Earthquake in France !

Newspapers here have been calling Sunday’s election a “séisme”, or earthquake.  I’m thinking more like a shitstorm.

Let’s see, what’s been going on?

On Sunday, France elected deputies to the European Parliament.  The Front National (FN) - the racist, xenophopic party - won big, with a quarter of the vote, putting it well ahead of the major parties.

It is easy to both overstate and understate what this means.

On the one hand, voter turnout was at near record lows.  Nobody really cares about the European Parliament and even fewer know what it does.  With the low turnout, this means that the FN actually got the support of only about 10% of French voters. 

On the other hand, it is a reflection of the extreme “colére” (anger) of many French voters.  Everyone we know talks about how disconnected politicians are from the voters, how politicians and government officials form a closed society and only take care of themselves. There is special colére about “multiple mandates” – the fact that one person can be a mayor, a member of the French parliament, and a party official all at the same time, collecting multiple salaries and (later) multiple pensions. 

Over and over we hear that the government is run by a small group of people who all went to the same few schools, run for office over and over, say the same things on TV over and over, and change nothing. 

Of course, when they do try to change something, the French react by taking to the streets and protesting, but that’s another story.

In many ways, both the high rate of abstentions and the support for the FN represents a protest vote.  But if politicians here don’t fix important problems, first and foremost economic performance, the protest votes will continue.

Meanwhile, what’s going on with the major parties?

The UMP, the conservative party, had a huge embezzlement scandal break the day after the election.  I knew it was big when the first eleven (!) articles in Le Monde were about this.  Within a day, the entire leadership had resigned and the party was in danger of breaking apart.  For the moment, a group of three former prime ministers is running things until a new party congress can be held in the summer.

As for the Socialists, who at last report were actually in charge of the government, things go from bad to worse.  First they got crushed in the municipal elections last month.  Then they had their worst results ever in the European elections.  President Hollande now has by far the lowest job approval ratings of any president in the history of France.  How low?  Think about how low Nixon’s ratings got after Watergate.  Ok, way lower than that. 

I think it is fair to say that he is about as popular here as English cooking.

The day after the election, Hollande addressed the nation. His speech pretty much boiled down to, “Whoa, you guys are mad!”

Today all of Europe’s leaders are in Brussels, trying to figure out what to do, because there were big protest votes in most European countries.  They are thinking of having the European bureaucrats try to encourage job growth, rather than their usual focus on things like rules for standard cucumber sizing.

Good luck with that.

KVS