parliament to help finance her own party in France. True, she is not the only French politician to be facing such allegations, but it is common knowledge that her party is deeply in debt, and that French banks are unwilling to extend more loans. Rumours, never denied, have it that her party is being propped up by Russian banks. The Russian connection, not to say sympathies, is reinforced by a report in the “Kyiv Post”, a Ukrainian English language newspaper, that the Ukrainian authorities have banned three of Le Pen’s parliamentary colleagues from entering Ukraine because of a recent visit they made to occupied Crimea, presumably at the invitation of the Russian authorities.

 

There is of course a long way to go before the presidential election of 2022. Whatever else happens, however, Marine Le Pen’s main political opponents, whoever they turn out to be, but particularly those whose clothes she is trying to steal, will surely not be slow to present her and her party as shifty, contradictory and incompetent. In addition, in the current climate of tension between the EU and Russia, a denunciation of her forced complacency towards Putin’s Russia or the slightest hint of Russian meddling in her favour in the campaign, will also fall on fertile ground. Even if the mainstream right-wing parties have a lot to do to find themselves an undisputed leader and present a convincing political programme for 2022, their voters are unlikely to fall for the strategy that Marine Le Pen has chosen to pursue. That is how I interpret the poll that says that 70% of voters do not want to see a re-run of the 2017 run off. It is her they no longer want to see contesting the highest office in France. She is past her sell-by date and the elections of 2022 could well be the death knell of her political career.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conversation with a fisherwoman

Many French fishing ports are unlikely to be affected by Brexit, but Boulogne sur Mer and Dieppe, with only a short strip of water separating them from England, are not among them.They will undoubtedly be the hardest hit. Within a couple of hours of the main wholesale fish market in Paris and catching most of their fish in UK territorial waters, their fishermen are understandably more concerned than most about the looming deadline of January 1^st 2021, when a new deal, or a no deal, with the UK will come into force.

 

Dieppe, where I spent a few days this summer, has definitely seen better days. It is neither the richest nor the most beautiful fishing port in France. Many of its historic buildings were destroyed during the war and rebuilt on a shoestring and according to the aesthetic canons of the 1950s and 60s. Militant dockers and competition from Le Havre, just down the coast, have put paid to its erstwhile lucrative trade in bananas from the French overseas territories. The first building you see walking out of the railway station is a down-at-heel 1960s steel and glass building emblazoned with the name “espace de solidarites” – a brave attempt to bring together in one place all the social services that inhabitants are likely to need. And there are clearly many who do. The sea front is a disappointingly unattractive collection of hotels and residential buildings, ranging from run-down Art Deco to Soviet style concrete blocks that would not look out of place in the drearier suburbs of Prague or Warsaw. The narrow streets just behind them are home to seedy boarding houses for penny-pinching visitors. Being the nearest seaside town to Paris, and the cheapest, it was hardly surprising perhaps that there was a sprinkling of large families of North African origin on the beach, most of the women wearing headscarfs, probably on a short trip from the poorer Northern suburbs of Paris. Just up the road opposite the wharfs where the fishing boats are tied up is the HQ of the constituency MP and former mayor, Sebastien Jumel, one of the 11 members of the dwindling communist group in the Assemblée Nationale. The communist vote has tended to survive in France only in areas of declining industries like mining or fishing and strong working-class traditions. Three of the communist MPs were elected on this stretch of the Normandy coast.

 

To find out how the fishing community was faring just a few months before Brexit actually bites, what better place than the fishermen’s market on the other side of the port? Two stalls were occupied out of a possible total of six and the one I chose had a meagre selection of fish. It was attended by a fisherman and his wife and what I took to be their daughter. The fisherman and his wife were probably not far from retirement and looked drawn and dejected. I bought a couple of fish and turned to the daughter to ask how they felt about the impact of Brexit. She was a tall and broad-shouldered young woman with fair skin and blue eyes, hair tied in knot behind her head, perhaps a far reminiscence of the Normans’ Viking heritage. Unsurprisingly, she had little time for “English” fishermen: they had larger boats, bigger quotas and used aggressive fishing techniques. “We respect our blackout periods and quotas”, she said, heavily implying that the English didn’t, “but if you find scallops in the local supermarkets all the year round”, she went on, “they all come from English boats and are deep frozen”. What did they intend to do if there was no deal on fishing, I asked? “Fight them!” she answered without a moment’s hesitation, “encircle their boats and stop them fishing”. I could imagine her as a passionara in a male dominated world, wielding a battle axe and spurring her troops into battle, in the tradition of the valiant “corsaires” (privateers) and sea captains who sailed from Dieppe in the 17th and 18th centuries to capture and plunder foreign ships or wage war on the English, Dutch and Spanish. A statue of one of the most famous, Abraham Duquesne, stands in a small square behind the sea front that is now a car park.

 

For the moment, the headlines in the Brexit negotiations are focused more on a “level playing field” in state aid to industry than fishing rights, but the issue will undoubtedly return before the negotiations are over, unless of course they break up acrimoniously and a “no deal” is the result. Both sides are being lobbied by their respective fishermen. The industry accounts for little more than 1% of their respective GDPs, although the impact on coastal communities, on both sides, will be greater than this figure suggests. The situation is further complicated by the fact that French, Belgian, Dutch and German vessels take about 70% of their catch in British waters, while British vessels sell about 70% of theirs in continental Europe. In addition, many French trawlers that fish in the North Sea land their catch in Scotland and have it transported by lorry to France through the Chanel tunnel, where it reaches its ultimate markets, tariff and quota free, more quickly than if it were transported by sea.  All in all, a complex system that can only be heavily disrupted by Brexit, like so many others where it is proving necessary, by negotiation or fait accompli, to unpick the threads of a 45-year old trading relationship.

 

It is also worth remembering that in France at least, many fishing ports will not be affected at all. In Southern Brittany and on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, a lot of the fishing is local and most vessels that venture further remain in EU or international waters. The fishermen who sell their catch in our local market twice a week in the Golfe du Morbihan assured me that all their fish comes from French waters that yield a wide range of fish, from the cheaper mackerel, sardines and plaice to the nobler and more expensive species of sole, turbot and sea bass, all of which are snapped up at reasonable prices by local inhabitants and summer visitors. For these fishermen, Brexit is a non-event.

 

But Dieppe is another story altogether. Years of decline and the suspicion that their own authorities are unlikely to go to the barricades to defend their trade give their fisherfolk little hope that they will be offered much more than lump sum payments to scrap most of their boats and take early retirement. After all, this is the procedure that has been followed by all French governments over the years, putting many small coastal fishermen out of business and focusing on the larger and more efficient trawlers that can sail further afield and bring in larger catches. If the Brexit negotiations on fisheries go anywhere, this pattern is likely to be repeated yet again.

 

Little wonder that the older generation of Dieppe fishermen feels dejected – and that the younger generation is spoiling for a fight!

 

 

How green are the French ?

 

On Monday, June 29th, in the immaculately manicured gardens of the Elysée Place, Emmanuel Macron staged an official reception for the 150 members of the Citizens Convention for the Climate (Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat ) to announce officially how he intended to act upon their multiple proposals for a greener France,  a France that would bring official policy more into line with the overarching objective of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change to keep the global temperature rise to less than 2°C by the end of the century.

 

The CCC is a serious initiative. The idea behind it was to involve 150 randomly chosen citizens of metropolitan and overseas France over 18 months in an exercise to define detailed environmentally favourable proposals in all aspects of everyday life, from transport to eating, from housing to farming. The citizens were assisted by experts in all these areas and were supported by civil servants and legal experts whose job it was to translate their proposals into draft legislation, ranging from amendments to the Constitution to regulations on food labelling. The proposals, in many areas already in the form of possible legal texts, are impressive in their range and detail. The whole report runs to 460 pages.

 

The question arises though as to how useful all this really is. Are the French really so far behind in their attitudes and behaviour on environmental issues that a citizens’ convention, with its overtones of the pre-revolutionary “Cahier des Doléances” is necessary as a guide along the virtuous path of environmental action? On the substance the answer is surely no. On the form of the initiative however, the answers are many and varied and all of them are political.

 

Over the 40 odd years I have been living in France, there has definitely been a slow but clearly perceptible move to greater environmental awareness in general, as the reality of climate change, both in the form of small changes in everyday surroundings but also extreme weather events in France and the rest of the world, have increasingly impinged on the national consciousness. At the lowest level, recycling of materials like glass, cardboard and plastic has become more or less a national reflex. In our building of 77 apartments, in a leafy western suburb of Paris, recycling bins and bottle banks have been in place for the past 15 or 20 years and most people, even among the reputedly undisciplined French, use them properly. More recently, at the instigation of one or two residents, a composting initiative has been launched. The local authority’s compost expert told us that this was the 400^th such initiative for which he is responsible as he set up three large and sturdy crates in the grounds of our building, that about 15 families now regularly use to dispose of their vegetable peelings and the like. The residents’ association is about to request the extension of the building’s power network to accommodate charging points for electric cars and it can only be a matter of time before the first electrically powered car appears in the car park. More and more neighbours cycle to work (and can now be financially rewarded by their employers for doing so). A cycle repairer working from a well-equipped van now has a regular spot at the local covered market on Friday mornings. Locally produced fruit and vegetables can now be ordered from local organic farms and delivered to a pick-up point in town. In rural areas, street markets have always been a permanent feature of small towns and villages, but more and more city dwellers now prefer to queue up to buy local produce at markets or order it online than take a caddy round a crowded supermarket on a Saturday afternoon. In our holiday village in Southern Brittany, the local fisherman and the local market gardener attract far longer and more patient queues than any other traders on market days. The French being the French of course, the taste and texture of fresh, locally grown produce play a role but the idea that local producers of “organic” food “should be supported” can often be overhead in conversations. 

 

In all these respects therefore, many of the CCC’s proposals are certainly not revolutionary and seem only to underscore and promote underlying trends in society that have been apparent for some time and to which the recent episode of Covid induced confinement and related restrictions have lent new relevance.

 

What is new however is the way all this has come to be reflected in local and national politics. Emmanuel Macron must have realised how lucky he was to be able to make political capital from the labours of the citizens’ convention just one day after the election of a number of green mayors to towns and cities all over France in the delayed second round of municipal elections on June 28^th. Notably, and somewhat unexpectedly, in large cities like Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Tours and Besançon. Indeed, it is the first time that, to the surprise of many observers, a green party, EELV (Europe Ecologie les Verts) in an electoral alliance with other left-wing parties, has managed to win power in this number of major cities. Six years ago, only Grenoble, among France’s larger cities, elected a green mayor and many considered his chances of re-election as thin. Similarly in Paris. Anyone who knows the city well cannot fail to have noticed the increasing restrictions on cars in the city centre since the socialist Anne Hidalgo, with the support of the EELV and the communists, was elected mayor six years ago. Despite highly vocal protests by all those affected, like taxi drivers and motorists driving into Paris to work every day, she was re-elected for a second six-year term, after promising even more radical restrictions on cars as well as more green areas and cycling paths. Her task was probably made easier by an exceptionally low turnout, a divided and ineffective opposition but also perhaps by the realisation, during lockdown, by those who actually live in the city, as opposed to those who only work there, that a Paris with fewer cars, noise and pollution is a far more pleasant place to live. In the same vein, the new mayor of Bordeaux, Pierre Hurmic, when asked whether he would soon be outlawing diesel-engined cars from the city centre, answered without hesitation that in his view a city centre was no place for cars at all. Exhibiting his newly discovered green credentials, the re-elected mayor of our Paris suburban town has very recently reserved half of the main road in and out of town for cyclists.

 

The big question now therefore is whether this support for green causes can gain enough political traction for a green candidate to have a serious chance of beating Emmanuel Macron at the presidential election in 2022. Barring major upsets, this seems unlikely. But there are also regional elections in the Spring of next year. They will be a third test in as many years of support for the greens and, in case of further electoral gains, another step towards national power. Before then however, the greens have three crucial issues to solve. The first is leadership. For the moment there are at least three potential standard bearers, Yannick Jadot, who was elected to the European Parliament at the head of a number of EELV MEPS last year, the current mayor of Grenoble, Eric Piolle, and even the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who, some think, could weld the disparate bits of the green movement together into a broader alliance. But that would certainly require some solid welding as, and this is the second issue, the movement has distinguished itself in the past more by its divisions than its ability to form alliances and build a broad-based left-wing political platform that the rump of the socialist party has singularly failed to achieve since the ignominious end of the Hollande presidency.

 

The third issue for the greens and their potential allies is the environmental credibility - or lack of it - of Emmanuel Macron and his government. Macron has always sought to present himself as a President fully mindful of environmental issues. Using the considerable powers of his position, he persuaded a popular environmental figure, Nicolas Hulot, to become his first Minister for the Environment, or “ecological transition” as it is boldly named, only to see him resign 15 months later after denouncing the power of “lobbies”. He then appointed another green politician, François de Rugy, but he was forced to resign soon afterwards over an expenses scandal in his previous position as Speaker of the National Assembly.  Now that he has a new Prime Minister and a new government, Macron has appointed another former green activist, Barbara Pompili to the post. In addition, he is making as much as he can, as we have seen above, from the outcome of the citizens’ convention.

 

What is already clear though, reading through the convention’s report, is that anything very radical that could have emerged seems to have been quietly smothered along the way. No radical moves like an immediate blanket ban on dangerous pesticides for example, as the new Minister for the Environment, outspoken as she is reputed to be, has been forced to concede. Nothing more than vague aspirations for "better agro-ecological practices” and certainly nothing very tangible about issues like intensive dairy production or intensive pig rearing that has been responsible for releasing tons of animal excrement into rivers and watercourses for years, that eventually cause a proliferation of toxic seaweed on Brittany’s coastline. No big shake up either of the eternally underperforming and loss-making SNCF freight operation, riddled with restrictive practices and frequent strikes, that has shifted so many goods onto the roads over the years, in lorries that criss-cross France’s motorways and that could easily bring the country to a standstill, as they have done before, if the industry felt under threat.  In other words, this is not the time, less than two years before the election of 2022, to upset big farmers, or the rail unions, or road haulage companies.  And Macron will of course be keenly aware that whenever anything radical has been attempted in the recent past, like special tolls for lorries under President Hollande or environmentally driven fuel taxes for all in 2018, the “bonnet rouges” and “gilets jaunes” movements were the result!

 

Everything seems therefore to point to a continuation of the incremental and relatively uncontroversial path of environmental improvements, until such time as it becomes politically easier or more urgent to be more radical. Whether that will be enough to avert the environmental disaster that some experts say is just around the corner is another matter altogether. One thing the “gilets jaunes” protests have made painfully clear however is that when faced with the choice between “the end of the month and the end of the world”, as the saying goes, most people, for the time being at least, will choose the end of the month. In this respect, the ultimate outcome - and surely the ultimate aim - of the middle-of-the-road approach of the citizens’ convention is to give a higher profile to the environmental credentials of Macron and his government. We shall have to wait until the presidential campaign gets going in earnest in early 2022 to see if a majority of French voters are convinced.

Wishful thinking !

President Macron’s address to the nation last Sunday evening was, as usual, long on rhetoric and short on detail. Apart from the announcements of further steps to relax the lockdown and order most children back to school on June 22nd, there were few clues about the future direction of economic policy and above all, what, if anything, will be done about the huge accumulation of debt over the past three months of the crisis. The only clear promise was that there would no increase in taxes; the French would simply have to “produce more and work more”. 

The economy minister, Bruno le Maire, was on the radio on Monday morning to fill in a little detail: what the President meant by the French working more, he explained, was that more of them should be in work, meaning, presumably, that efforts would continue to reduce unemployment, but not that each worker, heaven forbid,  might have to work longer hours or take shorter holidays. The overall effect of “more work” would be to increase economic growth and that this alone would gradually reduce the debt. Without being quite as severe as Alex Massie, a British journalist who wrote in “The Spectator” the other day about a UK cabinet minister, that “the spectacle of intelligent people deliberately peddling nonsense is often aggravating but it’s rarely as enraging as it is now” , there are several reasons to believe that such talk is no more than wishful thinking and that, what is more, most people in France and, more importantly, in its government, don’t take it very seriously.

The first is the past record of France’s economic growth and unemployment. Over the past 20 years, basically since the introduction of the Euro, France’s GDP growth has rarely exceeded 2% a year. After 2009, when it fell by 2.9%, it has exceeded 2% only twice and has generally bumped along at about 1% a year. As for unemployment, it has remained stubbornly high, at around 10% over the same period and only started falling consistently but slowly, to 8.5%, in 2019. While there is likely to be a spurt of catch-up growth after the Covid induced downturn, there is little reason to expect growth rates to double and unemployment to halve in the next few years. Even less likely considering the amount of new debt that will have to be paid off. And yet those are the kinds of trends that would be necessary to create real wealth and pay off debt. State intervention in the economy will not make things any easier. Renault, for instance, of which the state holds 15%, has just been granted a state guaranteed loan of €5 billion, but on conditions that it does not close down too many factories in France and lay off too many French workers. Peugeot, also part owned by the state, was intending to bring to France a few thousand workers from Poland to help it cope with post Covid demand. In the face of objections from government and the unions, it has had to scale back the numbers. Nobody will be surprised at the continuation of the age-old French tradition of government meddling in industry, either openly or simply by a nod and a wink to business leaders. Indeed, there are undoubtedly justifiable reasons for it, but it is hardly compatible with the robust rates of growth that would be required to put France’s public finances back on an even keel.

The second is the size of France’s debt and the extent of its social safety net. In his address, President Macron said that the state has “mobilised” €500 billion to deal with the Covid crisis, demonstrating, he went on, “the strength of our state and our social model”. The figure is eye-watering and it covers a multitude of different policies. Some of it is in the form of state guaranteed loans to companies and industries. Many of the underlying loans will be repaid one day and the guarantees will not be needed. Some of it will be invested in research and development, where the hope is that the eventual return will be higher than the cost of capital. In addition, some of the extra debt is held, and will continue to be held, on the balance sheet of the ECB. As long as it stays there, it will not need to be repaid, and because of low interest rates and the payment of dividends to the state from the central bank, will cost nothing. The ECB has undertaken to keep that debt on its balance sheet until the end of 2022, but is likely to be prevailed upon to extend that term. This nevertheless leaves a sizeable chunk of debt that has financed, and continues to finance, current spending and that will have to be paid off: the huge bill for Covid related health spending; the deficit of the unemployment fund and furlough payments, twice as generous as corresponding payments in Germany according to an expert on the evening news a few days ago; the continuing deficit of the still unreformed pension system. And even if taxes are not raised, they will surely not be lowered and will remain among the highest of the OECD countries. An instructive case in point is the sinking fund for social security debt, the CADES (Caisse d’Amortissement de la Dette Sociale) a kind of bad bank for social debt that was set up in 1996, siphons off about €16 billion of tax revenue annually and was supposed to have paid off its €45 billion of outstanding debt by 2009. Now holding debt of €260 billion, due to be paid off by 2033, it is to be saddled with an extra €136 billion, according to newspaper reports (notably in “Le Canard Enchainé” of June 10^th), only some of which is Covid related. The tax that funds the repayment of this debt, the CRDS (Contribution pour le Remboursement de la Dette Sociale) is the kind of tax of which finance ministers dream, with its huge base and very low rate. It will now go on until at least 2036, continuing to deduct seemingly imperceptible amounts from monthly pay slips and annual income tax statements, but never making the headlines on prime-time news or appearing on placards in street demonstrations.  In addition to all this existing debt, the health minister has just announced that a fifth branch of welfare spending, on top of health, family allowances, pensions and work-related accidents, will be created to fund social care for the elderly and dependent. Again, a perfectly respectable and even admirable move given the increasing number of dependent elderly people and perfectly in line with French people’s expectations of their generous welfare system, but likely to cost, according to some estimates, upwards of €30 billion a year for many years to come. Presidents Sarkozy and Hollande both considered introducing this big dose of additional social spending during their terms but decided not to go ahead when they found out how much it would cost. The current government has simply announced this new policy but said nothing, as yet, about how it will be financed. But, we are assured, no new taxes will be introduced and existing taxes will not rise.  It will all be financed by economic growth.

A further reason, and more insidious consequence of Covid related spending and the resulting debt, is that it makes it that much harder for public opinion to believe that money cannot be found for anything.  Boris Johnson was wont to say, before the Covid crisis struck, that there is no such thing as a “magic money tree”. And yet Macron’s headline figure of €500 billion will make it look to everyone as if he has conjured up a huge and bountiful one within just three months! The effect this will have on the presentation and negotiation of future policies is as yet untested but could be profound. Why quibble, negotiators of pay increases for health and other front-line workers might argue, about a pay rise of a mere €200 - €300 a month when the state can find €500 billion within a few weeks? Why reduce unemployment benefits or curtail furlough payments when the extra cost is just a few million a year? Even with the highly controversial pension reform, which may be back on the agenda before the end of the year, it was estimated by the most militant union leaders that the existing system needed only €8 billion a year to balance the books. Is this not chickenfeed compared to €500 billion? 

Once again, and probably more urgently than ever, the sustainability of France’s generous welfare system is on the line. Nobody really knows what overall impact this vast run-up in debt will have in the longer term and in the absence of meaningful reform. The ECB will eventually hit the limits of expanding its balance sheet and when it does, long term interest rates will rise. Some economists believe that the headlong money creation of the last three months can lead only to monetary inflation or to the formation of bubbles in real estate or financial assets or both. When these bubbles eventually and inevitably burst, the impact can be cataclysmic, as we witnessed at the bursting of the “tech bubble” in 2000 or the “subprime” crisis of 2008. However, it seems fairly safe to assume that when these things actually happen, Emmanuel Macron will have long since left the Elysée Palace, even if he is elected for a second term, and today’s crop of militant union leaders will have been replaced by perhaps even more militant ones. By that time, my four grandchildren, all of them currently under twelve, will be at university or in further training and looking for their first job.

So, what else is new? Or as the French might put it, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.

Entrenched inequality

The protests and demonstrations all over the world after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have exposed a festering little hypocrisy in French society. An unauthorised demonstration in front of the main court building in Paris last week, called only on Facebook, attracted, to general surprise, an estimated twenty thousand people at a time when large demonstrations were still banned because of the risk of spreading the coronavirus.  The immediate reason for the protest was the death in police custody four years ago of a young black man called Adama Traoré, the cause of which has never been unequivocally established and which members of his family and community attribute to unwarranted police violence during his arrest. The shocking death on video of George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer has triggered a fresh call for “Justice for Adama” that the demonstrators feel has never been done.

Racism targeting black and brown people in France is as prevalent as it is in many other countries.  What is different in France however is the way it is treated by the state.  A time-honoured tradition, originating in the revolutionary era of the late 18th century, holds that the population of France is not made up of different “communities”, but only of “citizens” with equal rights in a “one and indivisible republic”. A lofty ideal indeed, but one that has been badly battered by subsequent developments in society, particularly since the start of large-scale immigration in the middle of the 20th century.

The problem starts with names and expressions. Whereas in the UK for instance, one hears constant references to BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) communities, in France there is no such designation. Sociologists and statisticians are not allowed to gather any specific information about such “communities” as officially they don’t exist. The furthest the Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, was willing to go in a nicely phrased soundbite the other day was to refer to “a part” of French society that felt that “the republic was not doing enough to protect its children”. Present Macron followed up a day or two later referring to racism in general as “a betrayal of republican universalism”. It follows, understandably therefore, that the term Afro-Américain used widely by French journalists to designate George Floyd is rejected by many. “Why Afro-American?” commented one newspaper reader recently. “Would one call someone from Martinique an Afro-French person?”. The guardians of correct French in the newspaper “Le Monde” have made their views clear in their blog: the term Afro-Américian, they write, is discriminatory in itself. George Floyd was, and should be referred to simply as “un Américain”.

Admirable, one might think, in theory, but in practice a definite problem.

While its known for instance that a higher proportion of people have died from Covid-19 in the northern suburbs of Paris than practically anywhere else in France, this knowledge remains purely anecdotal as no statistics are, nor can be, compiled, about different death rates in different communities and neighbourhoods. The northern Paris suburbs are known to house, in huge and unattractive housing estates, large numbers of people who are described in the media as “people of immigrant origin”. They tend to be poor, often have large families and small apartments, and are more likely to be either unemployed or employed in unskilled jobs as casual and sometimes unregistered labour.  In terms of security and policing, these areas, euphemistically referred to as “difficult neighbourhoods”, are known to harbour thriving hubs of drug trafficking and other underground activities.  Anyone wishing to find out more need go no further than the novels of Olivier Norek, a former police officer turned author and script-writer (Code 93 or Territoires) or films like Les Misérables, by Ladjy Ly, brought up in one of the neighbourhoods he depicts in his film. Its title is deliberately lifted from Victor Hugo’s eponymous 19^th century novel and last year, it won the jury’s special prize at the Cannes Film Festival before being in contention for the best foreign movie at the Oscars.  Another landmark film, “La Haine” by Matthieu Kassovitz is now 25 years old.

Nobody in France, least of all in government, can therefore deny that there is a problem and that it has been around for many years.  The police, who are supposed to maintain “republican order” in these “difficult neighbourhoods” know full well who and what they are up against but have not always displayed sound judgement and great skill in doing their job, to say the least. For their part, youths from black and North African communities constantly complain of being subject to police harassment and sometimes violence. Cases like that of Adama Traoré or that, over ten years ago of two black teenagers who took refuge and were electrocuted in an electricity sub-station after being chased by police, regularly hit the headlines and trigger violent demonstrations. And although there are clearly racist tendencies in the police, as the discovery of a closed group of police officers on Facebook, riddled with racist comments, demonstrates, these exist in all parts of society and police representatives are quick to point out that they are often unfairly singled out for criticism in doing their job.

Despite special efforts to promote children of immigrant origin (anonymous CVs for job seekers, special scholarships at universities and “grandes écoles”etc.) which in any other country would be called positive discrimination, one can’t help feeling that national unity might be better served by officially admitting that specific communities are victims of specific discrimination and trying to get to grips with the detail and extent of the phenomenon. The recent demonstrations, sparked by the killing of George Floyd and calling for a reopening of the case of Adama Traoré, show that anger and indignation in these communities run high. Many other demonstrations have taken place since, all over France, in which the demonstrators are largely black, and posters inscribed with “Black Lives Matter” and “No Justice, No Peace” are prominent. The public debate was given a further twist yesterday when the government spokeswoman, Sibeth Ndiaye, black and of Senegalese origin, spoke in favour of breaking a taboo and compiling “ethnic statistics” only to be roundly contradicted by President Macron a few hours later, who said that only specific anti-discrimination measure can be envisaged.

Republican values on citizens and equality strike a chord in the French national psyche and for many French people are one of the big and positive differences between France and countries like the UK and, above all, the US. But France’s numerous and able statisticians would surely be quick to remind politicians that they can’t properly manage what they can’t properly measure.

Back to square one ?

In her excellent book on Emmanuel Macron and the background to his rise to the presidency of France in 2017, (Revolution Française – Emmanuel Macron and the quest to reinvent a nation – Bloomsbury, 2018) Sophie Pedder, the Paris bureau chief of “The Economist” quotes part of an interview that Macron gave just a few months after becoming President: “I’m not made to lead in calm weather,” he said “my predecessor was, but I’m made for storms”. Indeed, there have been many testimonies to his poise and self-control, in Pedder’s book and other accounts since. At the height of the gilets jaunes protests in November 2018 for instance, when violent demonstrators seemed determined to march on the Elysée Palace, Macron was reported in the following week’s “Canard Enchaîné” as being expressionless and unmoved (“de marbre”) in the face of what his security staff considered an imminent threat. He didn’t budge.

As Macron now faces the second, almost perfect, storm of his presidency, he will need all the poise and self-control he can muster in deciding what to do next.

The effect of a storm is to throw a ship off course. In this case, the ship of state. How far off course depends on one’s view of where Macron has been taking France since he became President in May 2017. Contrary to what his political opponents and many in the media seem to think, his overall strategy has not been to open up France to the forces of “ultraliberal” capitalism, favouring the rich to the detriment of the less well off, but to make all French people a little less reliant on the state and its comforting but also stifling embrace, and a little more reliant on their own efforts. State intervention in the economy and the cast iron social safety net that the French enjoy at the price of high taxes and high public debt has been shifted only slightly. Or, more precisely, had been shifted only slightly before the epidemic of Covid-19 hit the country.

Running through most of France’s policy shifts since 2017, including those that have not yet been finalised, it is indeed this “liberal-light” theme of more self-reliance that seems common to all of them. The initial labour market reforms, making it less complicated and, above all, less costly to hire and fire workers had started to make a dent in some of the highest unemployment figures in the OECD. The subsequent education and training reforms, putting the choice of training schemes in the hands of employees themselves and taking it away from social partners, is credited with a big increase in apprenticeships and other training courses. The reform of the generous unemployment benefits scheme would have been a lasting incentive for the unemployed to seek retraining and find a job more quickly. But as this reform had not actually come into force by the time the Covid-19 crisis struck, it is now in limbo, some of its provisions have been put on hold and are likely to be reversed. And then of course there was the major reform of pensions, designed to adapt the pension system to a modern, post-industrial economy and also to reduce pressure on the public purse, but which had generated only controversy and confusion before the crisis. It is now on hold too and, according to some sources, more than likely to be abandoned altogether.

As he leaves his Prime Minister to oversee the precise measure to relax the lockdown from May 11th onwards, the number of employees furloughed under a state sponsored scheme settles at around 10 million, the country’s public debt to GDP ratio creeps onwards and upwards, as the state “invests in debt”, as Gérald Darmanin, the budget minister put it quaintly in a TV interview the other day, and as the latest unemployment figures soar and can only get worse, the question is whether Macron can, or indeed intends to, revert to the same course he had been charting previously, at a time when the natural reflex of most people, and not only in France, is to turn to the state for help and protection. Indeed, the man himself, in his nationwide address on April 13th, seemed unsure of his future course of action, concluding with the words, “we must all reinvent ourselves, starting with me” (“nous devons tous nous réinventer, et moi d’abord”). What that enigmatic phrase will ultimately mean remains to be seen.

For the time being at least, the French government has little choice but to continue to cope as best it can with the impact of the coronavirus and its economic fallout. Luckily, its extra borrowing is still at negative interest rates, a relatively comfortable situation which indicates that lenders have not yet lost trust in the French state’s capacity to repay its debts. But the prospect of higher interest rates is never far away. An unguarded comment by the new President of the European Central Bank was enough to push up interest rates on long-term Italian debt and the recent judgement by the German Constitutional Court has not made life any easier for the ECB to buy as much sovereign debt as it judges necessary to maintain a credible stance as lender of last resort. All this is a far cry from the situation that Macron would undoubtedly have preferred, to reduce deficits and outstanding debt and thus elicit a more favourable response from neighbours like Germany and the Netherlands to the request to loosen their own purse strings in favour of greater European solidarity.

In a recent article in “Le Monde”, Cédric Pietralunga, a journalist, writing about Macron's possible post-lockdown strategy, quotes him as saying, “of course we must protect, but protection doesn’t mean anesthetising people, as if there were nothing else to be done.” (“on doit assumer de protéger mais ce n’est pas protéger pour anesthésier, pour dire qu’il n’y a plus rien à faire”). He goes on to write that, “wanting the French to be more self-reliant is nothing new for Emmanuel Macron” (“cette envie de voir les français se prendre en main n’est pas nouvelle chez Emmanuel Macron”) referring back to his first New Year’s address to the nation in which he paraphrased JFK’s famous call, “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country”. The government spokeswoman, Sibeth Ndiaye, is quoted in the same article as saying, “the basic message is that the state alone cannot find the solution to relaxing lockdown…it’s only if everyone feels that they have their own contribution to make that we shall be able to come through this.” (“le message au fond est de dire que l’Etat seul ne peut résoudre le déconfinement … c’est parce que chacun se sentira dépositaire d’une part de la solution qu’on pourra surmonter.”). What is missing in such messages, as well as journalists’ comments on them, is the link between more or less self-reliance and the sustainability of France’s social model. The more people rely on the state, the more taxes and debt are bound to rise, a message that the French don’t really want to hear, certainly not in the present circumstances, and that very few politicians, including Macron, have yet dared to spell out in so many words.

However he decides to “reinvent himself”, Macron too, for the time being at least, has little choice but to batten down the hatches and limit the storm damage, while trying to persuade other ships of state to come to the rescue. A tactical change of course is undoubtedly essential before the overall strategy can move on again. This tactical change will last until the storm has blown over, probably by the time of the presidential election campaign in just two years’ time. Only then will we have a clearer idea of whether the French are likely to give Emmanuel Macron a second chance to continue, in Pedder’s words, “his quest to reinvent a nation”.