INTRODUCTION
In this post, I will move away from the traditional economic topic I
tend to write about here to a more political one. Yet, of course, politics
affect economic policies and it is not for nothing that the economic science
was first known as political economy. Furthermore, while I will be talking about France specifically, I think similar conclusions could be drawn in many European countries. Therefore, I hope the reader will find these musings of
interest.
TEAM A FAILS? VOTE FOR THE OTHER TEAM!
"Alternance" (alternating) seems to guide most recent western political history and definitely the recent French political system.
One side gets to power, sometimes on a wave of usually short lived enthusiasm,
then either mucks things up or at least fails to deliver the good things it was
expected to and then loses power to the other side… A few years later, the
cycle repeats itself. Supposedly, this is a good thing. I do not think so. A constant cycle of failure to deliver does not do politicians credit and may eventually push voters, tired of the "same old, same old" to the extremes. I will not be breaking any new ground of political sciences by saying that crises are fertile ground for extremism.
RIGHT vs. LEFT – IT'S NOT ALL THE SAME
In Europe in general and in France in particular, it seems to me that
the situation is as follow: The Right has a relatively clear idea of where it
wants to go. It want the country to be more like the United States of
America. By this, I mean that the Right wants France to be more business friendly, to "reward success and hard work", to provide a less heavily taxed
and regulated environment, coupled with a smaller government and a more 'liberalised'
labour market. It uses slogans like 'The France of the early risers', describes
the state and regulations as the stranglers of entrepreneurship and often tries
to appeal to a broad segment of the population by stigmatising the un-employed
or the under-employed and immigrants as 'lazy' and 'parasites'. This works well, up to a point,
especially in 'normal' times, when there isn't an acute crisis to prove this
description of reality tragically inadequate. But, whether in crisis or not, when
the right tries to make significant changes to the actual status quo and to
actually chip at the government-sponsored pillars of the middle class (the really
big ticket items), French (and most European) voters tend to rebel and refuse to
endorse such reforms.
The Left, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have a very clear agenda at all –
they certainly don't share the Right's dream of becoming more like the USA. But
they have not articulated a clear alternative beyond defending the status quo.
'Let's keep our forefathers' social benefits and entitlement programs' is their
motto. Usually, this is not the kind of rallying cry that would electrifies
troops and get people enthused. But, in the past two decades, it has come to
reflect a wide enough sentiment of things getting worse as time goes by, with a
necessity for people to hold on fast to whatever advantages, benefits and
privileges they were able to grab in the good decades of long gone better
times, to get them elected on an alternating basis. «Keep all you can and, if,
tomorrow, it turns out it was all unsustainable, well, today at least, you'll
be a-okay» seems to be the attitude…
The Left is supposed to be progressive but, in the face of an economic
reality they do not understand, can't really explain or, at the very least, do not
know how to deal with, they've shown themselves pretty conservative. The Right,
on the other hand, far from being conservative is actually rather
revolutionary. Indeed, if there was a main difference in economic policies
between the US Right and the French Right, I would suggest that it is that the
US Right is trying to bring about a second Conservative Revolution (more tax
cuts for the wealthy and an even more radical destruction of the social safety
net under the pretext of deficit reduction) while the French Right is still
trying to get the French people to buy into the first Conservative Revolution
(Reaganomics/Thatcherism) beyond liking a few of its slogans and handing them
over a couple of shallow electoral victories.
CONCLUSION
There we have it: Vote left and nothing changes, by design. Vote right
and, despite the rhetoric nothing changes because the French and most mainland
Europeans aren't about to experiment with Thatcherism. Not only are they
unwilling to take the short-term pain it clearly involves but the long-term
gains are no longer so obvious or believable after the 2007-8 crisis and the
un-ending quagmire we're living through.
It is of the utter urgency, in my humble opinion, that the French (and European) Left find a project for itself and re-discover how to be a force for change.
Hi Fred,
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting one.
The argument that you're making here strikes me as a similar one to one of the points which Keith Jenkins makes in Rethinking History (i.e. that there has been a general drift to the right over time). As I understand it, Jenkins is also a staunch socialist.
My view, as a conservative, is quite the reverse: that the electorate as a whole are moving away from both socially conservative and economically liberal positions.
So, it looks as though neither of us are getting what we want. We both feel that the political parties we support are struggling to hold the line, and that the other side have the upper hand.
James
James,
DeleteI truly apologise for the extreme long delay in replying. I suspect that what happened is that I deleted the email telling me I had a comment to answer to.
As to the substance, I am not sure I am really saying electorates are moving to the right in Europe. Sure, the extreme right is popular but, apart from some socially conservative fig leaves, they're not classically conservative either and certainly not economically liberal.
I was more trying to say that neither the right nor the left have the answers to our problems, the right because they're wrong and the left because they're too timid to do anything serious about the problems... :)