François Hollande, a year on

A year into his Presidency, François Hollande is struggling. Of all the analyses made of his first year in office, very few have been positive. At The Current Moment, we commented extensively on the elections a year ago and on Hollande as a leader (see here, here and here). A few points are worth reiterating to make sense of today’s widespread disappointment.

It is important to remember that what secured Hollande’s victory a year ago was the prevailing anti-Sarkozy sentiment. Some of that feeling came from a rejection of the substance of Sarkozy’s presidency and so signalled a real endorsement of Hollande’s agenda. But much of the anti-Sarkozy feeling came from a reaction against his style: showy, celebrity-focused, hyperactive, lacking the gravitas expected of the President of the Republic. This list could go on.

Far from challenging this superficial rendering of politics as a matter of competing styles and personalities, the Socialists launched their own brand: normality, embodied in the rotund (but much-slimmed) cheeriness of François Hollande. He enjoys football, he makes jokes, he will govern through the country’s institutions and not above or alongside them. The notion of the ‘normal presidency’ never really stuck, not least because it lacks any capacity to inspire. But it did just enough to give Hollande the election victory on May 6^th. Other factors counted too of course: his promise of a 75 per cent tax on incomes above 1 million Euros was timed perfectly to play on the anger felt towards high earners living in luxury at a time of social crisis. Even then, Hollande’s victory was wafer thin. He edged in front of Sarkozy by very little in the first round (28.63% to Sarkozy’s 27.08%) in comparison to Sarkozy’s thumping victory against Ségolène Royal back in 2008. In the second round, Hollande secured 51.64% of the vote, to Sarkozy’s 48.36%.

Throughout the campaign, the gap narrowed between the two leading contenders, transforming what many thought would be a sure victory for the Socialists into a very narrow one indeed. Hollande, an unremarkable figure until then, tipped by few as a likely winner for the presidency, certainly held his nerve. More than anything else, though, he was in the right place at the right time. This explains why his popularity has plummeted. Constructed on the back of the antipathy towards Sarkozy, the fading memory of the latter brings with it a steady erosion in Hollande’s popularity. This is not a problem of voters forgetting the past too easily. It is a product of the negative and opportunistic campaign of the Socialists in 2012.

Hollande’s difficulties today are also to do with what has happened since May 2012. The gay marriage bill has been pushed through but at the expense of a widespread societal mobilization against it, one that brought many people out of their provinces and onto the esplanades of the country’s capital. This author remembers seeing dozens of coaches, all full to the brim, tearing through the Bois de Boulogne on a Sunday morning on their way to an anti-gay marriage demonstration and all coming in from well outside of the capital and its surrounding suburbs.

One event that hit the government particularly hard was the Cahuzac affair: the admission by a government minister, the minister for the budget no less, after many months of denial, that he had a bank account in Switzerland which he kept hidden from the French taxman. The reason the Cahuzac affair has been so damaging for the government is that Hollande’s critique of capitalism, and in particular those private companies and private individuals that escape paying taxes, was always a moralistic one. Hollande presented his case against finance as a moral crusade: it was a war against the vulgar anti-egalitarian materialism of the financial class, fought in the name of the republican values of common good and a sense of patriotic duty attached to contributing to the public coffers.

Cahuzac’s secret Swiss bank account struck at the heart of this moral crusade by bringing those corrupt values into the heart of Hollande’s cabinet. In some ways, Hollande can’t be blamed for having trusted someone who then betrayed him. To misjudge someone’s character is something we have all done at some point. For Hollande, the difficulty was that there was nothing other than this moral crusade underpinning his critique of capitalism. What could have been dismissed as a mere personal failing on the part of an individual, had Hollande’s critique been more substantial, has had the effect of a devastating blow.

This crusade against finance has also been exposed to the harsh winds of the continuing national and European crisis. On this, the French government has managed to achieve very little. A central plank of Hollande’s campaign was his promise to rewrite the European Fiscal Compact, notably by injecting into it a strong growth component. Even at the time, it seemed improbable that Hollande – after the election – would travel to Berlin and tell Angela Merkel what to do. Unsurprisingly, very little in the Compact was changed and Hollande has so far struggled to dent Merkel’s determination to stick to her austerity agenda in the run up to elections in Germany in the Autumn. Promising a radical shake up of France’s sclerotic economy, Hollande commissioned a report from prominent industrialist, Louis Gallois. Focused on competitiveness, Gallois suggested a number of ‘shock’ measures which the government chose to ignore. Hollande may still pursue a reform agenda, by bringing Gallois or someone like Pascal Lamy into a more technocratic cabinet after a summer reshuffle. But there is little momentum in either the reforming or the staunchly anti-austerity direction, leaving all sides unhappy at the government’s immobilism.

Hollande has tended to make his case by courting fellow travellers, latching onto Southern European leaders like Rajoy, or more recently Enrico Letta, whose national difficulties expose the limits of the German austerity agenda. Alliance-building, however, is no substitute for a programme. As remarked upon by Current Moment co-founder Alex Gourevitch, the fact that the case for austerity is currently unravelling has more to do with the pain it is inflicting on European societies and rather less to do with any political alternative being proposed by its growing army of critics.