PARIS LETTER:Unlike any French leader since, the late president spoke across the left-right divide, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC
IT IS 15 years this week since the death of François Mitterrand, and the grass at the small cemetery in his home town of Jarnac in southwest France has been well-trampled by the socialist faithful returning to a site whose symbolic resonance has grown deeper with every year.
On Saturday, senior Socialist Party (PS) figures and hundreds of activists stood solemnly by Mitterrand’s grave, remembering the only leader of their movement to have become president of the Fifth Republic – and no doubt reflecting on how his feat might be emulated.
The more Mitterrand’s two-term presidency fades from public memory, the more resilient his legend seems to become. He is arguably one of only a pair of heads of state since the creation of the current republic in 1958 – the towering Charles de Gaulle, of course, being the other – who has managed, in the French imagination, to transcend party cleavages and to be embraced across the divide.
The right may try assiduously to dismantle his reforms – retirement at 60, most recently – but they take care rarely to criticise the man himself. One of the striking features of former president Jacques Chirac’s memoir is how his rival Mitterrand emerges as the figure who seems, more than anyone else, to command the Gaullist’s admiration and respect.
On the left, Mitterrand’s spirit haunts a generation of leaders condemned to be judged by their failure to wrest the keys to the Élysée Palace from the right since Mitterrand stepped down in 1995. But as the PS prepares to select its candidate for next year’s presidential election, the contest for ownership of his political inheritance has become one of the recurrent themes in the party. The Jarnac ceremony was supposed to demonstrate the party’s unity, but instead it was overshadowed by Ségolène Royal’s opportunist declaration that morning of her desire to “succeed François Mitterrand” – in other words, to do what she failed to do in 2007 and defeat Nicolas Sarkozy. The rest of the party hierarchy is determined to block her.
The Mitterrand story’s enduring hold over his party and his country is partly explained by its uncanny ability to speak to people from different camps. The left cherishes memories of the heady days of 1981, when the right’s grip on power was ended and an air of genuine change brought crowds onto the streets; and the series of radical measures Mitterrand’s first government introduced: a huge stimulus programme; nationalisations; a higher minimum wage; retirement at 60; and reduced working hours. For centrists in the party and even for some on the right, however, Mitterrand is the man who then reversed course when faced with spiralling deficits, embracing la rigueur, or austerity, as the defining credo of the day. He then satisfies two further requirements for veneration in many French eyes: a deeply cultured man with a vague sense of roguery about him.
Watching a recording recently of Mitterrand during a debate on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, it was striking how mild-mannered and aloof he seemed when facing his opponent, the charismatic and pugnacious right-winger Philippe Séguin. Could the late president’s enduring popularity owe something to the fact that he was temperamentally so unlike the current, polarising occupant of the Élysée? The spotlight that the Mitterrand anniversary shines on today’s PS is nonetheless awkward for the party. Mitterrand succeeded in 1981 and again seven years later by asserting himself as uncontested leader of his party, by uniting the left and constructing a viable political programme. With 18 months remaining before a presidential election, the PS has yet to tick any of these boxes. At least five senior figures covet the nomination, and with the primary not due to take place until November, nursing factional divisions may well consume the party’s energy for much of the year. “Good news for the socialists: they have finally found a leader,” taunted Le Figaro on Monday. “Bad news: he died in 1996.” While party leader Martine Aubry has been busy preparing a policy platform, her rivals are quick to distance themselves from ideas that don’t suit them. As environment minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet remarked unkindly this week, “meeting at a tomb doesn’t constitute a [political] project”. Finally, left-wing unity in the form of an electoral pact with the greens and the communists, which will be crucial if the PS candidate is to prevail in 2012, still seems a long way off.
With the economy stagnant, the president unpopular and polls showing some of their prospective candidates are well placed for next year’s presidential election, socialists may have the best chance in years to prove that Mitterrand’s success was more than a historical parenthesis in modern French politics. But the problem with a strong hand is that you can only blame yourself for losing.