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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 February - 3 March 1999 Issue No. 418 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 February - 3 March 1999 Issue No. 418
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Telling their left from their right
By Hosni Abdel-RehimIn France, the first election battle of the new year is already underway. It began right after the Christmas holidays -- well ahead of its official start date. Political parties across the spectrum are busily revamping their programmes in order to refocus on European issues instead of national ones.
First off the blocks were the Greens, who are part of the ruling leftist coalition. Their list is controversially headed by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the former May 1968 student leader and deputy mayor of Frankfurt. Yet the acrimony which he has provoked in certain quarters seems, if anything, to have helped broaden the Greens' constituency. According to opinion polls, the party is now second only to the Socialists, thus displacing the Communist Party (PC) as the leading junior partner in the government.
Nor has Cohn-Bendit been afraid to criticise the government of which his colleagues are a part. In particular, he has laid into the left's immigration policy, which last year led to 65,000 "sans papiers" being denied permission to stay in France. Cohn-Bendit has demanded that all those who asked to be "regularised" be allowed to stay. In doing so, he challenged the right and the left to show their hand, while pulling the carpet from under the feet of the far left, which was banking on playing the immigration card as its trump against Lionel Jospin's government.
Cohn-Bendit's shock tactics seem to have worked, for they have got the other parties rushing into the fray. The fascist right has since announced three lists, led respectively by the National Front's Le Pen, his erstwhile protégé Bruno Mégret and all-purpose national aristocrat Philippe de Villiers. All three are opposed to the recent European agreements leading to further political and economic integration and all three are calling for Draconian measures to deal with illegal immigrants. However, they also seem intent on dividing that part of the vote which might one day be theirs in the pursuit of personal ambition, much to the disgust of many of their supporters. As a result, it seems unlikely their collective score will exceed 10 per cent.
The conventional right, which should have every reason to rejoice at this disarray on its extreme fringe, seems likely to replicate their mistakes. The Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) -- President Jacques Chirac's party -- has already presented a list to be led by Phillipe Seguin, in collaboration with Démocratie Libérale (DL), a break-away group founded by Alain Madelin, the former finance minister. How the two parties' programmes will sit together remains to be seen. Madelin is not only European in outlook and opposed to union-inspired social legislation, but is openly calling for "American-style" liberalism -- that is, the restriction of social expenditure and the slashing of unemployment benefits.
Meanwhile, the Union Démocratique Française (UDF) has announced that it is to go its own way, fielding a list that will be led by former minister of education and current party leader François Bayrou.
At the opposite end of the political spectrum, the Communists have also opted for autonomy. Not only will they not be joining forces with the Socialist Party, but half the candidates on their list, led by the party's secretary-general, Robert Hue, have no official party affiliation. Some observers fear, however, that this apparent open-mindedness will only serve to create a rightist trend within the PC, diluting the ideological content of its programme.
For their part, the Socialists are united around Lionel Jospin's ultra-European platform, which includes a number of "social Europe" policies aimed at combatting unemployment. Opinion polls predict that the Socialist list will capture around 20 per cent of the vote.
Further, the Socialists and the Greens along with their coalition partners in the Citizens' Movement (MDC) -- a Socialist splinter group led by Minister of the Interior Jean-Pierre Chevènement -- are expected to represent the majority of the French contingent in the European parliament.
In the last European elections, the MDC took only 2.4 per cent of the votes. Any improvement on their position depends on their attracting the votes of dissident leftists who are hostile to the European project -- and also to the integration of immigrants into French society, a crusade Chevènement has made his own.
By the end of January, the far left had also entered the ring, with the improbable union of long-standing rivals Arlette Laguiller and Alain Krivine. Their joint platform criticises the government's austerity measures, and the rising unemployment that has been brought about by EU policies. Even together, though, they are unlikely to gain more than 5 per cent of the vote -- and that depends upon Cohn-Bendit failing to seduce their voters away.
The French are also following developments on the other side of the Rhine closely, following the defeat of the SDP-Green coalition in Hesse. As a result, the German government no longer commands an absolute majority in the Bundestag. This has led observers to re-evaluate the Greens' suggestions regarding immigration policies in Germany. It has also led to speculation that the Social Democrats will be forced to reach some sort of compromise with the Christian Democrats before they can press ahead with their electoral programme.
Is France about to go the same way as Germany? Will the European elections register a swing to the right? If so, it may give some indication of what can be expected in the next presidential elections, when Jacques Chirac will be defending his post. Yet, however successful, the French right looks likely to remain divided. This is not simply a matter of internal politics. The next few years will see further crucial developments in "Euroland", as the EU moves to upgrade the European parliament and create a European constitution and penal code, as well as laying down continent-wide rulings on working hours and immigration.
How this process will proceed will depend largely on the degree of cooperation prevailing between the two leading European powers. All the EU's current plans could easily be upset if there was to be a big change on the political map. As Britain's Tony Blair stands on the sidelines with his hands in his pockets, the next few months will show whether the fragile European centre-left consensus can survive its biggest challenge yet.
