The overwhelming defeat of President Chirac’s center-right government in the French local elections was no surprise. Voters reject cuts to their generous welfare system. Yet the truth is that France, like Germany, can no longer afford such featherbedding if it is to stay within the budget deficit limitations imposed by membership in the eurozone.
Even the current cuts are unlikely to allow France to finally honor its obligations under the Stability Pact that is supposed to underpin the single European currency. France, like other eurozone countries, is also still underperforming, with 2003 growth of just half a percentage point for all 12 euro states. Unemployment remains high, the 35-hour week pushed through by French unions has damaged productivity and the government’s tax-take is insufficient to allow it to come close to balancing its books.
With voters in revolt, it seems unlikely President Chirac will have the courage to press on with reforms, whether he sticks with his unpopular Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin or forms a new administration. The growing clamor for industrial action against further economic reform of the state sector, health and welfare services and pensions may well have brought fundamental change to an end.
Maybe a socialist administration would have a better chance of handling the unions and driving through change. It happened in Felipe Gonzales’s Spain. But in France Socialists have a poor record of grasping economic realities. There is also a sinister addition to the country’s political mix in the shape of the neo-Fascist National Front party. They scored 16 percent in the first round of the latest local elections, though their vote shrank to only 13 percent in the second round on Sunday.
The National Front can be expected to exploit France’s economic woes by blaming them on the country’s immigrant community, which includes Europe’s largest Muslim population. The worse the government’s finances become, the louder will be the claim that immigrants are “stealing” the jobs of ethnic Frenchmen and leaching the welfare system. This xenophobia is a contagion which could spread and be taken up by new European member states, most of which have a dishonorable history of mistreatment of racial minorities.
At the moment most Frenchmen from both left and right of the center would recoil at the idea that the racist message of the National Front could take root beyond its hard core of supporters. But the truth is that the ravaged fields of economic failure have always proven fertile ground for intolerance and hatred. The clear danger now is that if no French government has the courage and strength to stop France living beyond its means, once moderate politicians will struggle to outflank the National Front by subscribing to its racial policies. At such a point, France will have far more than a wrecked economy to worry about.
