"Jean-Pierre's running an interactive campaign," explains Chevènement's parliamentary assistant Guillaume Vuilletet. "He has his principles, but his ideas are nourished by this direct contact with the citizens." Despite a propensity for sprinkling his speeches with Latin quotations and obscure allusions to the Holy Roman Empire, interactivity appears to be one of the candidate's strong points. By the time he meets the local press an hour later, softening the impact of the 35-hour week on small business and safeguarding independent retailers have become key components in his program. Only the young man's request remains unanswered; under Chevènement, the hip-hop scene in Bayonne is unlikely to get a boost.
Chevènement is an unlikely applicant for the nation's top job. The architect of a Soviet-inspired command economy for newly elected President Mitterrand in 1981, he resigned as Minister for Industry after massive capital flight two years later. In 1991, after trumpeting Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a model for the Arab world, he resigned as Defense Minister to protest France's engagement in the Gulf War. Yet another noisy resignation followed in 2000, when he left the Interior Ministry in disgust at Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's plan to devolve limited legislative powers to the local assembly in Corsica, an initiative that was overturned last week by the Constitutional Council.
Chevènement's candidacy has been thrust into the spotlight by the peculiar air of unreality that hangs over the elections. Although everyone anticipates a duel between Prime Minister Jospin and President Jacques Chirac, neither man has declared his candidacy or even begun to stake out the issues on which he intends to run. Jospin wants to be perceived as a hard-working head of government until Parliament is dissolved late next month, while Chirac prefers to paint Jospin as an over-
eager challenger. As a result, Chevènement has garnered a 10% rating in the latest opinion polls, putting him third after Chirac and Jospin and just ahead of Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front. Although few expect him to win in three months' time, Chevènement's unexpected success to date bears testimony to a powerful yearning for the past.
Chevènement has come this far with an old-fashioned blend of nationalism and populism that appeals to right-wing voters as much as it does to his traditional left-wing constituency. "France doesn't know where she's going anymore," he says. "Today, the top priority is returning to the basic values of the Republic." His 10-point program includes calls for more law and order, re-establishing the authority of teachers, buttressing France's monolithic public sector and encouraging French women to have more children. It's hardly surprising that Chevènement's handlers are concerned about their candidate's difficulty in attracting the youth vote.
However tempting it might be to dismiss Chevènement as a backward-looking crank, his success so far says a lot about the cracks running through France. Despite the modernization of the past 20 years, much of the country still views with suspicion, if not paranoia, the advent of a pluralistic society, a global economy and a more limited role for the state. "People to the left and right of the political spectrum are scared by the way our society is opening up politically, economically and culturally, and Chevènement appeals to that electorate," says Pascal Perrineau, director of the Center for the Study of French Political Life. Another man with appeal for that demographic is Le Pen, though he hasn't yet begun active campaigning. "Le Pen's been exploiting popular anxiety about an open society for the past decade," says Perrineau. "Today, Chevènement's picking up votes from people who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Le Pen."
Chevènement dismisses Le Pen as "the tail of a comet." Yet together they account for one-fifth of the electorate. Jospin and Chirac are going to have to come up with a compelling positive spin on France's future if they are to counteract the nostalgia that vote represents.