The first round of the French presidential elections saw Nicolas Sarkozy beaten by an underwhelming socialist candidate, Francois Hollande, who has reached the age of 57 without running anything of consequence.
Sarkozy is only the sixth elected president of France since 1958. Of his five predecessors, Georges Pompidou died in office and Giscard d’Estaing was defeated after his Gaullist party fractured.
The general rule is that French presidents stay in office for a long time, and with the exception of Francois Mitterrand, they have all been conservatives.
The hapless Sarko looks like providing another exception. In which case he will be the latest in a series of incumbents that have lost elections or been forced out of power since the eurozone crisis erupted three years ago.
Italy, Ireland , Spain, Greece, Hungary, Belgium and Portugal have all experienced political turnover, and Holland is in in the throes of change. Right-wing populists already participate in government in Holland, Denmark and Finland and are near-mainstream in some eastern European countries.
In France too, Francois Hollande may have topped the poll, but the extremists were the real winners. The Socialist’s vote fell short of the combined support of anti-immigrant nationalist Marine Le Pen and left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Melanchon.
During the campaign, the communist-backed Melenchon attracted excited crowds of 40,000 in regional centres such as Toulouse. Further south in Bayonne, France’s sitting president was forced to flee the irate public and hide in a cafe.
The policies of Melenchon and Le Pen have a lot in common. Both are anti-capitalist, anti-globalization, anti-austerity, anti-NATO. Both favour protectionism, the promotion of national champions, boosting the pay of low income workers and increasing pensions while reducing the retirement age to 60.
The time-tested populist instinct for demonization is also shared, though the choice of demons is different. As befitting a former Trotskyite, Melenchon has the rich in his sights – he promises to tax incomes over 360,000 euros at 100%. As befitting a daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen wants to stop all immigration.
There is even some similarity in their favourite films, which are mostly American blockbusters, as opposed to the arty French classics chosen by Sarkozy and Hollande.
Marine Le Pen – Father Christmas is a Bastard, Braveheart, Manon des Sources, Silence of the Lambs, Gladiator.
Jean-Luc Melenchon – Little Big Man, Blade Runner, Fellini Roma, Apocalypse Now, Out of Africa.
Le Pen’s mini-review of Braveheart is to the point. “How can we not be moved by this historical panorama celebrating patriotism, courage, honour and sacrifice, embodied in a man of the people who upholds liberty in the face of treachery and the compromises of an elite perverted by power-lust! Thirteen centuries later*, nothing has changed.”
The key distinction is no longer right/left, but populist/technocrat. And since the technocratic elites have committed themselves to an economic strategy likely to deliver plenty of pain and precious little gain, the opportunities for the Le Pen family franchise and their equivalents elsewhere can only grow.
Making a bad situation a whole lot worse is the inflexibility of a single currency system which removes devaluation as an option for the countries that need it most.
The expansion of the EU and the Schengen Agreement to scrap national borders are also elite technocratic projects dreamed up at a time of optimism and growth. In hard times they create the potential for a Grapes of Wrath scenario, where whole communities uproot themselves and move thousands of miles to find a better life.
The modern-day equivalent of Californian fruit farms would be the black economies of prosperous northern Europe countries. Small eastern European states such as Latvia and Estonia are already experiencing significant population declines. Shock therapy might set off similar trends in the southern European countries, starting with their own marginalized immigrant communities.
No surprise, then, that the populists are in a long-term bull market. For the unpleasant truth is that some of their ideas might actually work, whereas trying to cure a growth and jobs crisis with fiscal austerity, as the technocrats recommend, will not.
Marine Le Pen is the first leader of a significant party to make leaving the euro official policy, but she won’t be the last. Likewise, Melenchon’s public works program and controls on competition are not so different from elements of FDR’s New Deal. His proposal for the ECB to lend at 1% to governments instead of the banks would probably meet the approval of Ben Bernanke.
Much more troubling than the technocrats’ starry-eyed projects is the way they have been implemented – often in defiance of public opinion. When referendums have been permitted, they have generally produced the “wrong” result and the exercise has been repeated – with cosmetic changes in wording – until the “correct” answer has been obtained.
In the last few years, any pretence of democratic accountability has been dropped, as the “troika”, the commission and other bureaucratic organs take over the management of fiscal policy in crisis-wracked countries of the periphery. As The Economist notes, “the debt crisis has brought the commission unprecedented power to intrude in national economic policies. And this raises profound concerns about its legitimacy.”
At least the euro-populists are offering the public a choice, but if they ever take power we may see a different sort of movie.
* Braveheart is set in the thirteenth century, not thirteen centuries ago. Still, we get the message.