Hollande vs. Juppé

I didn't see it, but Thierry Desjardins, anti-Sarkozyste de droite, gives Hollande a TKO against a Juppé "vieux et usé," to borrow a phrase. Please post your opinions in comments.

Germany Looks at Hollande

The subhead in Die Zeit reads: "Einst wurde er Langweiler verspottet, nun soll der Sozialist Hollande Frankreichs neuer Präsident werden" (Once mocked as a bore, the Socialist Hollande is now supposed to become France's new president."

Sarkozy au Petit Écran--à tous les petits écrans

Nicolas Sarkozy will appear simultaneously on 6 French TV networks this Sunday. And maybe the Sunday after that he can do the halftime show at the Superbowl for an encore ...

Hollande Quotes (the Wrong) Shakespeare

When a French presidential candidate reaches for the high rhetorical register, he usually goes for la langue de Racine rather than la langue de Shakespeare. But François Hollande decided to go with Shakespeare. It seems, however, that the Shakespeare he chose was not William but Nicholas, novelist and book reviewer for The Telegraph. Worse, as Sarah Crown reports,

The quote is lifted from his 1989 novel The Vision of Elena Silves, in which it's spoken by a member of a guerrilla group which operates under the motto "Marxism–Leninism will open the shining path to revolution". While Hollande is standing as the Socialist party candidate, odds are his advisers wouldn't recommend him positioning himself as far left as that.

The quote in question was: "They failed because they did not start with a dream."

Ah, well. Perhaps next time Hollande will stick to Molière: "Le chemin est long du projet à la chose" (Tartuffe). Will this be Hollande's bravitude moment? On verra. As Molière also wrote, "Contre la médisance il n'est point de rempart." (h/t KirkMc)

The Cautious Candidate

François Hollande is the frontrunner, and conventional wisdom has it that frontrunners play it safe. François Hollande is playing it safe. The UMP wants to portray him as a profligate spender, so he will minutely calibrate every proposal. To finance the return to a legal retirement age of 60 for those who begin work early enough to have accumulated the necessary number of quarters by then, he will raise the CSG by 0.1 percentage points in each year of his quinquennat. He has baked in a growth estimate of only 0.5% in the first year. He will inscribe laïcité in the Constitution, but only within the terms of the existing 1905 law and without altering the existing exceptions of Alsace and Lorraine.

It's a program to make an accountant smile, but it isn't going to get anyone's pulse racing. And that's just the way Hollande wants it. Pulses are already racing, he figures, at the prospect of dumping Sarkozy, and that will be all it takes. He may be right, but such a program will make for the dullest of campaigns, and it will be hard to pivot to anything more exciting should his poll numbers begin to fall. But the pressure of a campaign strips candidates to their innate character, and caution seems to be the essence of François Hollande. There are worse qualities for a president, I suppose, at least in many historical circumstances. I wonder about the present circumstances, though, and I wonder about Hollande.

Who Is Unemployed?:

Workers over 50 have been particularly hard-hit.

The Campaign Without a Center

Julien Vaulpré, who was Sarkozy's polling expert in 2007, says that this year's campaign has no center because, in contrast to 1995, 2002, and 2007, the crisis is too multifarious to be encapsulated in a single, memorable campaign theme.

Quelle est, selon vous, la controverse principale de la campagne actuelle ?
Eh bien, c'est justement tout le problème, selon moi. A ce stade, on a le sentiment qu'il n'y en a pas.
Certes, il y a une question majeure, qui plane au-dessus de l'élection : la crise. Mais elle est tellement écrasante, tellement générale, et tellement difficile à appréhender qu'elle n'a pas véritablement été problématisée à travers une offre politique réussissant à la fois à poser une analyse et une solution. Par ailleurs, c'est la première fois que plane à ce point, sur une campagne présidentielle, un événement qui est en cours, dont l'issue est inconnue.

Roger Cohen, Unrepentant Sarkozist

Arun Kapil dismisses Cohen's latest paean to the French president. Kapil is right that Cohen's column is fatuous. I'm not so sure that the election is a foregone conclusion, however. This race will tighten, in my view, and mistakes and surprises are always possible. Just ask Mitt Romney.

The Times' Take

Steven Erlanger of the NY Times describes Hollande's speech of yesterday thus:

Mr. Hollande tried on Sunday to answer his critics with an impassioned if wandering speech about his conception of the presidency, shouting himself hoarse as he talked about resuscitating “the French dream” of a better life built on equality, justice and secularism.
“The French dream is confidence in the future, in democracy,” he said. He emphasized better education, and said that if he were to be judged on one thing, he would want it to be whether the lives of French youth were better in 2017, at the end of the next presidential term.

I have now watched enough of Hollande's presentation to agree by and large with Erlanger's account:  the speech was a valiant if meandering effort, the candidate shouted himself hoarse, all the Socialist elephants were lined up in support, and the crowd was more than enthusiastic. For a rather different take, self-avowedly "subjective," by an Hollande supporter, see Romain Pigenel's blog:

Un meeting réussi, c’est quand le bruit de la foule – les hourras, les cris, les « François Président », les « tous ensemble », toute cette liturgie de meeting – finit par devenir tellement continu, et tellement fort, qu’il couvre des passages entiers du discours du candidat, et que finalement personne ne s’en plaint, et qu’un sourire béat, un peu bête, illumine tous les visages, saisis par l’émotion magnétique du moment.

The reaction of the French press, meanwhile, seems generally positive, along the lines of Gérard Courtois's column:

Trois défis attendaient M. Hollande au Bourget : séduire, rassembler, convaincre. Autant le dire simplement : il les a relevés. Evidemment, un tel rassemblement militant – 20 000 personnes autour de leur champion – est, presque par définition, enthousiaste et fervent. Donc aisément trompeur.

It is tempting to provide a phenomenological commentary on the self-willed transformation  of what Sartre would have called "the serio-practical inert" into "the group-in-fusion," but I will resist the temptation. I have on occasion been caught up in this kind of collective enthusiasm. It's a heady feeling while it lasts, but it frequently ends in disappointment. In this case disappointment may come either before or after the election, but the apparent elation of yesterday's crowd will soon have to face the reality of campaigning and perhaps governing in a worsening economic climate with few ideas of how to reverse the decline evident among any of the candidates. including Hollande.

Two more positive reactions, from the left and the right. And a negative from the right. And more from the left. And still more. This last post suggests that Hollande appealed successfully to those to the left of him by making his "real enemy" the "world of finance." This sort of rhetoric leaves me cold, but evidently it's not without effect.

Hollande Relaunches

François Hollande kicked off phase two of his campaign with a vast meeting at Le Bourget. He struck at several of the Right's pet campaign themes, distinguishing, for instance, between l'assistanat and la solidarité and pledging to allow immigrants to vote in local elections. At the same time, he promised to inscribe the 1905 separation law in the Constitution. I'm not sure what this move is supposed to accomplish legally that the law itself doesn't already accomplish, but it gives Hollande some défense de la laïcité cred against Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Does it also dilute the outreach to immigrants in the local right to vote measure? No doubt. But all of this is symbolic posturing at best, and voters will read the symbols as they please, based I suspect on a more general evaluation of the candidate's instincts on these gut issues.

More concrete is the promise to end le cumul des mandats for deputies, which will have a long-run effect on the structure of parties and the relation of local to central government. He will also cut the salaries of the president and ministers by 30%--more eyewash. He says that his "real enemy is the world of finance" and promises to separate investment and credit activities and establish an EU-level public ratings agency and a public investment bank--modest gestures that don't really get to the heart of financial regulation.

On retirement, he emphasizes the 60-yr legal retirement age, but only for those "who began work early"--in sum, not very different from the Sarkozy-Fillon measure, though rhetorically shrouded in "defense of the working-man" verbiage. Nevertheless, state finances will be returned to "equilibrium" by the end of his five-year term--he does not specify how.

There are to be controls on "excessive" rents--a promise with a lot of built-in wiggle room.

The policy of not replacing 1 in 2 retiring civil servants will be suspended.

On crime, "priority security zones" will be created where "delinquency" is high, but he did not say how those zones would be policed.

There was this personal jab at Sarkozy: "Je revendique une simplicité qui n'est pas une retenue mais la marque de l'authentique autorité--mon secret, que j'ai gardé depuis longtemps : j'aime les gens quand d'autres sont fascinés par l'argent." This was coupled with language directed against the "personalization" of the presidency. I suppose that, given widespread dislike of the "bling-bling omnipresident," these tropes were inevitable, but I find them rather cheap.

There will be "a new treaty with Germany" to replace the de Gaulle-Adenauer treaty. It would be nice to know what the candidate thinks can be accomplished in this area.

Those were the high points. I didn't hear the speech, so I can't say how effectively it was delivered, but on paper, to my eye, it seems rather lackluster and predictable.