Chirac's rigid creed for French nonreform

(Published in International Herald Tribune, April 10, 2006)

Jacques Chirac is discredited, Dominique de Villepin, too, and with them, it seems, a certain France that told the world it could avoid change and, as exceptionalist as ever, escape immobility's ridiculousness in the process.

Absurdity certainly has caught up with this routine. There's never been a more incongruous political crisis than the country's present misery about relaxing employment regulations for young people: scores of thousands of them - a poll shows 76 percent of the 15- to 24 year-old age group aspire to the privileges, early retirement and ironclad security of civil service jobs - demonstrating for social conservatism on the historical turf of new dawns and revolution.

And rarely has upheaval on the streets led to more ridiculous political repercussions. Here, it has exposed a president who tried to save face for his prime minister by signing a bill changing first-job rules, then explained incoherently that a second measure would soon nullify the original's provisions, and finally turned over the repair job to a rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, who both Chirac and Villepin have long hoped to crush.

For some, this is a hoot. But ridiculousness can be sad, or even ominous. That's the direction this episode points to for the future because it shows the entire French political spectrum locking itself into the depressing cavern of Chirac's political creed.

This article of faith insists that if France will sample the idea of reform, just tasting, it won't willingly swallow real social change. In terms of getting- elected politics, the Chirac precept says that only a presidential candidate who refuses to talk about the necessity of risk, or how France gains through a smaller nanny-state or a freer economy, can inspire enough French trust to win election.

In a new book on the president by Franz-Olivier Giesbert, François Fillon, a Sarkozy ally, describes Chirac as 'a psycho-rigid person who's convinced that France cannot tolerate any major reform. This comes to the great irritation of the left which wanted the right to do the job before it returns to power.'

In the same book, Jacques Toubon, a former cabinet minister once referred to by Chirac as a man ready to jump out a window for his boss, characterizes him as 'incredibly representative of the French, their aspirations, their contradictions, their pusillanimity. Every time I tell him we've got to move, he says 'We're only going to get hurt.''

Toubon added, perhaps Chirac is right.

With roughly a year to go before Chirac's second term is up, the current unrest and its context has strengthened that awful irony. The upheaval caused by a tiny reform attempt signifies the only thing that this enfeebled president (his approval ratings are in the 25 percent range) has ensured as a political legacy is wide acceptance by politicians right and left of his defeatist analysis of French voters' instincts.

Look at Sarkozy. Locked in battle with Villepin to become the presidential candidate of the democratic right in 2007, the interior minister for years defined himself as France's ultimate anti-Chirac truth-teller. Playing the liberal reformer to the hilt, Sarko said that the statist, timidly capitalistic, nationalist French model was done for and there had to be a 'rupture' in the country's consecrated habits for French decline to end.

But with Villepin in big trouble trying to defend his half-cocked labor- market reform (targeting young people while missing the structural causes of France's overall job problem), Sarkozy quickly became the voice of state compassion in erasing Villepin's baby steps toward change.

With big gains in the polls, Sarkozy's friends are now calling this a wise recentering of policy. But in truthful terms, Sarkozy's choice of action stands mostly as his real-time confirmation of Chirac's no-change precept. It's a decision that can only impose limits on what had been Sarkozy's reflex to talk honestly about reforming France's future.

Enter more ludicrousness: Before Villepin's presidential aspirations appeared to go up in smoke (the prime minister has fallen to the 25 percent level in voter satisfaction), his attempt to bring a little more flexibility to the job market was regarded as a pre- emptive tactic to counter Sarkozy's potential pitch as a reformer.

And Villepin was the pol who promised to protect the French social model. Giving every appearance of mocking Chirac's instincts about France - Giesbert's book describes Villepin talking with increasingly brutal relish about forcing the president's hand to become prime minister - Villepin charged ahead thinking he could corner an eventual reformist vote without having the rest of the French come down on his head.

That move was a botch. It effectively ended with this incoherent - or all too comprehensible - phrase from a seemingly punch-drunk Villepin in the National Assembly last week: 'Let's not aim for a zero-risk society, which is an immobile society, but for a society of totally controlled risk.'

Which leaves the left, riding weeks of protests and the Chirac/Villepin retreat, in a much-improved position to win the presidency. But the left's return to executive power after 12 years' absence would be without the deep reforms in society that Margaret Thatcher left behind for Tony Blair (and which make Britain a country that works.)

Since Chirac fled tackling reform head on, and has been humiliated as a result of his prime minister trying to grab only the big toe of change, the Socialists can't be objectively encouraged or expected to act as its agents.

Rather the opposite. The one hot Socialist presidential prospect, Ségolène Royal, attacks the word flexibility, a euphemism for reform in a country certified as scared stiff of it. She argues flexibility 'means social destructiveness and makes no economic sense.'

Royal's prescription for a France she admits is in decline? She says: 'I think that to re-establish confidence, citizens have got to see that the experiences they're living through are being identified with. The best way to achieve that is to ask them what they think. I believe in citizen expertise.'

If that very probably means that fighting for reform gets eliminated as the best way to win the presidency, it proves Chirac's sorry axiom right.

In all of France's ongoing grief, Jacques Marseille, a professor of the history of economics at the Sorbonne, has become, left and right, the media's go-to guy for wisdom on the demonstrations and the country's rejection of change.

Talking to the newspaper Le Monde, he suggested that what France has now become is a pole of emptiness, 'the model of the absence of real democracy, or incapacity for discussion, reform and compromise.'

So was France impossible to reform? he was asked.

'Yes,' Marseille answered. 'Or in any case it's exceptionally difficult.'