FRANCE: Lara Marlowe previews the legislative programme of the newly elected French government
President Jacques Chirac is fond of the Napoleonic adage, "You win, and then after you see." This week, in a presidential message to be read to the new National Assembly tomorrow and in the general policy speech on Wednesday of the Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the right will explain how it intends to govern France for the next five years.
To show a sense of urgency, Mr Raffarin warned candidates in this month's legislative elections: "Tell your wives to cancel the holiday bookings. I need you in the National Assembly." Setting aside the sexist but safely accurate assumption that deputies are men whose wives do secretarial duty, Mr Raffarin broke with French tradition by asking the Assembly to meet in an extraordinary session from now until the first week of August.
Two recent events reminded Mr Chirac and Mr Raffarin that it is easier to make campaign promises than to keep them: a call to budgetary order at the June 20th Ecofin meeting, and the publication of an audit of government finances on June 27th.
The outgoing socialist government had counted on a 1.4 per cent budget deficit this year; the actual figure will be between 2.3 and 2.6 per cent. No recent French government has enjoyed control of all institutions, including an absolute majority in the National Assembly. But Mr Raffarin has very little financial leeway.
The first item on the Assembly's agenda is the traditional post-election amnesty law for parking tickets, to be presented on July 9th. The entire French political class is asking: "Will they dare?" Will the new right-wing majority dare to slip a pardon for "politico-financial offences" into its first legislation?
Mr Chirac and his protégé, Mr Alain Juppé, the president of Mr Chirac's UMP party, would be the first beneficiaries. The Justice Minister, Mr Dominique Perben, says an amnesty for corrupt party financing "is not on the government's agenda". But, he added: "I don't know what's on the minds of each of 577 deputies." In other words, UMP deputies may tack on an amendment to clear their political bosses.
Mr Chirac's presidential campaign programme, which will serve as the blueprint for Mr Raffarin's policy speech, stated that "no infraction, however minor, must go unpunished . . . This is 'zero impunity'; I shall impose it."
Measures enacted since Mr Chirac's re-election on May 5th include the creation of a "domestic security council" presided over by the President and the creation of "regional intervention groups" of gendarmes to patrol rural areas, where crime rose 11.5 per cent in the first five months of this year.
The Interior Minister, Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, caused an outcry when he announced that he would equip security forces with "flash-balls", a high-velocity air gun whose rubber ammunition can be lethal at close range.
Mr Sarkozy will receive 60 per cent of the €6 billion to be budgeted for security and justice.
The other 40 per cent will go to the Justice Minister and his junior minister for "property programmes", a euphemism for 11,000 new prison cells. The law on the presumption of innocence, which police blame for the rise in crime, will be revised.
Mr Chirac promised to reduce income tax by 5 per cent this year. That will be voted in mid-July, but there are doubts whether he can make good on the commitment to reduce income tax by one-third over the five-year legislature.
The last, business-friendly measure to be voted this summer will be an exemption from all social charges for the hiring of 16 to 22-year-olds without university degrees.
In the autumn, Mr Chirac and Mr Raffarin want to change the constitution to give more power to local government. Decentralisation is a recurring theme in French politics, last promised by the Defferre laws 20 years ago. The right hopes it will pacify Corsica, but no one seriously believes that Paris will loosen its grip over the rest of France.
The government is postponing the most explosive issues - pensions and the assouplissement (softening) of the law on the 35-hour working week - until January 2003.
Both touch on the single biggest question facing the right.
In a country where 45 per cent of GNP goes up in withholding taxes, where more than a quarter of wage-earners are government employees, can they reform the State?