Could France’s Next President Be a Thatcherite?
Από: Dalibor Rohac
f the U.S. election season looks too depressing, you might consider following the presidential primaries in France instead. A week ago, the French magazine Le Point—which lies on the French center-right but is very far from the intellectual conservatism in the British or American sense—dedicated a whole issue to the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, asking on its cover whether Thatcherism was “the best platform for the 2017 presidential election.”
Don’t hold your breath yet for sweeping Thatcher- and Reagan-style reforms coming to France next year, of course. Nonetheless, it is impossible to ignore that the tone of political conversations in Paris has been vastly different from the messages that Americans have been hearing from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
True, the leader of the Kremlin-funded National Front, Marine Le Pen, has a good chance of making it to the second round of the presidential election. Besides her well-known anti-immigration agenda and a promise of leaving the European Union, on the economic front Le Pen promises increased protection against “unfair competition” from countries with low labor costs, employee quotas for native French in specific professions, and industrial policies that she claims would lead to a “re-industrialization” of the country.
Yet it is unlikely that she can command a popular majority against essentially any plausible center-right or center-left candidate. Meanwhile, the leading candidate among the center-right Républicains, Alain Juppé, is a reliable if unexciting figure. His platform promises cuts to corporate taxes and public spending amounting up to $110 billion, and an increase in pension age to 65 years. More significant than anything that either Clinton or Trump have achieved, as Prime Minister in the 1990s Juppé led the effort to bring public-sector pensions under control. Admittedly, the reform brought mixed results, as it triggered a massive, three-week wave of strikes of around 2 million workers, following which the initial proposals were watered down drastically.
In addition to the former president Nicolas Sarkozy, the primaries of the Républicains (to be held on November 20) also feature François Fillon, a former prime minister, Anglophile, and a self-avowed follower of Thatcher. Spending and tax cuts, the end of the 35-hour work week, and a regulatory review aimed at cutting red tape burdening the French economy are the centerpieces of his electoral platform.
Even more interesting things are happening in the Socialist party. President François Hollande’s approval ratings have been miserable for some time. Last week, two journalists, Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, released a 672-page book based on numerous interviews that Hollande has given them throughout his term in the office. The book and the controversy surrounding won’t shock anyone who has followed this year’s campaign in the United States. However, waiving any control over content and timing of publication of the book, which is full of politically incorrect quotes on subjects ranging from Islam and immigration to France’s judiciary, was an amateurish mistake and a reason for many not to consider Hollande as a serious contender for presidency.
Hollande’s blunders are an opportunity for Emmanuel Macron, whom many on both sides of the political spectrum consider as truly the best hope for the French economy. Until recently a minister of the economy in the cabinet led by the Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls, Macron spearheadeddistinctly pro-market economic reforms: a liberalization of long-distance bus transport, opening up of protected professions including notaries public and judicial officers, and making it easier—albeit only marginally—for companies to fire their employees.
Don’t be fooled by appearances. Although Macron was part of the Socialist cabinet, he is not a card-carrying party member. One of Macron’s most vocal supporters in France, the libertarian lawyer and intellectual Mathieu Laine (also a Le Point contributor), recently wrote a preface to a French edition of Margaret Thatcher’s speeches, giving a glowing endorsement of the Iron Lady’s economic reforms he thinks France desperately needs.
It is quite refreshing to see the growing recognition in France that what the country needs is not economic protectionism, populism, and heavy-handed government interventions, but serious structural and fiscal reforms. It is equally refreshing to see the French political class increasingly cognizant of the role that liberal democracies play in keeping the world safe—and of the fact that the United States have failed as of late to hold its part of the bargain.
In a recent interview, even President Hollande—in many respects, political figure as far from a hardline American neoconservative as one can get—lambasted President Obama’s failure to act in Syria in 2013. This “act of weakness,” he said, “provoked the crisis in Ukraine, the illegal annexation of Crimea, and what’s happening in Syria right now.”
Regardless of who the new occupants of the White House and the Elysée are next year, it is quite likely that the latter will be more attuned to the ideas of free enterprise and a global leadership by liberal democracies. And that is a thought that Americans should find unsettling.
Πηγή: American Enterprise Institute
