Nicolas Sarkozy intends to follow up his victory in the French presidential election with a one hundred day long offensive to transform the country. His first task will be to lead his right-wing party to a solid majority in the French National Assembly in two rounds of voting on June 10 and June 17. (The momentum he enjoys from the presidential campaign is likely to ensure him a majority in the National Assembly elections, although there will be plenty of resistance to him in the coming contest.)
Then it will be down to business. (Right now, Sarko is taking time off to cruise around the Mediterranean on a luxury yacht with room for his family and his closest confidants.)
Sarko’s priorities will be to toughen France’s immigration laws, make it easier to expel illegal immigrants from the country, stiffen penalties for those convicted of crimes, cut taxes, lessen the power of unions, lay off many thousands of people who work in the public sector, and repeal the country’s thirty-five hour work week. This is a sweeping Margaret Thatcher-style agenda. It will pit the president and his allies in the National Assembly up against millions of workers, students, immigrants, and the families of recent immigrants.
Sarkozy won office at the head of a political party, many of whose members don’t trust him, by showing that he was prepared to get tough with the kids of immigrants in the dreary suburbs of the great French cities and that he was prepared to crack down on lawlessness.
On the immigration issue, Sarkozy has been the beneficiary of the decades-long, relentless campaign of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National to stigmatize immigrants as the cause of France’s ills. While Sarko would never acknowledge it, without the spade work of the Front National, he wouldn’t have stood a ghost of a chance of being elected.
He will make it even more difficult than it already is for immigrants to enter France and he will not hesitate to mobilize the forces of law and order to hunt down and expel those who are in the country without papers. Like other politicians of his stripe, he will constantly remind the people of France that he has a mandate to do what he said he would do during the campaign. (Remember Margaret Thatcher, Mike Harris, Stephen Harper et. al.---they do not soften once in office.) Sarko will show mercy to a few people who have suffered abuse in their countries of origin so he can claim to be a civilized human being, but in the overwhelming majority of cases the hammer will come down.
Tax cuts and their accompaniment---the sacking of those on the public payroll---will start him down the neo-liberal path to the more American-style economy he seeks. In the main it will not be bureaucrats who will lose their jobs, but a wide range of employees who work in hospitals, schools, day care centres, universities, servicing roads and other infrastructure, keeping cities clean, beautifying parks etc.
Key to Sarkozy’s campaign was his promise to let the French work harder if they choose to do so. That means he will set out to scrap the thirty-five hour work week. That measure, introduced by the Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin (under the presidency of right-winger Jacques Chirac), came into effect in 2000. The law which applied initially to large enterprises, provided for a phase-in for smaller companies. It was intended to give workers more leisure time and to create jobs by enticing companies to make up for the loss in hours worked by hiring new employees. When it came into effect, the law was popular among workers and was reviled by employers. Economists and foreign analysts were horrified by the law which they said would discourage foreign investment. Perhaps their real fear was that it could prove attractive to workers in other countries, just as previous movements for the forty-eight hour week and later the forty hour week became causes that motivated working class movements.
The transition to the thirty-five hour week did not provoke the ruinous consequences that the political right had predicted. Unemployment in France today is lower than it was when the law was introduced.
Sarkozy has targeted the law however, and with it the union movement in France. He has convinced a large proportion of the population that France is stagnating, that it needs a more enterprise-centred market economy. One might imagine from all the hysteria about French stagnation that free enterprise has been suffering in France. In fact, 2006 saw record high profits for the companies listed on the country’s leading stock exchange, the CAC 40.
Capitalism is already alive and well in a country in which the gap between the rich and the rest of the population has been widening (although not as much as in the US, the UK and Canada). Sarkozy’s goal is to free capitalism from the remaining restraints it faces. He wants to deliver the death blow to what remains of the distinctive French economic and social model.
There will be one hell of a fight.
Sarkozy won 53 per cent of the vote last Sunday, but the 47 per cent of the French population that voted for Socialist Segolene Royal is a very sizeable portion of French society. The new president is a highly polarizing figure. While adored by those on the right, he is detested in equal measure by those who opposed him.
Sarkozy will attempt to use the power of the state to crush those who stand in his way. Those on the other side can expected to resist, however. Since 1789, France has always been divided between the right and the left, the counter-revolutionary tradition and the revolutionary tradition. That division has not ended.
In 1968, millions went into the streets of France to oppose the government of Charles de Gaulle, a president who was seen as a demi-god in the country. While they did not topple his regime, the consequences of that movement were the defeat of a constitutional amendment in a referendum the following year and de Gaulle’s resignation. Still later, the movement of 1968 laid the foundation for the election of Socialist Francois Mitterrand in 1981, the only left-winger to win the top job in the Fifth Republic.
Sarkozy is threatening to turn the clock back in France to an era of greater exploitation of working people, to take away from wage and salary earners much that they have gained. That there will be powerful resistance is clear. How powerful, we will have to wait and see.
Then it will be down to business. (Right now, Sarko is taking time off to cruise around the Mediterranean on a luxury yacht with room for his family and his closest confidants.)
Sarko’s priorities will be to toughen France’s immigration laws, make it easier to expel illegal immigrants from the country, stiffen penalties for those convicted of crimes, cut taxes, lessen the power of unions, lay off many thousands of people who work in the public sector, and repeal the country’s thirty-five hour work week. This is a sweeping Margaret Thatcher-style agenda. It will pit the president and his allies in the National Assembly up against millions of workers, students, immigrants, and the families of recent immigrants.
Sarkozy won office at the head of a political party, many of whose members don’t trust him, by showing that he was prepared to get tough with the kids of immigrants in the dreary suburbs of the great French cities and that he was prepared to crack down on lawlessness.
On the immigration issue, Sarkozy has been the beneficiary of the decades-long, relentless campaign of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National to stigmatize immigrants as the cause of France’s ills. While Sarko would never acknowledge it, without the spade work of the Front National, he wouldn’t have stood a ghost of a chance of being elected.
He will make it even more difficult than it already is for immigrants to enter France and he will not hesitate to mobilize the forces of law and order to hunt down and expel those who are in the country without papers. Like other politicians of his stripe, he will constantly remind the people of France that he has a mandate to do what he said he would do during the campaign. (Remember Margaret Thatcher, Mike Harris, Stephen Harper et. al.---they do not soften once in office.) Sarko will show mercy to a few people who have suffered abuse in their countries of origin so he can claim to be a civilized human being, but in the overwhelming majority of cases the hammer will come down.
Tax cuts and their accompaniment---the sacking of those on the public payroll---will start him down the neo-liberal path to the more American-style economy he seeks. In the main it will not be bureaucrats who will lose their jobs, but a wide range of employees who work in hospitals, schools, day care centres, universities, servicing roads and other infrastructure, keeping cities clean, beautifying parks etc.
Key to Sarkozy’s campaign was his promise to let the French work harder if they choose to do so. That means he will set out to scrap the thirty-five hour work week. That measure, introduced by the Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin (under the presidency of right-winger Jacques Chirac), came into effect in 2000. The law which applied initially to large enterprises, provided for a phase-in for smaller companies. It was intended to give workers more leisure time and to create jobs by enticing companies to make up for the loss in hours worked by hiring new employees. When it came into effect, the law was popular among workers and was reviled by employers. Economists and foreign analysts were horrified by the law which they said would discourage foreign investment. Perhaps their real fear was that it could prove attractive to workers in other countries, just as previous movements for the forty-eight hour week and later the forty hour week became causes that motivated working class movements.
The transition to the thirty-five hour week did not provoke the ruinous consequences that the political right had predicted. Unemployment in France today is lower than it was when the law was introduced.
Sarkozy has targeted the law however, and with it the union movement in France. He has convinced a large proportion of the population that France is stagnating, that it needs a more enterprise-centred market economy. One might imagine from all the hysteria about French stagnation that free enterprise has been suffering in France. In fact, 2006 saw record high profits for the companies listed on the country’s leading stock exchange, the CAC 40.
Capitalism is already alive and well in a country in which the gap between the rich and the rest of the population has been widening (although not as much as in the US, the UK and Canada). Sarkozy’s goal is to free capitalism from the remaining restraints it faces. He wants to deliver the death blow to what remains of the distinctive French economic and social model.
There will be one hell of a fight.
Sarkozy won 53 per cent of the vote last Sunday, but the 47 per cent of the French population that voted for Socialist Segolene Royal is a very sizeable portion of French society. The new president is a highly polarizing figure. While adored by those on the right, he is detested in equal measure by those who opposed him.
Sarkozy will attempt to use the power of the state to crush those who stand in his way. Those on the other side can expected to resist, however. Since 1789, France has always been divided between the right and the left, the counter-revolutionary tradition and the revolutionary tradition. That division has not ended.
In 1968, millions went into the streets of France to oppose the government of Charles de Gaulle, a president who was seen as a demi-god in the country. While they did not topple his regime, the consequences of that movement were the defeat of a constitutional amendment in a referendum the following year and de Gaulle’s resignation. Still later, the movement of 1968 laid the foundation for the election of Socialist Francois Mitterrand in 1981, the only left-winger to win the top job in the Fifth Republic.
Sarkozy is threatening to turn the clock back in France to an era of greater exploitation of working people, to take away from wage and salary earners much that they have gained. That there will be powerful resistance is clear. How powerful, we will have to wait and see.
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