 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Right Time
Blocking the march of Jean-Marie Le Pen
[May 6, 2002] |
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
E-mail your letter to the editor
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
PATRICK KOVARIK/AP
|
Cohabitation: Political rivals like Jospin, left, and Chirac are forced to both cooperate and compete |
|
 |
|
Lots of Talk, but Nobody's Listening |
 |
|
|
|
|
Chirac and Jospin fail to ignite voters in a dull campaign. Are they avoiding the issues that matter? |
|
|
|
|
|
By JAMES GRAFF |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Posted Sunday, April 14, 2002; 15.05GMT
France is up in arms again. but this time
it is a lack of passion rather than an excess of it that has embattled
the nation. The first French presidential election of the 21st century
is being universally decried as lackluster and boring. The same two
men who lined up seven years ago, Socialist Lionel Jospin and neo-Gaullist
Jacques Chirac, are vying for the post again. But having shared power
as Prime Minister and President for the last five years, they both
run as incumbents, and neither seems able to profit from that status.
Pundits are predicting the highest abstention rate ever for next Sunday's
first round. Have the French lost interest in politics?
Clearly, they are not much moved by its traditional agents. Jospin
and Chirac are all but certain to be the top two candidates and go
on to the second round on May 5. But the two of them together are
unlikely to get even half of the votes cast in the first. Most voters
will choose from the 14 other candidates running toward certain elimination.
On the right, polling as much as 13%, is the perennial untouchable,
Jean-Marie Le Pen, who wants an end to the euro and to immigration.
On the left are three Trotskyites, including one, Arlette Laguiller,
whose call for a ban on all firings has made her a kind of national
mascot; she is expected to get as much as 10%. Jean Saint-Josse, a
defender of hunting and fishing rights, is polling better than Alain
Madelin, an economic liberal whose platform isn't much different from
the one that took British Prime Minister Tony Blair to power.
Never before has the chasm been so obvious between the august stature
of the President of the Republic and his fragile power. Not until
after parliamentary elections on June 16 will the new President know
whether he will be an active leader of French policy, working with
a Prime Minister of his own party, or another "spectator President"
like Chirac, who since 1997 has only been able to carp about domestic
policy, which is in the hands of the Prime Minister.
Chirac's inability to influence government policy during the last
five years of "cohabitation" raises an uncomfortable question: What
is so great about the presidency anyway? The strictures imposed by
the European Union over everything from state industrial aid to budgetary
discipline give any French president — or government —
less room for maneuver. The domination of the United States and the
predations of a globalized marketplace constrain France's ability
to put forward an alternative vision. Clearly, this isn't Charles
de Gaulle's presidency anymore. But neither candidate seems able to
acknowledge those changes in their campaigns. "France is in mental
gridlock," says Albert Bressand, managing director of the economic
think tank Promethée in Paris. "We can't seem to look at the
future except in the mirror." The burden of past grandeur casts a
long shadow on a country that is a lot more average than it considers
itself to be. "There's a great nostalgia on both the right and the
left for real power," says Christian-Marie Wallon-Leducq, dean of
the law faculty at the University of Lille. "This nostalgia is France,
and the feeling is that if we abandon it we aren't ourselves."
|
|
