Ordre Rébublicain

As I predicted in my post on March 18 (“Eleven candidates in the running “) two more steel hoardings have been added to the ten put up that day in front of the primary school down the road from where I live. One more for the eleventh candidate and one displaying four official documents concerning the election:  a ministerial decree announcing the date of the election and setting out the organisational details; a ruling from the Constitutional Council giving first and last names of the eleven officially qualified candidates; a circular from our département’s préfet specifying at what time polling stations will open and close on polling day; a facsimile screen of the electronic voting machine which has replaced the traditional polling booths for the past two years or so. Much to the relief of the station supervisor who no longer has to buttonhole likely looking voters to enquire, “if they wouldn’t mind coming in at 8 to give us a hand with the count”.  But also much to the disappointment of camera crews who can longer capture the moment when a political celebrity slips his or her envelope into the ballot box to the accompaniment of the words “a voté” (“has voted”).

As the official campaign started on Monday of this week, eleven official, taxpayer-funded, posters have been put up by municipal employees. Not in any old order of course, such désordre would be inexcusable, but in the order determined by a national draw organised by the Ministry of the Interior, in which M. Dupont-Aignan occupies hoarding N°1 and M. Fillon hoarding N° 11. The order on the screen of the voting machine will be the same, as will the order in which the ballot papers will be arranged in those polling stations that do not yet have such a marvel of modern technology.

Somehow however, désordre has crept in: someone with an anarchistic turn of mind has written below the ministerial decree (not across it of course as this would be an offence!), the words “ne pas voter!” (“don’t vote !”) in neat indelible and capital letters.

Others have made their own politically motivated and idiosyncratic modifications to the posters themselves. In front of our polling station, in a well-to-do part of town, Le Pen has been decorated with the inevitable Hitler moustache, Mélenchon has been given an expertly drawn pair of devils horns and the Macron poster has been torn down. Fillon and the marginal right and left wing candidates have been left unmolested. On the hoardings down by the railway station however, Mélenchon supporters have been out in force, sticking small paper squares with the Mélenchon campaign logo over the noses and eyes of le Pen and Fillon.

I shall follow the first round of voting from the Eastern seaboard of the United States where I shall be spending ten days. But don’t think that I shan’t be voting! Far from it. I have given my proxy vote to a neighbour, who will vote for me on the day. There is no postal vote, no early voting and no proxy can be given to the authorities  - just an official proxy form countersigned by a local police officer that my proxy holder will take to my polling station on April 23 to cast my vote. Only he, not the authorities, will know how I vote. And If he doesn’t vote the way I asked him too, I will have no way of knowing.

The republican electoral machine is shifting into top gear.   I shall miss the fun of the last few days, but not the news – watch this space!

School's out !

For someone like myself who went to school in England in the 1960s, school holidays were something to look forward to but never very long: about ten days at Christmas and Easter, six weeks during the summer and a couple of half-terms which were no more than a long week-end. My brother went to a different school for few years. His holidays were not always the same as mine.  I never remember it bothering my parents. Life went on as usual.

It was only when I had been living in France for some years and my own children were going to school that I had a first culture shock. I learnt that schools are managed nationally by the Ministère de l’Education Nationale (note the “nationale”, meaning nation-wide) and that holidays were the same for everybody, same weeks, same duration. Over the years, the length of those holidays has gradually increased. Children, and of course their teachers, now have two full weeks at Christmas, two full weeks in February, another two full weeks around Easter and almost two months during the summer, a long holiday that apparently has roots in France’s rural past when children were expected to help bring in the harvest! In the Autumn there used to be a longish weekend around All Saints Day on November 1st. This was gradually extended by a day here and there before François Hollande, in one of his first acts as President in 2012, granted all schools another two full weeks.

The ostensible reason for these long holidays, which are probably the longest in Europe, not to speak of anywhere else in the world, is that chronobiologists (I first heard of this speciality in connection with school holidays!) have apparently concluded that kids need 2 weeks rest after every 7 weeks in class. A quick calculation this year reveals however that the time between the Christmas holidays and the February holidays and between them and the Spring holidays is only five weeks in some cases, especially as the most populous parts of France, like the Paris area and other major cities, now have their holidays staggered  - Paris' holidays starting and ending a week before those of another area and so on. With three academic regions, the total holiday period during the February and Spring holidays is a full month. The academic calendar is laid down by the Ministry at least two years in advance.

Why then have the chronobiologists been forgotten, contradicted or overruled? The reasons are increasingly apparent. A lead story on the evening news the other night provided a telling clue. Just before the start of the Spring holidays, a number of ski resort operators and tourist offices around the country were asked how their season was going and if they were fully booked for the four weeks of the coming holiday period. They didn’t sound too unhappy.

France is certainly a beautiful country with plenty of opportunities for tourism. And the majority of French families tend to spend their short holidays in France. But it is also true that long and frequent holiday periods justify investment in tourist facilities and a powerful lobby of MPs does everything in its power to make sure that the investment pays off by lobbying for the extension of holidays, or against their reduction.

The result of all this is that most of one’s life in France revolves around school holidays. Working parents who can take up to 5 weeks paid holiday a year regularly take week long breaks with their children during the school holidays or, if it’s not possible to do so, pack their kids off to holiday camps, day care centres or willing grandparents for a week in the country, in the mountains or at the seaside. The impact on everyone else is also profound.  A gym class is normally held in a school gymnasium? Not during the school holidays. A lecture series for adults take place in a room lent by a pedagogical institute? Not during the school holidays. More than once during my career as an interpreter, I heard the French delegate say that this or that week was not convenient for the next meeting “because of the school holidays”, apparently oblivious to raised eyebrows and suppressed smiles in the rest of the room. During the school holidays, ski resorts and holiday camps are fully booked, there are special traffic jam alerts for days on which families leave for, or return from, holidays, extra trains are scheduled and sold out almost as soon as the tickets go on sale. Paris and other large cities empty themselves of a large proportion of their inhabitants. Ski slopes, holiday resorts, rural and seaside villages face a big influx of home-grown tourists.

What all this means for the number of hours that children spend in classrooms and how much they learn is not, surprisingly perhaps, an issue of serious national concern, although once a year there is a ritual wailing and wringing of hands when it is reported that France has slipped further down the PISA rankings. It is certainly a non-issue in any presidential campaign. Tourist areas are delighted to function more or less the whole year round, families get themselves organised to go on holiday or mobilise grandparents. Teachers’ objections, understandably perhaps, are muted.

In the U.K, a father was recently fined for taking his daughter out of school for a week’s holiday during term time. He contested the fine and the case went to the Supreme Court that ruled against him, much to the relief of the representative of a head teachers’ association interviewed on the BBC’s Today Programme.  It is a far cry from France. No parent ever has to take a child out of school during term time. School’s out …..for sixteen weeks a year.

What's next ? Update...

 The plot thickens and the gap narrows. Three events of the  weekend show that this election is evolving into a real cliff hanger, the outcome of which will not be known before 8pm. on April 23.  Maybe even later that evening if the scores are very close.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is clearly making an increasing impact on voters At an open air meeting in front of thousands of supporters on the old port in Marseille, he chose not to focus on his economic programme, which is not, it must be noted, dissimilar to that of Marine Le Pen, but praised the diversity of French society, expressed sincere sorrow over the deaths of thousands of migrants in the Mediterranean and launched into an almost mystical passage about war and peace: “If you want peace, make no mistake in your vote” (“si vous voulez la paix, ne vous trompez pas de bulletin de vote”), a clear reference to the U.S strikes in Syria. Interviewed afterwards, a few people who had attended confessed that Mélenchon had impressed them and that they had now decided to vote for him, after voting for the right-wing candidate at the last presidential election. Which seems to show that part of the anti-establishment protest vote may indeed to be drifting away from Marine le Pen and towards Mélenchon (cf: my “What’s next" post of last week).

Especially as Marine le Pen has seriously blotted the copybook she has been trying desperately, and reasonably successfully, to keep clean in the past few years. Asked in a radio interview about her views on France’s role in the round-up and deportation of 13 000 Jews in Paris in July1942, she made it clear that for her, "France is not responsible" ("La France n’est pas responsable" ). This unambiguous statement not only opens up old wounds caused by France’s attitudes and policies during the occupation, wounds that Jacques Chirac’s official admission of French guilt back in 1995 was intended to heal, but is also a sinister reminder of Le Pen’s father’s anti-Semitic and fascist leanings that were the stock-in-trade of the Front National until she set out to sanitise them.

Finally, in Paris on Sunday, François Fillon held a well-attended meeting of fervent supporters and clearly feels that his star is rising again. “I don’t ask you to like me” he said rather curiously, "I ask you to vote for me in the interests of France". (Je ne vous demande pas de m’aimer. Je vous demande de me soutenir, parce qu’il y va de l’intérêt de la France".)

An event that prompted Le Monde in today’s edition to concede that "Francois Fillon is still in with a chance" ("François Fillon peut encore y croire").

Polling day is in just 2 weeks. With Mélenchon and Fillon up in the polls, Le Pen down and Macron stable, it is becoming increasingly difficult for pollsters to predict the outcome of the first round of voting, let alone the final result.

Voters, thankfully, will have the last word.

Macron unplugged

Last night’s political talk show on France Televisions, the French pubic sector TV network, was a long awaited opportunity to find out more about Emmanuel Macron, his personality and his political programme. After Marine le Pen and François Fillon, Macron was taken through his paces and confronted for more than two hours with questions about his views on foreign policy, his economic programme, and above all, how he would deal with two of the most corrosive issues in French society, unemployment and globalisation.

Macron speaks fast and at times impetuously. An irritating little grin occasionally appears on his lips when he knows that he has scored a debating point, hinting at a sense of superiority, often noticed in young, high-flying French officials in whose mould he has been cast. Towards the end of the programme, asked exactly when he had decided to stand for President, both his words and his expression conveyed sincerity. The overall impression was of a clever and ambitious young man with a mission. French voters will now have a clearer idea of whether they wish to entrust him with that mission on May 7.

On the substantive issues, Macron’s foreign policy views, particularly on Syria, were not very different from France’s well-rehearsed positions: military intervention only under a UN mandate, followed by discussions “with all parties” to eject Bashar al-Assad, bring about regime change and fight Islamic State. All this of course has been overshadowed by the events reported this morning, but French presidential elections are not decided on foreign policy issues anyway.  His macro-economic programme, on which he was closely questioned by an economic journalist, quickly became a battle about technicalities and figures that generated far more heat than light. He did not come off well in a short discussion with an articulate history teacher who criticised him for describing, a few weeks ago, the French colonisation of Algeria as a “crime against humanity”. The exchange highlighted the fact, 60 years after the events, that the war in Algeria and its aftermath are still very much a fault line in French society.

However, on unemployment and globalisation, elements of his thinking became clearer and led me to conclude that if he were to be elected President on May 7, official policy on both would shift quite significantly.

Confronted with a militant trade unionist who took him to task for failing to support employees of a Whirlpool plant about to be moved to Poland, Macron retorted that it was pure demagogy for politicians to stand up on the back of a lorry and promise that the plant would be saved. It will not have escaped his listeners that François Hollande and his ministers did just that when Arcelor-Mittal announced the closure of a blast furnace in Lorraine a few years ago.  The plant was subsequently closed and its employees were understandably bitter. Paraphrasing the Schumpeterian maxim of creative destruction, Macron went on to say that while it was legitimate for the French government to demand that Whirlpool pay back state and local authority subsidies, ultimately it was not jobs but individuals who should be protected, particularly through re-training. In a discussion with a cab driver using the Uber app, complaining that he works long hours for low pay, Macron pointed out that there are many others in France, like small farmers, greengrocers and plumbers who also work long hours for low pay but that Uber drivers are better off having a job than having none.

To my knowledge, no politician has made these points so clearly before. The wider issue here of course is the impact on France of what has come to be known as the gig economy, of the “zero hours” contracts in the U.K or “minijobs” in Germany. Those in France who denounce these kinds of jobs fail to mention that they have made a big contribution to lowering unemployment. Conversely, those who are quick to point out that French unemployment is much higher than that of the U.K and Germany fail to mention that it is largely due to a much more flexible labour market than France has been willing to countenance so far. Macron clearly wants to persuade the French to change their attitudes and embrace more flexibility. Of course, France being France, it is unlikely to adopt the free-for-all of its neighbours and will always insist on the need for regulation and protection. But when all is said and done, Macron’s stance is a welcome departure from the fossilised, all or nothing, positions that have dominated this debate in France for too long. The Barcelona v. Uber case currently before the European Court of Justice should help to clarify, later this year, whether Uber can be considered simply as a digital platform, as it claims, or a transport company, subject to labour legislation on employees, as claimed by its detractors. Unsurprisingly, France is in the latter camp.

The other interesting highlight was the final debate between Macron and François Fillon’s right-hand man, Senator Bruno Retailleau. Dressed up as a criticism of Macron’s ministerial role in the fate of two French companies, Alcatel, sold to Finland’s’ Nokia and Alstom, a part of which was absorbed by GE, it was in effect a debate about the impact of globalisation and how far France can and should go in protecting its national champions. Faced with the accusation of selling French industrial interests down the river, Macron defended himself vigorously, rolled out all the reasons for his decisions and in doing so, it seemed to me, won the argument. The end of the debate shifted to the more emotionally charged issue of what it means to be French and descended, unfortunately, into a shouting match in which neither man, let alone the journalists trying to moderate the debate, could make himself heard. But I don’t think I was the only one to feel that, all of a sudden, Fillon’s representative looked tired, flustered and old-fashioned, as if long-held concepts, nurtured by a long-established politician, had suddenly been made to look a little stale by some fresh thinking from a new boy on the block.

I wrote in a previous post (“The meddling Mr. Macron”) that I had my doubts about Mr. Macron’s modernising credentials. His performance last night went some way to dispelling them. If, as polls are now suggesting, he contests the run-off with Marine Le Pen on May 7, I shall vote for him. In that configuration, I always would have done. Now, however, I shall do so a little more willingly.

It's the politics stupid !

I usually listen with great interest to the lunchtime interview on BFM business radio. The journalist, Hedwige Chevrillon, asks well prepared and searching questions, chooses her guests carefully and always manages to get something interesting out of them. Monday’s guest was Jean Messiha, a senior official in the French administration, interviewed in his capacity as the co-ordinator of Marine Le Pen’s presidential programme. As BFM focuses mainly on economics, finance and business, most of the questions concerned Marine Le Pen’s oft-stated intention of abandoning the Euro and going back to the Franc.

M. Messiha is a clever and ambitious man. Of Coptic Egyptian origin, he arrived in France at the age of eight, did all his subsequent schooling in France, got a PhD in Economics and graduated from ENA. He speaks calmly and stated clearly all the familiar arguments to show that the Euro has been a failure and that France should make an orderly exit and have nothing more to do with it.  

Calling for a serious “review” of what the Euro has failed to achieve, he went over the usual ground: it has cramped French industrial competitiveness; the Euro area is little more than a DM zone chafing under rules “imposed by Brussels”; it is not adapted to the structure of the French economy; if France were to restore its monetary sovereignty and devalue, economic growth would pick up, unemployment would fall, deficits would be reduced and everyone would be better off. Asked about Greece, his response was that “it should have left the Euro” in 2011 or 2012, presumably meaning that if it hadn’t gone quietly it should have been pushed, the solution that German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaüble, was said to favour at the time. Messiha was convinced that once all the “facts” had been placed before the French people they would decide, in a referendum promised by Le Pen if she is elected President, to abandon the Euro.

I found myself thinking, with mounting irritation, that I had heard all this before…and that it was only half the story. Listening with half an ear, one could have been mistaken for thinking that France was the only country that had the Euro as a currency or at least the only one that had problems with it.

I would have liked to hear Messiha tell the other half of the story: that France shares the Euro with18 other countries; that the 19 members of the Euro area have decided, not unnaturally, to entrust its governance to European institutions like the European Central Bank and the European Commission; that many of the countries in the area, the original members as well as the more recent joiners, have submitted themsleves to painful economic restructuring. Portugal, Ireland, Spain and the three Baltic republics come to mind, not to speak of Greece. How come that France has come off so badly? Only because of the Euro or also because it has not yet made the necessary efforts to put its own economic house in order? As for Greece, Messiha seems to have forgotten that one of the reasons why Greece did not leave the Euro during the crisis of 2011 and 2012 was that the Greeks, in spite of everything, did not want to. If polls are to be believed, around 80% of the French do not want to either.

I cast my mind back to another debate, in Germany, after the fall of the Berlin wall, long before the introduction of the Euro.  As a prelude to unification of the two halves of the country, Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided, against the almost unanimous view of economists, that one Ostmark would be worth one Deutschmark. It was a political decision. The economists were overruled, just as Schaüble was overruled by Chancellor Merkel during the Greek crisis.  Of course, many of the economic difficulties predicted at the time occurred and the eastern part of Germany, however remarkable its recovery, is still, on average, poorer than the western part. But in 50 years time, long after the economic difficulties have been forgotten, Helmut Kohl will be remembered as the Chancellor who did not fluff the historic chance to unite his country in peace.

The Euro, to be sure, will continue to generate heated debate about its economic merits and drawbacks. Many economists like Joseph Stiglitz have been stinging in their criticism that the Euro area is not what they call an "optimum currency area", like the United States, and therefore can never work.

The truth is that the Euro is very much work in progress. Since its launch, institutions and arrangements have been added, usually during or after a crisis, as so often in the EU. The European Stability Mechanism  (2013) and the banking union (2016) are good examples. Others are necessary. The Euro area is still a long way from the transfer union of the United States that took over 100 years to perfect. Fiscal transfers already take place in the EU from the richer to the poorer members. It will take longer for true fiscal federalism, in some form or another, to evolve. Is that a good enough argument for abandoning the whole venture after less than 20 years?

That process will indeed take years rather than months. But if European politicians do not make the political case, debates between opposing schools of economists will become increasingly acrimonious and toxic.  The Euro, let’s face it, is above all a political project, designed to help bring about that “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”, that is one of the founding principles of the European Union. And that is precisely what Marine le Pen and her like are afraid of.

But the majority in most EU member countries, including I hope in France, seem to consider that it is still a better path to follow than all the others. If that is the case, political leaders should say so and do their bit to make the Euro work better.

A little political fiction

At a time when fake news and alternative facts are flying thick and fast, it seems hazardous to indulge in political fiction. But a novel I have just finished provides an opportunity that I cannot resist. It is the most recent novel by the French writer Michel Houellebecq, (pronounced Wellbeck) Soumission (published in France by Flammarion in 2015 and in an  English translation by Lorin Stein as Submission by Picador books in 2016).

Houellebecq is a controversial and somewhat provocative contemporary novelist who has won the prestigious Prix Goncourt and other literary prizes.The themes taken up in Soumission will be familiar to his regular readers but one of them in particular has special resonance against the background of the upcoming French presidential elections. The novel is set in 2022 and narrated in the first person by a rather unsavoury university professor, observing the political situation in the run-up and immediate aftermath of the presidential elections of that year, just five years from now. Many of the politicians he refers to are household names in French politics today and are involved, in one way or another, in the election campaign of 2017: Marine le Pen, Manuel Valls, François Hollande and François Bayrou, to name just four. Houellebecq is clearly seeking to extrapolate from the political situation prevalent at the time of writing in 2014. Without wishing to spoil the story for those who have not read it, the scenario described for 2022 is the elimination in the first round of voting of the traditional right and left wing and centre parties that have governed France since 1958 and the triumph, in the run-off, with wide-ranging support from those same parties, of a new figure, heading a new party that had been unheard of five years previously.

Sound familiar? Coming back to the real world of 2017, opinion polls are now predicting that the mainstream candidates of the right and left will indeed be eliminated in the first round of voting on April 23 and that the run-off will be contested by Marine Le Pen and a new figure in French politics, Emmanuel Macron, at the head of a party that was founded a year ago almost to the day, on April 6, 2016.  He has so far won pledges of support from many leading figures in the socialist party, including Manuel Valls, a few from the right and, most significantly, the centrist party of François Bayrou!

In Houellebecq’s novel, one of the characters paints a highly unflattering picture of Bayrou. He is described as vain, obtuse and unprincipled, motivated solely by an obsession to win power. Observers of the real world will have a sardonic smile on their lips as they read or re-read this ferocious portrait, in the knowledge that Bayrou, having lost almost every election he has contested during his political career to date, was one of the first to rally to Macron’s standard and is now well placed, in the event of a Macron victory, to become Prime Minister.

However, the real mould-breaking event described in the novel is not the elimination of the mainstream candidates in the first round of voting in 2022 but that the previously unknown candidate who wins the election that year, beating Marine le Pen in the run-off, is called Mohammed Ben Abbes, at the head of a new party, the Muslim Fraternity, which goes on to introduce an Islamic regime to which French society is obliged to submit.

One can of course debate at length whether this scenario, or a similarly scary one, will play out in 2022. Be that as it may, Houellebecq has pinpointed with uncanny foresight the current and possible future consequences of the slow decomposition of the French body politic since the surprise elimination of Lionel Jospin in the first round of the presidential election of 2002 and the run-off, that year, between Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father and founder of the Front National. Since 2002, despite the gathering strength of the protest vote at every election, neither Chirac nor Sarkozy nor Hollande have devised, let alone implemented a convincing and credible political and economic strategy designed to bring large swathes of the French electorate back into the mainstream and away from the protesting fringes.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that one of Houellebecq’s implicit messages is that the next President of France will have one last chance, over the next five years, to put the country back on track…and stop the purveyors of fake news and alternative facts from gaining the upper hand.

April 1st - neither fish nor fool

Our local bakery clearly had better ideas for today than to play tricks on their numerous customers. As I was queuing up this morning for my daily bread, or baguette tradition as it’s now called, I spotted, among the always mouth-watering display of cakes, tarts, pies and breads, a tray full of….. fish ! The pastry case was in the form of a fish with a wide tail, the scales were made of small, evenly-cut slices of apple or pear, a glaze provided the shine and the eye was a large blueberry.

Although our household is not a great consumer of cakes and pastries, I couldn’t resist these and bought one apple/fish and one pear/fish. Both were delicious!

Nobody seems to agree where the expression poisson d’avril, the French for an April fool’s trick, comes from, except that it goes back to the middle ages at least and may be connected with the end of Lent or the opening of the fishing season. Judging by the number of people buying the baker’s fish tarts this morning, the fishing season in his shop must have closed just a couple of hours after opening.

As I write, there has just been a news flash saying that the French government has announced €1 billion worth of measures to the people of Guiana after two days of negotiations with their representatives.  (cf: my post two days ago). I hope, for their sake, that this is not an April fool’s trick!