This week’s cabinet reshuffle in France has done little to clarify where François Hollande stands on the key issues facing his presidency. What it has done is confirm that Hollande remains the manager of his own fractious party rather than a president with a clear political agenda.
When it was announced that Manuel Valls would replace Jean-Marc Ayrault as prime minister, it seemed that Hollande was completing his turn-to-the-right that had begun in January, in a speech where Hollande promised to cut public spending and reduce the tax burden on business. This ‘social compromise’, denounced by Marine Le Pen as an embrace of neoliberalism, was at the time seen as a new departure for Hollande. His nomination of Valls at Matignon seemed to take it further. The Financial Times complemented Hollande for ‘daring to turn to the right’ and commentators began to associate this new socialist government with the likes of Tony Blair’s New Labour in the UK, Schroder’s SPD in Germany, and the current much-transformed state of the Italian Democratic Party.
A couple of days later and the impression is very different. The appointment of Valls has been tempered by the promotion of key left-wing figures within the French Socialist Party. Arnaud Montebourg – the self-appointed spokesperson of the anti-globalization wing of the French Left – has been given a beefed up economic profile. Benoit Hamon, another prominent leftist, was made education minister, a powerful and key government department.
With such a cabinet, there is little evidence of any dramatic turn to the right in the Hollande presidency. Indeed, there is no dramatic turn to anywhere. Hollande’s goal seems to have been to manage the different currents within his own party, deploying the popularity of Valls as an antidote to his own poor poll ratings whilst compensating the left of the party with the promotion of Montebourg and Hamon. Michel Sapin’s nomination as finance minister hardly signals a radical change in France’s economic policy, given the little Sapin has achieved as labour minister. The impression Hollande gives is of placating his party rather than leading it. It may be that all along his success in the presidential primaries of 2011 was down to good luck: an absent Strauss-Kahn, strong antipathy to Valls, a weak showing by Royale and Montebourg, Aubry running rather than Fabius. Now Hollande continues to act as manager of his party’s different currents and egos, at the cost of pushing forward his own programme. There is little evidence as compelling as this to suggest that the French Socialist Party is no more than a sum of its many – and very different – parts.
thecurrentmoment 