France: Le second souffle de la campagne de Hollande

Since the rally of the Bourget, Hollande’s campaign has slowed down a bit. This is normal. A presidential electoral campaign is long and has a life of its own punctuated by a certain rhythm. No one can wage an earth-scorching, barn-burning, flag-waving, walls-shaking nonstop campaign. The base would tire and the media would lose interest. So, it is important to have peaks and valleys in a campaign; even more accurately, it is important to chose when to slow down, when to peak, and when to crush the gas pedal to finish the campaign at the top.

However, with the chaotic entrance of Sarkozy in the campaign and his one-announcement-per-day blitzkrieg style and his omnipresence in the media, Hollande was compelled to regain the momentum by increasing not only the rhythm of his campaign, but also by infusing a dose of enthusiasm in his base to foster a greater of mobilization for the first round. This is exactly what Hollande has done this week so far. He started the week by announcing an important endorsement of a serious and highly respected politician–Jean-Pierre Chevènement–and then by holding an important rally in Marseille where he delivered a new stump speech–a sharper stump speech aimed at mobilizing the base and at attacking Sarkozy’s record as well as his numerous, inflammatory, and contradictory campaign promises.

The most important sentence delivered by Hollande in his speech is this: “Pourquoi voulez-vous qu’il fasse dans les cinq prochaine années ce qu’il n’a pas été capable de faire les cinq dernières années?” Hollande here is borrowing from Ronald Reagan who in his closing statement in  the last presidential debate that opposed him to the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, delivered a knockout punch by asking the following: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the store than four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment than there was four years ago?” Reagan’s rhetorical questions pierced Carter’s presidency, highlighted the failures of his tenure, tightly linked the incumbent to his record, and helped Reagan to draw a sharp contrast between his vision for the future and Carter’s record.

Here is the closing statement of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 second presidential debate

I think Hollande has just regained the momentum again and i will predict that we will see a slight bump in his numbers in the next couple of weeks. Briefly stated, i think the real campaign has just started, and the next 5 weeks will be a mad dash to the finish line.

Here is the speech delivered March 14 at Marseille.

France: “Nicolas Le Pen”

Yesterday, in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, i read one of the most damning Op-Ed pieces that i have ever read about a politician. The Wall Street Journal, which can hardly be accused of sympathizing with the left or described as a bastion of liberalism, especially its editorial pages, literally indicted Nicolas Sarkozy as an extreme right candidate. Their reasons? Well, Sarkozy has gone so far to the right in his rhetoric that he is no longer a representative of the mainstream right, but a representative of the radical right. According to the WSJ, Sarkozy can no longer be distinguished from Marine or Jean Marie Le Pen.

Instead of summarizing the editorial piece, i let you read it and make up your mind.

• REVIEW & OUTLOOK EUROPE
• March 13, 2012

Nicolas Le Pen

Even by local standards, the French President’s recent burst of xenophobia is pretty cynical.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has ramped up the anti-immigrant rhetoric in recent days, telling a TV audience last week that France has “too many foreigners” and offering to cut the number of immigrants admitted to France by half should he be re-elected to a second term. Then on Sunday, before a monster rally in a stadium near Paris, he threatened to suspend France’s participation in Schengen, Europe’s internal borderless-travel zone, unless it is reformed to better keep out the great unwashed.

Even in France, it rarely gets more cynical than this. The attacks on immigration are an attempt to woo supporters of Marine Le Pen’s xenophobic National Front ahead of the first-round poll on April 22. Mr. Sarkozy trails his Socialist rival, Francois Hollande, 29% to 27%, according to a recent poll for Paris Match magazine. Ms. Le Pen comes in third at 17%. Little wonder that’s where the Sarkozy camp is now mining for votes.

Associated PressFrench President Nicolas Sarkozy

Still, the immigration talk is mainly a cover for French anxiety over their increasingly rickety welfare state. Mr. Hollande’s answer for keeping the system afloat is a 75% top marginal income-tax rate, which may do something for emigration but won’t do anything to improve France’s budgetary health. Mr. Sarkozy, by contrast, argues that “at a time of economic crisis, if Europe doesn’t control who can enter its borders, it won’t be able to finance its welfare state any longer.”

This is an ugly thought, not only for the ugly sentiments on which it plays but also as a textbook example of economic illiteracy. Not least among the threats to France’s welfare state is an aging (and increasingly long-lived) population and a birth rate that—while the highest in Europe—is still below the replacement rate. Barring fundamental cultural changes, only immigration can maintain an active work force large enough to pay for the growing rolls of pensioners and dependents.

The real task for the French government is to ensure that those immigrants are assimilating properly, and to create economic conditions in which they can thrive with the rest of France. Mr. Sarkozy no doubt understands that. But we wonder if Mr. Sarkozy also understands that transparent displays of cynicism like this one have brought him to his current political predicament.