FRANCE:If the right performs better than expected, prime minister François Fillon and his reforms will win credit for damage limitation, Lara Marlowein Paris
IF THE ruling right-wing UMP performs badly in municipal elections on March 9th and 16th, the results will be attributed to French president Nicolas Sarkozy's fall from grace.
A defeat for the right could infuse the divided and disoriented socialists with new energy. They've set themselves the goal of wresting 30 towns of more than 20,000 inhabitants from the right, including Caen, Toulouse, Saint-Étienne and Strasbourg.
If the right performs better than expected, prime minister François Fillon and his reforms will win credit for damage limitation. For the first time, opinion polls indicate a French prime minister is some 20 points ahead of the president who appointed him.
Bertrand Delanoë, the socialist mayor of Paris who ended a quarter-century of right-wing rule in the capital in 2001, looks certain to be re-elected. One opinion poll showed that 59 per cent of Parisians want him to stay in office.
Delanoë's popular initiatives include white sand beaches on the banks of the Seine in August, tramway lines on the Boulevards des Maréchaux around Paris, and positioning rental bicycles across the city. He is about to do the same for motor vehicles, with an "auto-lib" system. Delanoë has financed most of his projects through private-sector investment.
Only eight of 20 Paris districts are now held by the right, and two of these, the first and the fifth, look likely to fall to the socialists on March 16th. The fifth arrondissement is the most emblematic. "It's where the right-wing mayors of Paris, Jacques Chirac and Jean Tiberi, came from," explains Lyne Cohen-Solal, the socialist city councillor whom polls indicate will seize the district from Tiberi, who has run the fifth as a private fiefdom for decades.
The fifth is the home of the Latin Quarter, where student rioting 40 years ago this May transformed France. Cohen-Solal was a student protester.
"We broke taboos," she says. "Because of us, women can hold their heads high, contraception became widespread and homosexuals were accepted. Until May '68, Madame de Gaulle refused to invite a divorced man to her table. And now we have a divorced president. Sarkozy shouldn't say he wants to 'liquidate the heritage of May '68', because it changed the morés of this country. Forty years later, for the Latin Quarter to fall to the left would be a helluva symbol."
Philippe Meyer, a radio journalist, writer and lecturer on the history of Paris at the political science institute Sciences Po, is the centrist MoDem (democratic movement) candidate for mayor of the fifth district. Though he claims to have no affinity for either Tiberi or Cohen-Solal, the balance of forces makes MoDem and socialist candidates likely to form joint tickets between the two rounds in many contests.
Meyer, too, finds symbolism in the fifth arrondissement. "It has the oldest building in Paris, the ruins of Roman Lutèce. And it has one of the city's few successful contemporary buildings, the Institut du Monde Arabe." The 18th-century Irish College is also in the fifth, just a stone's throw from the mayor's office, behind the Panthéon.
Meyer warns that Paris is beginning to resemble Venice as a "museum city" whose inhabitants cannot afford to live there.
The fifth district "has all the problems of Paris", he notes: "'Museumification', the loss of commercial diversity, the lack of affordable housing, the departure of old people and prices too high for the young. It also has to deal with the consequences of tourism."
Both candidates accuse the incumbent mayor of the fifth, Tiberi, who did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article, of clientelism. "He trades public services for votes," says Cohen-Solal, citing Tiberi's habit of personally handing out slots in creches and low-rent municipal apartments, defying demands for a neutral commission to do the job. "The mayor should be there to distribute public services, not sell them," she adds.
As Jacques Chirac's deputy at Paris City Hall for many years, then as mayor of Paris from 1995 until 2001, Tiberi directed a high proportion of municipal funds to his home district.
"It may win votes, but it's dishonest," Cohen-Solal says. "I'm a councillor for all of Paris, and Tiberi is too. Not just the fifth."
The power struggle between Tiberi and Cohen-Solal is personal. This is the fifth time she has challenged him in legislative and municipal elections since 1997. Tiberi's Chiraquian protectors are now out of power, and the lawsuit which Cohen-Solal filed for vote-rigging in 1997 has finally come to fruition. Investigating magistrates broke a "republican tradition" of not touching politicians during campaigns by announcing that Tiberi will stand trial, probably later this year.
Cohen-Solal says she had no choice but to file the suit 11 years ago. "When you looked at the voters' registry, there were street numbers that didn't exist," she says. Tiberi filed his own suit against her for defamation, but dropped it the day it came to court. He has filed two other suits related to her employment by the Socialist Party.
"It's intimidation," she says. "He must think I'll get discouraged and give up. If he's stayed in power for 40 years [ in the fifth], it's because it was too hard for other candidates."
Now Sarkozy is trying to stock municipal governments with his own loyalists. Twenty-one of 33 ministers and junior ministers from Sarkozy's government are standing in the poll, 11 of them for mayors' offices.
The justice minister, Rachida Dati, is standing in Paris's seventh arrondissement, a bastion of devoutly Catholic aristocrats, where people rarely greet one another unless their families have been acquainted for two generations.
With the mayor's office in her sights, Dati moved from the poor right-bank neighbourhood where she lived when she was Sarkozy's campaign spokeswoman to the fashionable Avenue de La Motte-Picquet. The seventh is solidly right wing, and she's expected to win. But to convince les aristos, the Muslim-born Dati attends 15 réunions d'appartement, the political equivalent of a Tupperware party, every week. She's also been attending Mass and consults two of the neighbourhood's influential priests as informal advisers.