All’s not well in France
Revolutions are often sparked by an unexpected shock to an already weakened regime. As commentators in France remark not only on the crisis engulfing François Hollande’s government but also on the apparent deathrattle of the country’s entire political system, it could be that his flagship policy of legalising gay marriage will be the last straw that breaks the Fifth Republic’s back.
Opposition to the bill has electrified the middle classes, the young and much of provincial France. On March 24, in the freezing cold, the four-km stretch from the Arche de la Défence to the Arc de Triomphe was full of people protesting against the bill. On January 13, also chilly, the Champ de Mars was similarly crammed. When Johnny Hallyday or the World Cup got crowds like that, people talked of two million. But the police, evidently acting under political orders, have claimed that both demonstrations garnered a few hundred thousand at most. Credible accusations surfaced in Le Figaro on Monday night that the film taken from police helicopters on March 24 and released by the Prefecture has been manipulated to reduce the apparent numbers of demonstrators.
The government may have rushed the gay marriage law through Parliament on Tuesday to try to take the wind out of the sails of this mass movement, but police paranoia of this kind is surely a sign that the French political system is terminally sick. The historical background certainly confirms this. For more than 30 years, every French government has lost every election. With a single exception, you have to be over 50 today to have voted in the last election, in 1978, when the incumbent majority held on to power: Nicolas Sarkozy managed to get a conservative majority re-elected in 2007 only because he profiled himself, dishonestly, as a new broom and as a rebel against the roi
fainéant, his former mentor Jacques Chirac.
François Hollande’s election last May was therefore not a victory but only his predecessor’s defeat. He was elected with 48 per cent of the votes, if you include spoilt and invalid ballots, and 39 per cent of the registered voters. His election was especially unimpressive considering the widespread revulsion at Sarkozy’s personal bling and at his betrayal of his own voters. But even so, Hollande’s catastrophic poll rating has broken all records. When in March he became the most unpopular President after 10 months in office, his rating stood at 31 per cent. Now it is 26 per cent.
The immediate cause of the crisis lies in the dramatic alienation of sections of the electorate who voted for Hollande in May. The overseas populations of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, and regions like Brittany where the left is as deeply entrenched as in Scotland, are in revolt over gay marriage: the largest French daily, Ouest-France, based in Rennes, has turned against Hollande on the issue.
But the deeper explanation for the strength of feeling lies in the fact that, in French law, marriage is indissociable from the right to start a family. There is currently no gay adoption in France and no access for gays or lesbians to medically assisted procreation. The marches against gay marriage are therefore really marches in favour of the traditional family — and in favour of that “normality” which Hollande promised to bring to presidency but which he has betrayed in favour of the interests of a tiny minority.
The issue, in other words, has touched a nerve in France, a country divided between a globalist elite and a conservative nation, part of which still believes in the family and the state. Hollande’s economic orthodoxy coupled with his support for gay marriage seems but a softer version of the same phenomenon — as does the recent and severely damaging revelation that the former budget minister had a secret bank account in Switzerland (and then lied about it). The disillusionment with Hollande is also acute because this “socialist” President is such an obvious copy of his “conservative” predecessor. Hollande, who campaigned against austerity before the election only to introduce it immediately after, recalls Sarkozy, who was elected with the votes of the radical right only to appoint prominent leftists as ministers in his Blairite “big tent” government. The military adventure in Mali is Hollande’s Libya.
This similarity between the two men throws into the sharpest possible light the systemic crisis of which the endless changes of governmental majority are the symptom: France, like the rest of Europe and much of the industrial world, is governed by one single political superclass which straddles not only nation-states but also left and right. EU politicians spend more time seeing each other than their own voters, while the range of policies actually at stake at any election narrows with each one. This is why voters systematically reject their leaders, and this is why the young have been so massively present in the marches. Such a situation cannot last.