Campaign Chronicles: Anne Hidalgo and the Disappearing Socialist Party
The Socialist Party candidate, Anne Hidalgo, twice elected as mayor of Paris, seems firmly fixed at about 2% in the polls. That is where she started, and that is where she will apparently end. And yet she has been a successful mayor known for shutting off much of Paris–the historic center–to cars, thus cutting down pollution and providing green spaces within the city. Not everyone likes this, or likes her; several months ago (it seems to have died down) people were photographing random piles of trash and posting them on twitter with the hashtag #saccageParis.
Like this. People are often slobs. Aside from the popular hashtag, which originated apparently with one tweeter (see the Guardian article below), the complaints that Paris is turning into a trash heap are similar to the stories about chaos at the southern border of the United States: useful for campaigning when you have nothing else to talk about.
In fact Hidalgo has been a transformative mayor, she belongs to the Socialist Party, which has deep roots in the countryside, and–reflective of those deep roots–she was one of the first candidates to get her 500 parrainages, or endorsements, to run. She is a firm believer in laïcité, or secularism, of the hard-core variety that banishes religious display; in that, she is similar to both Valérie Pécresse (Les Républicains) and Fabien Roussel (Parti communiste français).
So what is the problem? And what happened to the once-great Socialist Party, one of the two governing parties of the Fifth Republic? Some might wish to look for the root cause of decline as far back as the “tournant” of 1983, when the first Socialist president, François Mitterand, after only two years in office, was forced by the weakening of the franc to switch from a Keynesian policy of social spending to a policy of austerity, or rigueur. This policy change was a part of the deregulatory and “trickle down” economics that is familiar from the 1980s, the times of Reagan and Thatcher, followed by the watered-down Third Way of Tony Blair and the DLC (Democratic Leadership Conference) policies of Bill Clinton. In the face of neoliberal orthodoxy, the Left in general has become altogether too cautious about discussing genuine economic justice in society, and has suffered as a result.
Short-term difficulties for Hidalgo include the recent string of bad candidates. Segolène Royal, in 2007, proved to be a lightweight; François Hollande, who won in 2012, was an unsuccessful president. The 2017 Socialist candidate, Benoît Hamon, went his own quirky and unproductive way. Hamon won the Socialist Party nomination in late January, 2017; he spent weeks in negotiations with Yannick Jadot, the Green Party (EELV) candidate, which ended, ultimately, in Jadot’s decision to drop out in favor of Hamon and the issuing of a joint program. Hamon then spent much of the rest of his campaign promoting his own (not the party’s) version of Universal Basic Income. This was something of a distraction, because people did not necessarily understand it; and then he issued a revised plan. In neither of these two efforts, according to party chairman Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, did he bother to unify the stalwarts of the party around him. Hamon won 6% of the vote in the first round, and left the party after the National Assembly elections in June, asserting that the Socialist Party “had perhaps had its day.” The Socialists dropped from 280 seats (2012) down to 30 (2017).
Hidalgo has not made those sorts of mistakes. She has announced that her next priority will be the National Assembly elections, if (when) she loses the presidency. And she has been promoting a socialist and secularist program that is traditional, broadly acceptable, and popular in terms of the issues. It has been suggested that she might try to reach out to the ecological wing of the left, since she has a genuine environmental record in Paris. But there she is confronted with the recent debacle of 2017 and the determination of EELV to run a separate candidate–who is, again, Yannick Jadot. He has held steady at 5% in the polls.
Her most important issues are strengthening the public schools and restoring economic fairness. In a discussion published in La Voix du Nord, she noted the recent attacks on public schools and teachers: “A teacher can’t find himself in a position of having to go soft on questions of secularism or freedom of expression because that might not please some parents.” (I’m not mentioning Florida or Texas here.). Noting that both the minimum wage-earners and old age pensioners have seen their living standards reduced in recent years, she called for catch-up raises for both, combined with an indexing to inflation. To the inevitable question of how she would pay for that, she has expressed a wish to restore the ISF–a wealth surtax abolished by Macron early in his administration–and, additionally, to tax multinational firms, as Joe Biden has also discussed.
She has also been vocal in her support for Ukraine, linking its struggle with Republican values. She devoted a campaign rally in Bordeaux, just after the Russian attack, to the support of the people of Ukraine:
“We, the European Left, republican and social, we are always on the side of the targets of aggression, of the oppressed, of the right of a people to decide its own destiny.” She has supported “the political and diplomatic isolation” of Putin, even if it meant hardships at home–a difficult decision, she said, “that will have consequences on our lives, but prosperity means nothing without liberty and peace.” She called for a strengthened European defense as well as the suspension of the Russian propaganda network RT (Russia Today), which was silenced in France on March 2, 2022. She has affirmed her support for the actions of the French government and the European Union. Finally, she has attacked “the extreme right, that of Le Pen and of Zemmour, which has slavishly relayed Putin’s propaganda for years.” And she has also had words for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the far left, or the “so-called Left”; “The left is never on the side of dictators, in Venezuela, in Syria, or in Ukraine.” In an April 2 interview for the Journal du Dimanche she was asked whether Mélenchon, third in the polls after Macron (in first) and Marine Le Pen, might not be a more “useful” vote for those who want to see a candidate on the Left in the final round, rather than a replay of Macron and Le Pen:
“I say to the voters: if you want to change the future of our children, you need to vote for the left of transformation, and not for the left of vociferation, incapable of blocking the extreme right in 2017 and guilty of indulgence towards Vladimir Putin.”
======================================================
Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, Chronique d’une débâcle, 2012-2017. Paris: l’Archipel, 2017.
Anne-Charlotte Dusseaulx and Arthur Nazaret, “Anne Hidalgo au JDD:’Je propose d’une loi d’urgence pour l’avenir des jeunes de notre pays,” Le Journal du Dimanche, April 2, 2022.https://www.lejdd.fr/Politique/anne-hidalgo-au-jdd-je-propose-une-loi-durgence-pour-lavenir-des-jeunes-de-notre-pays-4103373?Echobox=1648934157#utm_medium=Social&xtor=CS1-4&utm_source=Twitter
Laurent Decotte and Julien Lécuyer, “École, salaires, retraites, décentralisation . . . . Anne Hidalgo face aux lecteurs de La Voix du Nord, La Voix du Nord, March 31, 2022.https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/1160577/article/2022-03-31/presidentielle-2022-anne-hidalgo-face-aux-lecteurs-de-la-voix-du-nord?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email-communication-fid&utm_campaign=VDN_20220331_fid_fal_hidalgo&utm_content=2022&M_BT=4668072208292
“Guerre en Ukraine: Anne Hidalgo rejoint les maires européens à Varsovie Vendredi,” BFMTV, March 3, 2022.https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/guerre-en-ukraine-anne-hidalgo-rejoindra-les-maires-europeens-a-varsovie-vendredi_AN-202203030515.html
“À Bordeaux, Anne Hidalgo consacre son meeting au conflit en Ukraine,” Ouest-France, February 26, 2022.https://www.ouest-france.fr/elections/presidentielle/a-bordeaux-anne-hidalgo-consacre-son-meeting-au-conflit-en-ukraine-6ca829da-9734-11ec-b7c4-1bc37bf7ac71
