Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Mirror, mirror
Introduction
(This article appeared in the July issue of The Connexion, an English-language newspaper published monthly in France as the first in a series of profiles of canidates in the French presidential elections of 2007.)
Who needs elections when one has opinion polls? With the 2007 presidential elections in prospect, the French pollsters, supported by the media, have already been working overtime. Hardly a day goes by without a blow-by-blow account of the two candidates now expected to dominate the election – Nicolas Sarkozy in the blue corner, Ségolène Royal in the red. Yet neither of the two largest parties has in fact yet chosen its candidate and the majority of other candidates have still to declare. Despite this air of unreality, the polls are beginning to assume something of the air of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Mirror, mirror….
Long before the era of the internet and the video-game, the French acquired a taste for ‘virtual’ politics. In the 1880s, at the height of la Belle Époque, a furore of popular enthusiasm swept to sudden fame a vacuous if handsomely moustachioed cavalry officer called Georges Boulanger. For a brief, mad moment it seemed as though nothing could prevent Boulanger, on the crest of popular acclaim, from marching on the presidential palace and proclaiming himself head of state. In the event, the general hesitated and took flight, the moment of madness passed and, shortly afterwards, as ineffectually chivalric in death as in life, Boulanger committed suicide, in exile, on the grave of his former lover.
In the long run-up to the presidential elections of 1995, a similar fit of ‘virtuality’ convulsed the media. Long before the election itself, they were talking of the result as though it were a foregone conclusion. The man of the moment was the retiring President of the European Commission, socialist Jacques Delors and for several weeks all the polls gave him a huge advance over any other potential candidate. Unfortunately nobody had thought to ask Delors whether he actually intended to stand and the bubble burst abruptly when he announced that he had no intention of doing so.
This time round, the right has had little need for the magic mirror of the opinion-polls. From the moment when he admitted to thinking of the presidency while shaving of a morning, Nicolas Sarkozy has confidently predicted his own candidature and events seem now to be justifying his confidence. Through thick and thin he has adroitly managed to maintain through a fairly constant popularity with the right-wing electorate. The reassurance Sarkozy finds in his shaving-mirror, the Parti Socialiste, with a proliferation of presidential hopefuls, has been obliged to seek in the opinion polls.
For a time the pollsters’ favourite was former Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. Jospin has been in self-imposed political retirement since 2002 and the forecast return to favour never seemed very probable. Certainly left-wing voters were disenchanted with the PS leadership – popularly referred to as ‘the elephants’; certainly they harboured a certain sentiment of guilt about the divided vote that had led to Jospin’s defeat in 2002. Nevertheless his supposed popularity as a potential candidate for 2007 had all the familiar characteristics of political fantasy.
It was short-lived. Over recent months, Jospin’s poll-ratings have sunk as those of Ségolène Royal have spectacularly risen. Not regarded as a serious contender until the Spring of this year, she has now become clear favourite in the polls for the candidature (to be decided in the autumn) and is placed on an equal footing with Sarkozy for the presidency itself (April-May). With a fair while to go before either event, it is reasonable to wonder if once again one is not in the realm of the purely virtual.
As with Jospin, the initial impulse seems to have been essentially sentimental. Sexist remarks by other socialist leaders in response to the suggestion of a Royal candidature sparked off a certain sympathy that tied in well with a long-standing desire amongst the electorate for a different kind of leader and a different kind of politics. The fact that she is a woman has contributed greatly to her current popularity. Confronted with an array of hidebound elephants, it is unsurprising if the public express a preference for something more in the nature of an okapi.
Such sentiment is not the stuff of genuine political popularity. Until very recently little was known about the political views of a young woman who had only previously served in government as a relatively junior minister. She is working hard to fill that vacuum. Starting with a declared support in general terms for a sort of French ‘Blairism’, she has proceeded along classic ‘Blairite’ lines to privilege public relations (particularly via her website Désirs de l’avenir) and to steal the clothes of her political opponents. As in the case of Blair in the nineties, this has taken the form of talking tough on crime (boot-camps for delinquents) and making friendly gestures to the business community (back-pedalling on the 35-hour week).
This strategy was successful for ‘New Labour’ in a British context because Blair could be reasonably certain that traditional Labour voters would have nowhere else to go. In a richer and more volatile French political environment, it is a good deal more risky since the divided French left is unlikely to follow so tamely. Nor is there any real evidence that ‘Blairism’ has any greater appeal for the French electorate than it has nowadays for disillusioned British voters. The undoubted sympathy that the polls reveal for Royal as a personality (ségolisme in the candidate’s own preferred term) is far from certain to convert into real political support for the Royal agenda. Even if chosen candidate in April, she risks finding herself outmanoeuvred on her right and outflanked on her left.
Opinion polls here do not altogether play the same role as in British politics. In Britain, they measure the respective popularity of the political parties (even if this is increasingly expressed in terms of the popularity of their leaders). It is actually those parties and their leaders will contest any election in prospect. In France, no political leader is a candidate for anything at all until they declare officially. Until that time, the polls are little more than a beauty contest and can prove to be something of a distorting mirror for predicting ‘the fairest of them all’. There is a great deal of difference between a potential candidate (magnet for all kinds of passing fancies) and a real one (object of more severe political judgement).
Another recent opinion poll was rather more revealing of the prevailing mood of the French electorate. When asked what confidence they had in the two main parties, only fifteen per cent of those polled had confidence in the UMP (the party in power) but, more surprisingly, only fifteen per cent expressed confidence in the socialist opposition. Seventy per cent of the electorate remains therefore largely unconcerned in the presidential contest currently being promised by the pollsters and the media. Until French politicians of whatever allegiance can begin to gain the hearts and minds of that seventy per cent, the poll-ratings of a Sarko or a Ségo represent little more than a kind of media-fantasy.
(This article appeared in the July issue of The Connexion, an English-language newspaper published monthly in France as the first in a series of profiles of canidates in the French presidential elections of 2007.)
Who needs elections when one has opinion polls? With the 2007 presidential elections in prospect, the French pollsters, supported by the media, have already been working overtime. Hardly a day goes by without a blow-by-blow account of the two candidates now expected to dominate the election – Nicolas Sarkozy in the blue corner, Ségolène Royal in the red. Yet neither of the two largest parties has in fact yet chosen its candidate and the majority of other candidates have still to declare. Despite this air of unreality, the polls are beginning to assume something of the air of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Mirror, mirror….
Long before the era of the internet and the video-game, the French acquired a taste for ‘virtual’ politics. In the 1880s, at the height of la Belle Époque, a furore of popular enthusiasm swept to sudden fame a vacuous if handsomely moustachioed cavalry officer called Georges Boulanger. For a brief, mad moment it seemed as though nothing could prevent Boulanger, on the crest of popular acclaim, from marching on the presidential palace and proclaiming himself head of state. In the event, the general hesitated and took flight, the moment of madness passed and, shortly afterwards, as ineffectually chivalric in death as in life, Boulanger committed suicide, in exile, on the grave of his former lover.
In the long run-up to the presidential elections of 1995, a similar fit of ‘virtuality’ convulsed the media. Long before the election itself, they were talking of the result as though it were a foregone conclusion. The man of the moment was the retiring President of the European Commission, socialist Jacques Delors and for several weeks all the polls gave him a huge advance over any other potential candidate. Unfortunately nobody had thought to ask Delors whether he actually intended to stand and the bubble burst abruptly when he announced that he had no intention of doing so.
This time round, the right has had little need for the magic mirror of the opinion-polls. From the moment when he admitted to thinking of the presidency while shaving of a morning, Nicolas Sarkozy has confidently predicted his own candidature and events seem now to be justifying his confidence. Through thick and thin he has adroitly managed to maintain through a fairly constant popularity with the right-wing electorate. The reassurance Sarkozy finds in his shaving-mirror, the Parti Socialiste, with a proliferation of presidential hopefuls, has been obliged to seek in the opinion polls.
For a time the pollsters’ favourite was former Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. Jospin has been in self-imposed political retirement since 2002 and the forecast return to favour never seemed very probable. Certainly left-wing voters were disenchanted with the PS leadership – popularly referred to as ‘the elephants’; certainly they harboured a certain sentiment of guilt about the divided vote that had led to Jospin’s defeat in 2002. Nevertheless his supposed popularity as a potential candidate for 2007 had all the familiar characteristics of political fantasy.
It was short-lived. Over recent months, Jospin’s poll-ratings have sunk as those of Ségolène Royal have spectacularly risen. Not regarded as a serious contender until the Spring of this year, she has now become clear favourite in the polls for the candidature (to be decided in the autumn) and is placed on an equal footing with Sarkozy for the presidency itself (April-May). With a fair while to go before either event, it is reasonable to wonder if once again one is not in the realm of the purely virtual.
As with Jospin, the initial impulse seems to have been essentially sentimental. Sexist remarks by other socialist leaders in response to the suggestion of a Royal candidature sparked off a certain sympathy that tied in well with a long-standing desire amongst the electorate for a different kind of leader and a different kind of politics. The fact that she is a woman has contributed greatly to her current popularity. Confronted with an array of hidebound elephants, it is unsurprising if the public express a preference for something more in the nature of an okapi.
Such sentiment is not the stuff of genuine political popularity. Until very recently little was known about the political views of a young woman who had only previously served in government as a relatively junior minister. She is working hard to fill that vacuum. Starting with a declared support in general terms for a sort of French ‘Blairism’, she has proceeded along classic ‘Blairite’ lines to privilege public relations (particularly via her website Désirs de l’avenir) and to steal the clothes of her political opponents. As in the case of Blair in the nineties, this has taken the form of talking tough on crime (boot-camps for delinquents) and making friendly gestures to the business community (back-pedalling on the 35-hour week).
This strategy was successful for ‘New Labour’ in a British context because Blair could be reasonably certain that traditional Labour voters would have nowhere else to go. In a richer and more volatile French political environment, it is a good deal more risky since the divided French left is unlikely to follow so tamely. Nor is there any real evidence that ‘Blairism’ has any greater appeal for the French electorate than it has nowadays for disillusioned British voters. The undoubted sympathy that the polls reveal for Royal as a personality (ségolisme in the candidate’s own preferred term) is far from certain to convert into real political support for the Royal agenda. Even if chosen candidate in April, she risks finding herself outmanoeuvred on her right and outflanked on her left.
Opinion polls here do not altogether play the same role as in British politics. In Britain, they measure the respective popularity of the political parties (even if this is increasingly expressed in terms of the popularity of their leaders). It is actually those parties and their leaders will contest any election in prospect. In France, no political leader is a candidate for anything at all until they declare officially. Until that time, the polls are little more than a beauty contest and can prove to be something of a distorting mirror for predicting ‘the fairest of them all’. There is a great deal of difference between a potential candidate (magnet for all kinds of passing fancies) and a real one (object of more severe political judgement).
Another recent opinion poll was rather more revealing of the prevailing mood of the French electorate. When asked what confidence they had in the two main parties, only fifteen per cent of those polled had confidence in the UMP (the party in power) but, more surprisingly, only fifteen per cent expressed confidence in the socialist opposition. Seventy per cent of the electorate remains therefore largely unconcerned in the presidential contest currently being promised by the pollsters and the media. Until French politicians of whatever allegiance can begin to gain the hearts and minds of that seventy per cent, the poll-ratings of a Sarko or a Ségo represent little more than a kind of media-fantasy.
