16 - 22 May 2002
Issue No.586
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 May 2002 Issue No.586 |
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With an eye on June
Fighting crime, lowering taxes and preparing for the June parliamentary elections will be the priorities of the new French government, writes David Tresilian from Paris
Building on his unprecedented success in the second round of the French presidential elections on 5 May, scoring 82.21 per cent of the vote against the Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen's 17.79 per cent according to revised figures released last week, French President Jacques Chirac named a new prime minister, 53- year-old Jean-Pierre Raffarin, to replace Socialist Party Leader Lionel Jospin, who resigned on 6 May.
Raffarin, a little-known figure who served as minister for small business in the Juppé government from 1995 to 1997, went on to form a cabinet made up of many familiar figures from the French right, including a leading figure in Chirac's Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) Party, Nicolas Sarkozy, as head of an expanded Ministry of the Interior and Internal Security. Sarkozy had himself been widely tipped to succeed Jospin as prime minister, having served as a prominent member of Chirac's re-election committee.
Among the other appointments were Dominique de Villepin as minister of foreign affairs, formerly secretary-general at the Elysée Palace during Chirac's first presidency, Luc Ferry, a professor of Philosophy, as minister of education, and Michèle Alliot-Marie as minister of defense, the most senior of several women appointed to ministerial positions in the new government.
In his victory speech following his re-election to a second term as French president, reduced since 2000 from seven to five years, Chirac said that the priorities of the new government would be to fight crime, to increase the competitiveness of French business and to lower income tax.
Stressing "action" and "speed", Chirac said that "very urgent measures should be taken," particularly since the new government has only a few weeks to establish itself before the first round of the parliamentary elections on 9 June. The second round takes place on 16 June, with French left-wing parties being confident that they will return to power, ushering in a new period of "cohabitation" between a right-wing president and left-wing government.
Left-wing victory during the 1997 parliamentary elections had led to the formation of Jospin's "plural left" government, which had introduced a range of social legislations, including the reduction of the working week to 35 hours, the introduction of a state-sponsored youth-employment scheme and universal medical coverage, all to the disgust of the French right, which had argued that the measures would further harm private enterprise and France's competitiveness abroad.
France's soaring crime rates, particularly among young people, had been one of the main features of the election campaign, with both Chirac and Le Pen riding a wave of popular anxiety. Sarkozy, as minister of the interior, will have responsibility for reducing those figures, targeting particularly the parallel drug-based economy that has grown up in the poverty-stricken suburbs surrounding major French cities.
An immediate reduction of income tax by five per cent has been announced, with various social charges also being targeted. In France, national insurance and other social-security contributions levied at source can easily reach 42 per cent of an average salary, with employers paying yet higher complementary contributions. These high charges, the new government argues, aggravate already high rates of unemployment and put up French labour costs.
Two flagship pieces of social legislation inherited from the Jospin government will also be reviewed. Legislation introducing the 35-hour working week will be "softened," and that regulating the conditions under which companies may fire workers, the so-called law on "social modernisation," will be abandoned.
In his first media interview, given last week on France's TF1 television channel, Raffarin fended off the notion that his was only an "interim government" before the real test of popular support for the right at the June parliamentary elections. Stressing the need to "modernise the country" and to restore authority "with great firmness", he said that the presidential elections had revealed a "real discontent" among the electorate, which had "condemned five years of inaction" on the part of the Jospin government.
Rejecting the notion that the massive vote for Chirac during the second round of the presidential elections had shown that the voters, many of whom were on the Left, had voted for Chirac as the lesser of two evils when faced with Le Pen, Raffarin said that his government intended to follow its stated programme, even though no major measures could be taken until after the new French parliament, l'Assemblée Nationale, was elected in June.
Chirac had gained only 19.88 per cent of the vote during the first round of the presidential elections on 21 April, the lowest ever gained by an incumbent French president, and only a few points ahead of Le Pen's 16.86 per cent. Jospin, the incumbent prime minister, had been knocked out on 16.18 per cent of the vote in an election marked by an abstention rate of nearly 30 per cent, letting Le Pen through to the second round.
In response to a question on a report in the French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé that the new government intended to pass an amnesty law pardoning those being investigated for "economic and financial offences", Raffarin said that he was "too straightforward, and I have my feet too firmly on the ground," to pay attention to "inexact information" in the newspapers.
President Chirac, among other members of the ruling RPR, has been under investigation for a string of corruption scandals stretching back 20 years, which he has escaped by citing presidential immunity. Le Pen had made these into a key part of the Front National election campaign against "the establishment parties", styling himself as an honest broker against the "old boys' networks, the friends in high places, the men for all seasons," who he said had been sharing power in France for years.
Meanwhile, debate continues among French commentators on the significance of the Left's defeat in the presidential elections and on the meaning of a first-round presidential election in which three voters out of five had preferred either to abstain or to vote for fringe candidates rather than for representatives of the country's discredited political class, only rallying to Chirac to prevent the election of Le Pen.
A further period of cohabitation after 16 June may increase calls for constitutional reform in order to concentrate legislative power and avoid the fragmentation and stagnation that has been a feature of French political life in recent years.
Yet, as one commentator in the French newspaper Le Monde put it last week, though a change of system would chime well with the French taste for change, the country "going through five republics, two monarchies, two empires and a French state [Vichy] over the course of the last two centuries," such "institutional meccano" would not solve the real problem that the presidential elections had revealed.
This was that the "contract of trust between governors and governed" had been broken and needed to be restored. The country's "social and cultural crisis is more intractable and complex than that of its institutions," the newspaper said.
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