French presidential weekly: the death of the socialist party & the sponsorship rule killing French democracy
Whilst Eric Zemmour polls at around fifteen per cent but struggles to make the five hundred sponsors threshold, one can begin to understand the growing gap between French people and their elected representatives.
This is the first article in a new series by Juilien Yvon about the upcoming French presidential elections. Articles will be posted weekly.
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar once proclaimed “cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once”. According to the latest Elabe poll, the French socialist party will suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune upon receiving an embarrassing 1.5% of the vote share in April’s presidential election- its worst result since 1969.
With such a humiliating result on the cards for the Socialists, one finds it rather difficult to believe that the party had once triumphed in obtaining the presidency just ten years ago with twenty-eight per cent of the vote share. Following the 2008 financial crash, the Socialist candidate, Francois Hollande, was elected on a quasi “anti-bankers” platform. Like many other left-wing hopefuls across the continent, Hollande promised to put an end to the neo-liberal transfer of wealth towards capital, tackle corruption in the financial world and, lo and behold, reform the EU.
Unsurprisingly, Hollande fell flat on his face. His first hurdle was an EU that had already reformed itself into a more strenuous supranational apparatus that openly intervened in national democracies to impose its deflationary ideology. Whilst the Stability and Growth Pact killed any hope of public investment by capping government deficit at a mere three per cent of GDP, the EU Council’s Broad Economic Policy Guidelines (BEPG) pushed the feeble president into introducing more unpopular austerity measures. The most notable reform was arguably the El Khomri law of 2016 which made it easier for companies to dismiss workers, reduced overtime payment from a twenty-five per cent increase to a ten per cent increase, and equally reduced severance payments. Upon closer inspection, Hollande’s reforms had arguably been elicited by the 2016 BEFGs which demanded that France modernise its labour laws to further encourage employers to hire on permanent contracts. Whilst some continue to regurgitate the same old “remain and rebel” slogans, one fails to recall the 2011 ECJ ruling which stated that all failure to implement these guidelines would now result in a fine worth 0.2% of the guilty member state’s GDP.
The Socialist downfall, however, was the party’s response (or lack thereof) to the various social crises which rocked the country. Firstly, the Syrian war produced the biggest tidal wave of migration since the Second World War. As expected, Hollande would misdiagnose the mood of the nation by becoming one of the key proponents of the EU’s mandatory migrant quotas. Understandably, the French public had grown rather sceptical of the EU’s open-door migration policy, following a plethora of Islamic terrorist attacks. Indeed, within the space of a year, the French had witnessed the most horrific murders at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters and the Bataclan concrete hall, before spectating a truck being ploughed into dozens of innocent pedestrians in Nice.
Whilst the death of the Socialist party may have appeared rather abrupt, one can argue that, on an anthropological level, its demise was inexorable. Traditionally, the French political landscape since the 1848 revolution had been divided into four ideological camps: the Catholic right, the liberal right, the Socialists, and (later) the Communists. Moreover, each of these four ideologies had its regional power bases, deeply rooted in ancient family structures and agricultural formations.
The election of the first Socialist government in 1981 was undeniably the product of three phenomena between 1960-70: the sexual revolution, the rapid deindustrialisation of France, and the first wave of mass immigration from North Africa.
Following the May ‘68 student revolution, France witnessed one of its greatest declines in sexual morality. The last bastions of French Catholicism, such as Brittany, finally fell. Having both dominated regions with authoritarian and inegalitarian family structures (three generations living under one roof and primogeniture inheritance), the Catholic right and the Socialists had previously been separated by religion- the latter dominating protestant regions. The final de-Christianisation of France, however, led to the fusion of these two ideologies which now replaced the authority of God and the church with the authority of the state. This unusual coalition led to the transmogrification of French socialism into the ugly middle-class bureaucracy of today. Indeed, whilst President Francois Mitterrand oversaw the mass privatisation of French industry, he equally created over two million more civil service jobs to compensate for the rise in unemployment.
As witnessed in most countries across the continent, the deindustrialisation of France spelt the death of its Communist Party. The main beneficiary of communism’s demise was the Socialist party which absorbed most of its vote, owing to the preserved perception of the traditional economic left-right divide. However, the seeds for the growth of the far-right had been sown as, little by little, mass immigration pushed the more socially conservative working-class and formerly communist regions to vote for the National Front, based on cultural rather than economic issues.
In the 2017 presidential election, the myth of the traditional left-right divide was smashed. With Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen reaching the second round, it was clear a new dividing line had been forged: that between the globalists and the nationalists. Consequently, the Socialists were attacked on two fronts- its liberal cosmopolitan core switching to Macron whilst its remaining traditional working-class electorate either abstaining or lending its vote to Marine Le Pen.
Interestingly, the decline in the Socialist vote has paralleled the rebirth of the French Communist Party (PCF). Having chosen to sit out the previous two presidential elections, the PCF entered the opinion polls this year with less than one per cent of the vote share. In the space of two months, however, the party has seen that number rise to around five per cent. The party’s candidate, Fabien Roussel, has begun to garner support by presenting himself as the only pro-nuclear and anti-woke left-wing candidate. One will have to wait and see whether Roussel sticks to his old school populist platform or, like Corbyn or Mélenchon, folds in front of the vocal minority of woke student politics.
With the Socialists languishing on 1.5%, one begs the question of how they have already qualified for the first round with ease whilst other candidates, which sit above them in the opinion polls, are struggling to make it. I am, of course, referring to the French parrainage (sponsorship) rule which requires all presidential candidates to collect at least five hundred signatures from elected representatives (whether national, regional, or local) to qualify for the first round.
Controversially, the rules surrounding sponsorships were reformed under the Hollande premiership. Having previously been anonymous, sponsorships are now made public. Under the pressure of the higher echelons of the mainstream political party machine, many elected officials are now deterred from sponsoring more radical or alternative candidates. Without necessarily agreeing with their sponsored candidate’s politics, elected officials would candidly sponsor them anyway, simply for the fact of having a wider representation of voices at the polls. Today, however, many refuse to sponsor certain candidates for fear of them being detrimental to their political reputation and career.
Subsequently, this year’s field could be severely reduced. As we speak, the current trajectory suggests that zero Frexit supporting candidates will be on the starting line-up. Furthermore, all candidates who are either sovereigntist, anti-globalist or tougher on immigration are struggling to reach the magic five hundred signatures. In what appears to be outright retribution, Florian Philippot, the most vocal opponent of vaccine mandates, has so far amassed a single solitary signature.
If one considers that the Socialist candidate can poll at 1.5% but obtain over a thousand sponsors whilst Eric Zemmour polls at around fifteen per cent but struggles to make the five hundred sponsors threshold, one can begin to understand the growing gap between French people and their elected representatives.
