WHEN President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday dispatched his 34-page “Letter to the French People” to 45 million voters his main rival responded with one of the better put-downs in what has otherwise been, until recently, a most lacklustre presidential campaign.
“It’s not a letter,” a statement from Socialist François Hollande’s campaign team said. “It’s the bill, and it’s a big one.” Touché.
With first round voting less than two weeks away on April 22nd, Sarkozy has a hill to climb. Polls show him in the field of 10 leading or level with Hollande in the first round, but consistently giving the latter a clear majority of around eight percentage points in the second. The president ends his term one of the most unpopular presidents in modern French history, despite the poll boost that the recent terrorist scare might have been expected to give him.
Crucially for both men, they remain comfortable favourites to go through to the second round on May 6th. And that, despite the drama and colour of a surprise surge (to 15 per cent) by charismatic, soit-disant revolutionary, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, now candidate of choice for the protest, hard-left, and green voters. The new “third man” of the campaign has even pushed the National Front’s Marine Le Pen into fourth place. Her father in 2002 had split the “establishment” vote so successfully that he humiliated the Socialists by getting through to contest the second round with Jacques Chirac who duly trounced him. Not this time.
Mélenchon, a former Socialist minister, once a Trotskyist, now a member of his own radical Parti de Gauche, is running for a leftist coalition, the Front de Gauche. “The French Revolution of 1789 hasn’t breathed its last!” he told one rally. “If Europe is a volcano, France is the crater of all European revolutions!” Unsurprisingly, embracing the analogy, business leaders have branded him with the Terreur, a new Robespierre perhaps. A bit hyperbolic! Mélenchon has nevertheless performed remarkably in rallying a notoriously divided constituency, also, usefully for Hollande, siphoning off support from the far-right – polls say four out of five of his vote will go to Hollande in the second round.
The election has also acquired important Europe-wide dimensions. Sarkozy blames socialists for the euro crisis – notably Spain’s “after seven years of Socialist rule”, while his spokeswoman claims Hollande wants to give France “a one-way ticket to Greece”. Ironically, however, all but Copenhagen of Europe’s capitals, are run by right and centre-right governments, most of whom presided over their respective national crises. There the interest in France’s election lies precisely in the fact that it promises a first socialist revival.
European governments will also be watching nervously how firmly Hollande, encouraged by Mélenchon, impales himself irretrievably on his pledge to renegotiate the Fiscal Treaty. Most, Ireland’s included – referendum wording already agreed – are counting on an attack of post-election “realism”. If not, Hollande’s likely election could mean a rocky road ahead for all of us.