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Swinging Votes
France's Socialist Party's new agenda is a mixed bag. Along with a controversial set of measures designed to appease the hard left, it includes a series of authoritarian anti-crime proposals which demonstrate that Ségolène Royal's populist rhetoric is having an effect on the party's mainstream.
First, the extreme left's red meat, designed to prevent voters deserting the Socialists for one of France's many fringe sects. Plans to renationalise the electricity giant EDF, which was partly privatised last year will send worrying signals to investors and other EU nations, where EDF competes in their markets. A plan to raise the minimum wage to €1500 by 2012 is less controversial, though won't enthuse already hard-pressed small businesses, who have to fork out double that if they wish to employ an extra staff member. Planning to build 120,000 new houses, to raise more money for education and research (though without going into detail as to how this money will be raised...), well that's what Socialists do. France needs more housing, as last year's dreadful slum fires demonstrated. More research funding would be welcome too.
A proposal to introduce an impeachment system for errant presidents would signal a welcome end to Jacques Chirac's era, where his rushed-through presidential immunity law gave the nation the aura of a banana republique.
However, a further proposal - to extend the 35 hour week to all workers, not just the staff of larger businesses who benefit from it today, will have France's small businessmen sighing into their mint tea. Most commentators believe the 35 hour week has stifled job creation in France. Ségolène Royal even reckons it has damaged family life for working class women. Why extend it? Well, they can thank Martine Aubry for that. As labour minister, Mme Aubry devised the 35-hour week, in the paleo-socialist delusion that by slicing the amount of work employees do, businesses would need to employ more staff to take up the slack. Banning companies from cutting salaries to reflect the reduced hours didn't free up extra money to employ more people, though, and after a brief drop in unemployment as the state implemented the law in its offices, jobless figures soared again to around 10 percent, where they remain today.
Aubry refuses to countenance any change to the 35-hour week: It's her legacy, and, she hopes, a stepping stone to the presidential nomination next year.
Is it a vote winner? We'll see. What does appear to be guaranteed to attract voters to the Socialists is a new tough plan on law and order, inspired by Ségolène Royal's hard line last week. Royal's proposal to send offenders to military camps didn't show up on the agenda, though it was welcomed by mainstream voters and anecdotal evidence suggests that it was well-received among the inhabitants of troubled estates themselves.
Her plan to toughen laws blocking benefits to offenders families did go on the agenda, however, much to the outrage of some party members, who reportedly goose-stepped along the HQ's corridors to show their disapproval.
The agenda still needs to be approved by the PS's 200,000 members later this year, and, as the IHT notes, the socialists are nothing if not fractious. Even though her partner and potential rival for the candidacy, party leader Francois Hollande warned that the agenda wasn't to be tampered with, it might be difficult to gag the fragrant Mme Royal. Moreover, her law-and-order agenda horrified many in the party's rank-and-file, who are accustomed to blaming street violence on inequality, unemployment and heavy-handed policing. Nicolas Sarkozy, the right's likely candidate, is the left's biggest hate figure, not least because of his advocacy of the same measure Royal proposed: Why should the Socialists emulate their enemy?
Despite the party's distate for Royal's measures, they're overwhelmingly popular with the public. Indeed, they could even make the party electable, but the danger lies in how far the socialists lean to the left on economic issues to balance out their new found authoritarian line on crime. For France, the danger is that a set of basket-case economic measures could be introduced under the banner of fighting crime.
