Monday, February 12, 2007

Toeing The Party Line

I promised a bunch of background on the French presidential election, and I realize now that guilt over my failure to do so has kept me from even posting on some of the developments going on. So I'm just going to start giving updates, and hope that people care.

The big news of the campaign here has been Ségolène Royal's recent slippage in the polls, due in part to a series of media-stoked gaffes, but also because she had committed herself to a listening period made up of small regional town hall-type meetings, as well as online forums, to integrate the concerns of the French electorate into her campaign program.

Despite taking a beating for running what was called a policy-free campaign based on charisma and popularity polls (remind you of anyone?), she stuck to her guns, arguing that to cave in on her promise to the French people would be a sign of weakness.

Well, yesterday marked the end of the listening period and the big rollout of a program. And consensus seems to be that two months of direct consultations with the French electorate have produced a 100-point plan that bears a strong resemblance to the Socialist party's electoral platform, completed... last year. As the BBC puts it:

Thus her call for a rise in the monthly minumum wage to 1,500 euros (£1,000; $1,952) in the course of the next legislature is straight out of the PS programme, as is the proposal to increase low pensions by 5%.

It was a party idea to build 120,000 social housing units a year, to place a rental ceiling for low-income families at 25% of monthly revenue, and to punish councils that do not build their legal quota of public accommodation.

Reducing the country's reliance on nuclear power by increasing renewable energy sources to 20% of needs by 2020 is also a Socialist measure, as is the idea to provide free out-of-class coaching to all schoolchildren.

In other words, after flirting for the past few months with a Third Way-type centrism that rankled some of the party apparatchik, Ségo has largely re-positioned herself as a true Socialist candidate in order to mobilize the base for the first round of elections.

Now everyone will have their eyes glued on the poll numbers to see what impact it has on the campaign. My prediction? If she doesn't turn things around in the next two weeks, look for one of "the elephants", as the old-time party bigshots are known here, to launch an independent campaign bid. Specifically Laurent Fabius, a former Prime Minister under Mitterand, who had no qualms bucking the party line to oppose the constitutional referendum in 2005.

As I put it in a comment on another blog, politics isn't just a game here. It's a blood sport.

Posted by Judah in:  La Presidentielle   

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