PARIS — This is a grumpy French presidential campaign, with only a few voters passionate about their choices.
It could be called the election of “désamour,” one of those nearly untranslatable words, meaning a falling out of love, a disenchantment mixed with disillusion.
Opinion polls currently show that the incumbent president, Nicolas Sarkozy, would lose to either of the two remaining Socialist Party candidates, François Hollande and Martine Aubry, who will face each other in a runoff primary vote on Sunday.
But there is not much excitement around either of them, especially with the putative favorite, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, out of the race as a consequence of his encounter with a housekeeper in a New York hotel room.
Ms. Aubry, 61, succeeded Mr. Hollande, 57, as general secretary of the Socialist Party, and they actively dislike each other. They both speak in bureaucratic language, and their last debate, televised nationally Wednesday night on a set that made them look like contestants on a game show, sounded like a colloquy at an elite university.
Mr. Hollande is considered likely to win the runoff on Sunday and face Mr. Sarkozy next spring, but in a new primary format, results are hard to predict. Ms. Aubry, a more doctrinaire Socialist, has the party levers under her control, and those who voted in the first round showed a clear affection for positions farther to the left than Mr. Hollande finds comfortable.
Among the six candidates in the first round last Sunday, Mr. Hollande won 39 percent of the votes and Ms. Aubry 30 percent.
The primary itself is a new venture, open to any French citizen who pays at least one euro and signs a pledge supporting “the values of the left and of the Republic,” otherwise left undefined. While the Socialists praised the democratic participation of the first round — about 2.6 million people voted — the figures are small compared to a regular election. More than 36.7 million voted in the first round of the 2007 presidential race, and the Socialist Party candidate alone got more than 9.5 million votes.
But the Socialists are a little desperate. While they have done progressively well in local elections, they have not elected a president since François Mitterrand, who left office more than 15 years ago. Even worse, in 2002, a Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, lost in the first round to Jean-Marie Le Pen, then the leader of the far right National Front, handing the election to Jacques Chirac.
In 2007, the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, lost badly to Mr. Sarkozy in the second round. Ms. Royal, Mr. Hollande’s former partner, ran again this year, traveling all over France. But this time, Socialist voters rejected her thoroughly, even cruelly, giving her less than 7 percent of the vote. Despite her split with Mr. Hollande, she endorsed him this year.
The main surprise of the first round was the strong showing of Arnaud Montebourg, 48, an articulate advocate of protectionism and “de-globalization,” calling for the imposition of social and environmental taxes on imports to protect French jobs. His advocacy of a return to an imaginary France — in fact, French exports have been falling as a percentage of global exports nearly every year for the last 40 years — annoyed political experts, but it won the support of 17 percent of those who voted last Sunday.
Mr. Montebourg also won praise from the National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen, who favors nearly the same policies, another indication of how the criticism of globalization in France brings the far left and far right together.
On Friday, playing his last card for attention, Mr. Montebourg endorsed Mr. Hollande, but only “in a personal capacity.”
Laurent Joffrin, the chief editor of the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, said with some despair that the results show that “the French left wants an alternative, not only to Sarkozyism, but also to the liberal course followed for the last 30 years by the great democracies.”
As for “de-globalization,” Mr. Joffrin said, it is “archaic, unrealistic, utopian, even reactionary.” But he said the themes of “criticizing the unbridled free market, fear of cruel globalization, rejection of an irresponsible financial system” have become popular in a time of economic uncertainty.
So Mr. Hollande, who believes that his best chance of winning the presidential election is to be a “normal president” tacking toward the center, is being pushed to the left, which is where Mr. Sarkozy prefers the Socialists to stay.
In Wednesday’s debate and in interviews on Thursday, Mr. Hollande toughened his stance toward the financial sector, saying that Europe’s banks, rather than the taxpayer, should pay for losses stemming from investment in Greece. “Those banks that lent to Greece must take the losses, as they were not careful,” Mr. Hollande said. “Banks that made a profit will have to fund banks that make a loss,” he said.
Ms. Aubry was more combative and tried to be folksy, calling Mr. Hollande “vague” and citing a rhyming proverb from her grandmother, to the effect that “when it’s vague, there’s a wolf,” or a danger. And she said on Thursday “that it always disturbs me when a man of the left uses the words of the right.”
Mr. Hollande tried to avoid controversy and avoid further division on the left. “I don’t want to be devaluing people, I don’t need to denigrate, devalue and denounce,” he said afterward. He said he was opposed to a “sectarian left.”
His relations with Ms. Aubry are difficult. She considers him “soft” and conflict adverse; he considers her nasty and difficult, too openly critical of his period as party leader. She is said to resent him for having been a political favorite of her famous father, Jacques Delors, who picked Mr. Hollande to run a research foundation devoted to Mr. Delors, the Club Témoin.
Mr. Sarkozy and his political aides favored Mr. Hollande as the best chance to avoid facing Mr. Strauss-Kahn, but now that Mr. Strauss-Kahn has left the race, it is Mr. Hollande they fear the most. Ms. Aubry, who is known as “The Lady of the 35 Hours,” for her responsibility in government for passing the 35-hour work week, is much more easily caricatured as a hidebound leftist out of touch with the new realities of a fiscal and financial crisis and the need to reduce government deficits.
Already, the newspaper Le Figaro, which actively supports Mr. Sarkozy, is asking how the Socialists think they can afford their promises: 60,000 new teaching posts, 300,000 jobs for the young, a restoration of retirement at age 60 and an end to the current policy of replacing only one of every two departing civil servants. Only by soaking corporations, banks and the rich, the newspaper said.
Mr. Sarkozy has reportedly told aides, according to Le Nouvel Observateur, that Mr. Hollande is like a man made of sugar, who will dissolve in water.
But the désamour of the French, for now, is deepest with Mr. Sarkozy. While a good campaigner, he is deeply unpopular, and opinion polls show that for now, at least, he has a very steep hill to climb to beat either Mr. Hollande or Ms. Aubry.
Źródło: IHT on line. October 14, 2011