An Englishman's View of France on Election Day

[Errigal]

April 22, 2007

Unlike us, the French do it all wrong but still get life so right


Simon Jenkins

Both France and Britain are about to change their leaders. The French will do so by ballot, the British by bistro.
The French are staging a raucous two-ring circus to elect their new president, involving a first vote today and another in two weeks’ time. The British have already been told who is to lead them. It was ordained 13 years ago by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the Granita restaurant in Islington, north London. Blair would be prime minister first provided he ensured Brown would follow him.
In never moving Brown from the security of the Treasury and packing the cabinet with wimps and half-wits, Blair has been as good as his word, despite regarding Brown as unworthy of the office. The voters can get stuffed. While France practises the politics of Wilkes, Paine and Mill, Britain borrows from Louis XIV.
Modern elections are festivals of indecent exposure. They display politicians in all their nakedness and in doing so reveal much about the countries they purport to lead. The French election has been no exception. It has not been a pleasant spectacle for Brussels oligarchs or Americans who like to lump all Europeans together as homogeneous. It has peeled away the skin and shown France worried, vulnerable, proud, vital, stylish and unlike anywhere else — in other words, French.
Two years ago the French (and the Dutch) did Europe a signal service by voting against a new European constitution. They thereby relieved Britain of the necessity of doing the same. We forget how those referendums shattered Labour’s establishment. Peter Hain, now running for Labour’s deputy leadership, deceitfully called the new constitution merely “a tidying up operation”. Peter Mandelson, Neil Kinnock and Jack Straw sat around after the French vote like Roman cardinals contemplating Luther’s Reformation, glumly demanding a “period of sober reflection”. José Manuel Barroso, president of the European commission, declared a “risk of contagion” across Europe if the referendums continued. The French and Dutch should vote again and do so “until they get it right”. Only in Brussels is democracy considered a disease.
The French vote was, of course, peculiar. The vote against the new constitution was not (as it would have been in Britain) because it was too centralist and corporatist. The French “no” lobby’s case was that Europe was becoming too liberal, too open-market and thus threatening France’s cartelised public sector and restrictive labour laws. Worse, an expanded Europe would put French jobs at the mercy of east Europeans. France, co-founder of the new Europe, now rejected its pan-Europeanism. It was a reactionary vote but it worked. Indeed it may be called in aid again if the Anglo-German plan to revive the constitution as “just a treaty” goes ahead. Blair, eager for some European credentials before he retires, will argue that a treaty would need no referendums and can be slipped through before Brown takes over. Of course Europe needs a new constitution/ treaty, but not this one and not without a vote.
A similar chauvinism has been reflected in the election campaign. The contest between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolãne Royal has only superficially displayed the new politics, where personality and vision are all and policy programmes unimportant. The right-wing Sarkozy’s desire to “get France back to work” is closest to Britain’s Thatcherite consensus, but Thatcherism is not something he would dare advocate. The left-wing Royal is corporatist, conservative and protectionist. She is pledged to maintain the 35-hour week, state benefits and guarantee employment and housing tenure, despite their contribution to a devastating 22% youth unemployment rate.
Both these candidates, along with the centrist François Bayrou, share a nationalism which, to outsiders, seems old-fashioned and Gaullist. Nervous about immigration, passionate for the public sector and defensive of the state, they could not be farther from the reform programmes being sought in Germany, Scandinavia and Britain.
None of them would suggest opening French agriculture to world competition. None would hint at multiculturalism in a country whose southern shores are besieged by Muslim and north African migrants. None would attack the scale of the public sector, which still owns or controls all public utilities and has half of all adults dependent on it. One of Sarkozy’s final rallies was in a boiler-making plant where he pledged to protect French manufacturing against foreign competition.
This conservatism evokes the derision of Britons eager to repay the smugness that France hurled at us during the horrors of the 1970s. They point to the 30,000 French who pour into Britain looking for work each year, drawn by a more open and dynamic economy. It takes two days to set up a company in Britain, three months in France. From the Huguenots and the Orléanists to the Communards and the resistance, Britain has long been accustomed to accepting refugees from France’s political and military disasters. Today critics cite French businessmen building factories in Kent. They see Paris declining into a sort of Venice on dry land, industries awash in subsidies and stuck in the doldrums, French culture perpetually “en crise”.
Yet such derision rarely turns over the coin. It does not mention that more Britons now migrate to France than vice-versa (42,000 in 2005). They are drawn by the quality of life that attracts 7.3m British holidaymakers a year and 50,000 British second-home owners. There are few French pleasure seekers pouring the other way. France takes seriously the protection of its urban and rural environment. It values civic life: witness the cleanliness, security and confidence of municipalities there compared with Britain’s. Public services work. France’s trains run far and fast. Towns and cities, parks and museums are beautiful — as are even motorway service stations. The public realm in France has taste and bravura. In Britain it is grotty, largely because it is under the aegis of Whitehall and Westminster.
Europeans used to fight to get into Britain’s NHS hospitals. Not any more. Today the flight from these demoralised, MRSA-ridden places to France’s immaculate hospitals is becoming a flood. When last year Jacques Chirac warned that to pursue British policies risked having to accept Britain’s quality of life, his audience laughed. The risk was unthinkable.
A recent study of Anglo-French relations, That Sweet Enemy by Robert and Isabelle Tombs, delighted in the implacable polarity of these two cultures. It stretches back and forward through centuries of conflict to such piquant contrasts as the British official complaining that something “might work in theory but not in practice” while a French counterpart complains that “it might work in practice but not in theory”. Did not Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister inform the baffled Jim Hacker that Britain’s nuclear missiles were targeted not on Moscow but on Paris? Have not the Royal Navy’s bases always faced the French coast and not Germany or the Atlantic?
This is all good clean fun. Where it becomes less attractive is when British comment on other countries takes as its basic premise that they would be better off if only they were run like Britain (or America). The depiction of Chirac as an absurd Bourbon prince may have had a grain of truth in it, but Chirac ran France as the French desired, as did François Mitterrand and other presidents before him. Hence his constant capitulation to pressure from the unions and farm lobbies, irrespective of France’s hypocritical claim to be “a good European”.
Protectionism is, in every sense of the word, part of the French character. It is the privilege of a sovereign state, as it is the right of its citizens to choose and pay for it.
A casualty of globalisation has been a growing intolerance of political diversity, diversity not just of national personality but also of ideology, political priority and system of government. I may not share France’s view of the world and may believe it wrong to deny the Thatcherite reformation, as in varying degrees do all today’s candidates. But as Voltaire, the greatest of Frenchmen, insisted, the right that most needs defending is the right to be wrong.
On this day of the French election, long live difference.

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