What happened to the French Socialist Party?
The 2017 French presidential election was destined to go down to the wire and it didn’t disappoint. The traditional political landscape has been shot through by the victory of two outsiders, Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the far-right Front National, and Emmanuel Macron, the new kid on the block.
Under the ashes lie the two mainstream parties, the two pillars of French politics. The Republican right and its candidate François Fillon, marred by scandals , only missed the second spot by a whisker but you need to go all the way down to 6% to find Benoît Hamon, the candidate for Parti Socialiste (PS), the French Socialist Party. He came in fifth position, with a thoroughly humiliating result.
The PS is a giant of modern French politics. It is the party of the former president François Mitterrand, whose 14 years in the Élysée Palace, between 1981 and 1995, shaped much of contemporary France. It is the party of the other François, Hollande, who entered the Elysée in 2012. And it is the party of other leading and legendary figures of the French left from Jean Jaurès to Léon Blum, and many others.
But the party which won the presidency in 1981, in 1988, and again in 2012, has been reduced to less than 10% of the vote in 2017.
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The PS collapsed because it drifted way right, becoming more or less indistinguishable from the center-right that has most often governed France since WWII. There was no reason for anyone to vote Socialist, since the party was no longer... socialist.
I don't know why you used an American logo.
Here's the right one:
Just to show how it will work in this country.
France’s socialist party is failing to learn from its mistakes
France’s socialist party are to be congratulated for pulling off the remarkable feat of selecting as their next leader a man who makes François Hollande look dashing. As one French newspaper said of Olivier Faure, he’s “a man of consensus at the head of a moribund socialist party”.
Faure, 49, won’t be officially anointed the first secretary of the socialist party until their congress next month, but the job is his now that his only challenger, Stéphane Le Foll, withdrew from the leadership race on Friday.
The word ‘apparatchik’ could have been invented for Faure, a man whose Wikipedia page should be required reading for all insomniacs. It traces his tedious trail from joining the socialist party at the age of 16, to becoming secretary general of a socialist youth wing seven years later, to working in various capacities for Martine Aubry, Hollande and Jean-Marc Ayrault, a triumvirate of socialists whose influence over the party in recent decades is largely responsible for the catastrophic result in last year’s presidential election when only six per cent of the French people voted for their candidate, Benoît Hamon. Their humiliation was complete the following month when they took just 29 seats in the parliamentary election, down from 280 in 2012.
Since then the socialist party has been forced to sell its chic Parisian headquarters for €45.5m euros (£39m) to raise much-needed funds. But it’s not just money that the party lacks, they’re also horribly short of supporters. Since 2007, the membership of the party has plummeted from 260,000 to 102,000; of the ones who remain, only 37,000 could be bothered to vote last week for their new leader.
It’s a far cry from December 2014 when the then first secretary of the party, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, promised not just to arrest the declining membership of the party but to increase it to 500,000 by the time of the 2017 presidential election. What went wrong?
A month after Cambadélis stated his ambition the staff of Charlie Hebdo were gunned down – the first in a series of Islamist terror attacks on French soil over 18 months that left 239 dead. France needed strong and resolute leadership but instead it witnessed a government arguing among itself about how to best tackle Islamic extremism. Ministers who had coasted through political life in their socialist echo chamber were disorientated by the gravity of the situation, as they were when faced with the migrant crisis. T heir handling of the economy resulted in record unemployment among the young and the ridicule of the Anglo-Saxon world who delighted in French Bashing.
How they’re seen overseas matter a great deal to the French, who are, by nature insecure, and they never forgave Hollande nor his government for turning them into a laughing stock. The one minister who recognised this was Emmanuel Macron – then in charge of the economy – and on becoming president his first task was to restore France’s global image.
Macron’s two years in the socialist government opened his eyes not just to the incompetency at the heart of the party but also their lack of empathy with the people they governed. French politics has a tradition of breeding bloodless bureaucrats who don’t understand the day-to-day struggles of Frenchmen and women. Hollande, for example, was for years the partner of Ségolène Royal, who stood unsuccessfully as the socialist Party candidate in the 2007 presidential election. The pair met at ENA, the elite finishing school for French technocrats that has churned out scores of presidents and ministers over the years, including Macron. He might well have ended up as out of touch as his peers had he not married Brigitte.
Compare her background, for example, with that of Olivier Faure’s wife, Soria Blatmann, who until her husband embarked on his leadership campaign, was a human rights adviser for the government. In other words, she comes from the same milieu as her husband – the same as the majority of the European political establishment, which is now being rejected by million of voters across the continent.
Brigitte Macron doesn’t hail from this background. During her first marriage, she worked as a press officer for the chamber of commerce in northern France before retraining as a teacher, a profession she has described as her calling. She understands the world better than her husband because she’s lived in its heart and not just looked down on it from on high.
For example, a recent biography of the presidential couple highlighted their divergence of opinion on the threat posed to France by political Islam. Macron sees little harm in the wearing of the hijab. But Brigitte believes it is an oppressive garment and would like it banned from universities. “Emmanuel is a man of consensus,” she told the author Anne Fulda. “But I can’t support anything that harms women or children.” She has similarly robust views about the importance of safeguarding the country’s secularism [L aïcité ] in the face of Islamist provocation, whereas her husband – certainly in the early days of his political career – is confident, like so many of his class, that given time Islam will cede to Western values.
Because Brigitte Macron has never been part of the political groupthink that has characterised European politics for the last thirty years she has her own opinions which, as her husband acknowledged in January , she shares with him.
Olivier Faure has no one to explain to him what life is really like outside the Parisian bubble. He’s inherited the leadership not of the socialist party but of the consensus party, where political correctness still stifles honest and courageous debate on the issues that brought Hollande’s government crashing down.
LInk
The PS was on a course towards oblivion, and hasn't changed anything. No problem. There are other parties on the left, and there years to get used to the idea that the PS won't be leading the left.
It's a big change, but the handwriting has been on the wall for a long time.
Don't know nor do I particularly care.
One can hope that our democrat party meets the same fate.