France: disillusion with the elite
There were two key points to emerge from the first round French presidential election. The first is clearly the precipitous climb in the National Front vote from 10.4% in 2007 to 18% this time. The second is that the two main anti-establishment candidates (Marine Le Pen of the hard-right National Front and Jean-Luc Melenchon from the hard left) together outpolled each of the two establishment candidates. Le Pen and Melenchon between them polled 29% compared with 28% for the socialist Francois Hollande and 27% for the mainstream right’s President Nicolas Sarkozy. The true significance of these points is a matter of debate, but it is likely that the message from the French electorate may be even more profound than commentators and Europe’s political echelon are yet admitting.
On the first point, some commentators have tried to make the case that just under 20% of the vote going to the far right is nothing exceptional in France and should not be considered a significant change in the political landscape. After all, they point out, in 2002 Marine Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie got 16.9% of the vote to which should be added the 2.3% that went to the other far-right candidate, Bruno Megret, and some of the 4% that went to a hunters’ rights candidate. All-in-all, it could be argued that just over 20% expressed a preference for the hard-right in 2002.
Possibly that is so, but if it is then it only serves to highlight even more strongly the level of disillusion that has set in since 2007. Clearly with the National Front vote falling from 16.8% in 2002 to 10.4% in 2007, Sarkozy must have siphoned off a significant number of NF voters in his successful 2007 campaign. But even with his anti-immigrant rhetoric Sarkozy has now lost this vote and it has returned to the National Front because he failed to deliver on the pledges that secured these voters in the first place.
The evidence for this is not hard to find. On immigration, for instance, average net immigration for the years 2000-2006 was 0.66 per thousand inhabitants. Since 2006 it has averaged 1.48 per thousand. Despite his rhetoric, President Sarkozy has not returned the trust that was put in him in 2007. He has not turned his words into action.
But we believe it was not just the mainstream right but the mainstream in general that was punished in the polls, and on an astonishingly high turnout of 80%. Apart from the 10% of the votes going to the hard-left Melenchon, it could be argued that a vote for Hollande was also partially a vote against the mainstream, with the front-running socialist candidate’s rejection of the German-dictated fiscal pact for the eurozone and the anti-capitalist nature of his tax proposals.
So there would appear to be a wider disillusion than just with the failure of Sarkozy to deliver on his promises. Partly it is anti-capitalist, and the effect, if not necessarily the cause, could be a turning away from France’s hitherto unswerving devotion to European integration. Le Pen, of course, would take France out of the euro, while Melenchon would have nothing to do with Germany’s insistence on fiscal rectitude. But even the two mainstream contenders have been less pro-Europe than in the past. Hollande is campaigning against German orthodoxy, and he has proclaimed: “We are a great nation, a great country, whose choices are not made by the heads of state or governments of countries that are friendly but external to our democracy".
Sarkozy, for his part, has threatened to freeze contributions to the EU budget, to suspend France’s membership of the Schengen open-borders agreement, and to support a protectionist ‘Buy European Act’ that goes against the grain of EU policy. The contrast with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is obvious. In recent speeches she has been advocating the need for full political union. But, for once, France’s leaders are not responding to a European crisis with the traditional cry of the European elite for ‘more Europe’ – or, at least, not on the electoral stump – and this is significant. European integration has been built on the dictum of never letting a good crisis go to waste.
We are not yet saying that France is turning its back on the 50-year project of trying to re-establish French glory through a French-controlled united Europe paid for by Germany. In France, the attraction of this project extends much further than the elite. Nevertheless, as the flaws in the project become increasingly apparent (principally the costs of building and maintaining European unity and the reluctance of Germany to foot the bill forever), so perceptions are changing. The 2012 French presidential election could prove to be about a far more significant shift in French political forces than just a surge in support for the National Front, and it reinforces our long-held view that European integration has passed its high-water mark. JdeC.