Waiting for 'Godot', or the real reason why the French right cannot profit from Hollande's unpopularity

Logo of French right-of-centre party the UMP

Rocketing unemployment, serious economic problems, intense voter dissatisfaction, you name it, Hollande is having to deal with it. His popularity ratings are lower than those of any other president after one year in power, the national mood is deleterious, each day brings a new tax and each week sees a new government scandal.

In other words, this is a perfect opportunity for an opposition party to gain voter support by proposing alternative policies which seem credible. It's manna from heaven in political terms. Yet the UMP, France's main opposition party, has so far proved to be totally incapable of turning Hollande's considerable woes to their advantage. But why? That question is becoming urgent for the UMP because the longer they don't do something to improve the quality of their opposition the longer Hollande will be let off the hook.

There are several reasons for the right's ineffectiveness;

Kneejerk frontal opposition is an ineffective tactic.
The UMP's reaction to almost any government legislation or legislative proposal is one of indignant and full-frontal categoric denunciation, whereas they should be reacting by proposing sensible alternatives. But as the party has not yet put together a global alternative policy package due to the lack of an effective leadership structure (see below) there is nothing they can do. Meanwhile however, the public are becoming increasingly frustrated with the UMP's angry posturing and aggressive tactics in parliament.

The UMP is lurching to the right.
The UMP is currently locked in a bitter battle over the increasingly vocal and deliberately inflammatory support given to right-wing extremists by senior party members, some of whom are even demanding that citizens demonstrate en masse against not only the gay marriage bill, but also Hollande's economic policies. They also attend anti-gay demonstrations in the full knowledge that they will be disrupted by violent fascists and Catholic integrists. The result is that UMP députés and senior leaders are now to be seen during these demonstrations in the shoulder-rubbing company of prominent politicians from the extreme right-wing Front National. The public thinks it is shameful that democratically-elected politicians should chose to associate themselves with these obscurantist and reactionary elements and thereby tacitly endorse urban violence, right-wing extremism and high-risk demonstrations. Indeed, some party members have even ripped up their membership cards and left the party as a result of this spectacle. 

The interminable and damaging party leadership struggle.
UMP chairman Jean-François Copé is generally believed to have cheated - even by many UMP members - in the internal UMP elections which designated him as winner, and thus chairman. He is strongly suspected of having manipulated the results in order to beat his challenger - Prime minister under Sarkozy François Fillon. Since then the party has promised to hold new elections after summer, only to go back on its word with the more or less active agreement of both Copé and Fillon, who are both looking to be the next president of France. This state of affairs has not pleased half of the UMP's signed-up members and the general public feels that instead of squabbling between themselves and jockeying for position in view of becoming the UMP's presidential candidate in 2017 they should be addressing the country's current problems in a responsible manner. 

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Meanwhile, a certain Nicolas Sarkozy is waiting in the wings and watching them destroy each other, and he is the real, the central, and the only reason why the UMP is a poor opposition party at the moment.

Nicolas Sarkozy.
In case anyone had forgotten, Nicolas Sarkozy is still around, and he is the main reason why the UMP - the party he created - is riven with dissent at this time. The party has never managed to get round to doing its mea culpa of the reasons why they did so badly in the last elections, and that is partly because Sarkozy is still looming over the party, like a brooding giant. More importantly, he is refusing for now to say whether or not he will re-enter politics at the head of the UMP (his election would be a mere formality) with a presidential bid in view. He has been following all the action and, not surprisingly from his point of view, his tactic is to let Fillon and Copé as well as other would-be presidential candidates slug it out, along with the supporting groups of each one within the UMP. After all, given that polls give him a slam-dunk victory were he to run for the Elysée in 2017 and that party members are sick of all the in-fighting, his return would result in joy and rapture throughout the party's rank-and-file and he knows it. Will he come back, and if so when? That question is the reason why the MP is currently paralysed and ineffective.

If Sarkozy did come back, it would be with a massive bang. He would galvanise the party and upset the applecart of French politics as no politian has ever done since De Gaulle. His return would change everything, and everyone, both on the left and right of French politics, knows it. No one would know how things would pan out and the country would be thrown into a frenzy. Hollande must be dreading the possibility of this happening.

The fact is that the UMP is on hold for the forseeable future. In other words, until Sarkozy makes his mind up. Opposition isn't their priority, but the shadow of Sarkozy, who is listening to their every word, is.

The UMP is Waiting for Godot.

 But shhhhh, don't say anything.

France and its political shenanigans 'à la république bananière'

François Fillon (L) and Jean-François Copé (R)

Call me a glutton for punishment if you will, but unlike the quasi-totality of people in France I am still fascinated by the ongoing political saga involving Fillon and Copé and their dispute over the UMP party presidential election which was won by Copé. Just to quickly bring you up to date with the essentials (I wrote a more detailed piece here) Fillon immediately declared that he wanted another election quickly because, he said, Copé had cheated because the Copé-controlled election commission charged with counting the votes forgot to include about 1000 votes from three god-forsaken island colonies somewhere which would have made him, Fillon, the winner, Copé refused to hold another election, so Fillon threatened to take the issue to the courts and the UMP then splintered into two parliamentary factions. The UMP had thus deliberately weakened their political clout as an opposition party, which was sacrificed on the pious altar of a personal spat.

Those events took us up to last week and Copé has been clinging on to power ever since, much to the disgust of the vast majority of UMP supporters and that of the population as a whole. The belligerants have been meeting regularly behind closed doors over the last few days. Nothing or nearly is filtering out and there are no flies on the wall. No progress has been made. Still, the growing rumour of the moment says that they are planning a sneaky deal which will suit them both but will not suit the party. In order words, we seem to be heading towards a cosy arrangement between two conniving cheats.

Today brings a bombshell however, and it may yet upset their dastardly plans. It transpires that the president of the election commission, Patrice Gélard, is pisse... not a happy bunny.

He has come clean to say that he doesn't understand why his staff didn't send him the vote tallies from the three overseas departments, and reminds us that the staff who compiled the figures were Copé supporters. He says he asked for these results twice and was fobbed off with a "no problem, because they are contained in the global figures for overseas territories." But they weren't....

The person who gave him that erroneous information also turned out to be a Copé supporter.

So the question now being asked is 'was this an innocent error during the vote-counting? Or was it a deliberate act of fraud? If so, it would be obvious to all that Copé and his merry band of mendacious minions were behind it.

Even more suspicious, he says, is the 'flash message' email sent in all urgency to party leaders just two days before the election. It decreed that the rules of the election were being changed and that checks to ensure that all voting party members were up to date on their party subscription fees and could thus vote were being scrapped for technical reasons. It is being said that this move suited Copé.

The problem with that message though is that it had Gélard's signature at the bottom, and Gélard says that he did not sign it. He says "I don't know anything about [the message]. That email has nothing to do with me. No, I didn't sign anything at all [on the day it was sent] because I wasn't in Paris, I was at Le Havre.

So who forged his signature? Nobody knows.

I mean, you couldn't make it up could you. This laughable excuse for a democratic political party is making a mockery not only of itself, but of French politics in general. The Socialists are just as undemocratic as these two UMP clowns in their internal dealings vis-à-vis their rank and file members, who are also ignored, and all this explains why, year after year, France is ranked very low indeed in international and OECD studies which assess the democratic quotient of political life in OECD countries.

My personal take on all this is that although France's democratic practices sometimes have more in common with banana republics in other parts of the world than they do with other, highly-developed, countries, this is just the way things work in France and always have done. Political corruption is relatively rife here but oh well, the country still muddles through one way or another.

Besides, I do love a good old soap story from time to time.....

Copé and Fillon get a severe dressing down from a VERY angry journalist

Photo credit Lionel Bonaventure for AFP

Have you ever heard of Olivier Mazerolle? No? That's not surprising because until a couple of days ago he was a relatively anonymous political journalist at the French TV rolling news station BFMTV. They have modeled their presentation on Anglophone stations such as BBC World or CNN, although they are hardly known outside France.

Anyway, there he was live on BFMTV with a couple of other journalists recently and they were discussing - what else - the vaudeville political farce which is the aftermath of the UMP's election designed to designate a new party president. Copé and Fillon have accused each other via a viewer-hungry media of cheating, vote-rigging and everything else short of eating babies.

The whole country is sick of it and nobody understands all the underhand shenanigans which underpin this fight to the death, although they know full well that it's a total disgrace and a disaster for the already appalling image of French politics both at home and abroad.

Mazerolle has also had it up to here, and that explains his sudden and blistering attack on both belligerents, some of which I have translated below.

"Let's stop mucking about shall we. There's a major political problem. Nobody understands anything about that (UMP) party and nobody trusts anyone else in that party. So there's a man who says 'me I'm a former UMP General Secretary, I'm a former UMP president, I'm a former PM and I want everyoine to agree but only on the condition that you let me get on with the job and I have sufficient authority and I won't let myself be manipulated' he says. That's it, that's how it is now. Ok, right. Stop it! No I mean it, put a sock in it! Because I'm fed up to the back teeth of all this two-bit cheap French politics! I'm a journalist too and I'm tired of it all just like anybody else and I'm sick and tired of being obliged to report on all this nonsense and that's all there is to it."

Right on the button! I have often been highly critical of the French press' tendancy to kow-tow to politicians but BFMTV isn't too bad because it is much less dependent on state aid than are the state-controlled major TV stations and the big three newspapers.

So put yer' mitts together and let's have a big round of applause for the only person who has said anything worth listening to about the Copé-Fillon fight. How about if we flew them both to Corsica where we wouldn't have to listen to them any more and while we're about it - and to please Corsican independentists - we could then cut the mooring ropes and allow Corsica and its politically-toxic cargo to drift out into a Mediterranean sunset. Good riddance to bad rubbish I say...

The real winners and losers of the farcical Copé-Fillon UMP leadership elections

Photo credit Lionel Bonaventure for AFP

The UMP's Jean-François Copé and François Fillon remind me of two drunken clowns running around a minefield, and as any child will tell you drunken clowns who run around minefields invariably end up stepping on a mine and blowing themselves to smithereens.

France is fond of proclaiming 'the French exception' when it comes to protecting its interests, and that maxim certainly applies here because the current and still-undecided battle for the leadership of the UMP is, well, as exceptional as it gets. This ongoing farce of an election saw both Copé and Fillon declare themselves as having won late last night as vote-counting began to draw to a close after yesterday's vote by party members.

Once rumours began to circulate of possible vote-rigging however, they instantly changed their tune and began to accuse each other of fraud and ballot-stuffing. A depressed and weary France finally went to bed at about 3am with the announcement that no winner would be declared until today and that the vote had been so close that enquiries would have to be made into the allegations.

As I write this it is becoming clear that the results will not be known before late this evening at the earliest. Accusations of cheating have to be investigated, recounts will be needed in many places and confusion reigns. But the result, whatever it is, will prove to be totally irrelevant.

The press, the public and members of all political parties including the UMP are sickened by this spectacle. The Nouvelobs did a tour of the regional papers and found epithets such as 'grotesque', 'pitiful', 'surreal' 'theatrical', 'fratricidal' and the heavily ironic 'politics in all its splendour' to describe this amateurish imbroglio. The French word 'politique', which already has a highly negative image here, will surely be classified as a filthy swear word when this is all (thankfully) over.

However, the world being as it is there's always one idiot who puts his foot in it and cuts dinner conversation dead by asking his host how his gran is only to be sharply reminded that, as he had been informed last week, poor old granny fell under a bus the week before and is thus now in a non-ongoing existing situation.

The self-designated nitwit this time was hapless and one-time-short-lived-stopgap-expendable Prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin who came out with the totally inept and inaccurate assertion that all closely-fought elections lead to problems before going on to quote the Bush-Gore election as being an example. He had obviously forgotten (wasn't aware?) that whereas Bush-Gore was an election pitting two political parties against each other, the UMP débacle has been manufactured in-house. Also, you can bet your beret that, unlike for Bush and Gore, neither Fillon nor Copé will graciously accept defeat.

And therein may lie their future downfall. These primaries - the UMP's first - remind everyone here of the unseemly bitchfest between rival candidates Ségolène Royal and Martine Aubry after voting ended at the Socialist primaries in 2008. They accused each other of cheating and fraud and Royal and her lieutenant Manual Valls even announced that they would open legal proceedings to challenge the legality of the procedure. They finally stopped short of doing so however and the result was that although Aubry was eventually declared the winner, neither she nor Royal was designated as presidential candidate or candidate for party leader this year, and both have since slipped off the radar.

Both Copé and Fillon have lost pocketfuls of Brownie points since yesterday and whoever wins this fight will be faced off against the other in an ugly and party-splitting battle which will render the UMP even less efficient as an opposition party then they are already. As a result it is by no means certain that either will be endorsed as the 2017 UMP presidential candidate, and to understand why let's go back to the minefield analogy.

Their suicidal antics have been contemplated with hand-rubbing glee by their enemies, who have been standing on the sidelines and are taking great delight in watching them do a passable imitation of clumsy suicide bombers who blow themselves up without killing their intended victims. Their enemies shall thus live on to fight another day from an ever stronger position. Who are they?

The most obvious beneficiaries are François Hollande and his government. Their reaction has been wisely discreet up until now, given that the result is still uncertain, but they know that from now on they will be faced with a divided and weakened opposition which will have no more lessons to give in the future about the executive's right hand not knowing what its left hand is doing. The Front National on the other hand has lost no time in ridiculising this excuse for a democratic internal election and have every reason to be optimistic about picking up disgruntled right-of-centre UMP votes in future elections.

But the prize for the biggest cheshire-cat grin on the block goes to Nicolas Sarkozy, the man for whom the UMP was created. He hasn't said a single word about this disaster yet, but it can be safely assumed that his shadenfreude knows no bounds and that there there is sure to be a major uptick in the number of impassioned appeals by UMP politicians and rank-and-file party members for him to return as the Messiah who shall save the UMP from being banished to the political wilderness.

All of this however supposes that the UMP will survive this crisis. But both Fillon and Copé are already being exhorted to form their own parties if they lose, and that would weaken each of them even further in terms of electoral appeal.

The Socialists, the Front National and Nicolas Sarkozy haven't had to fire a single shot yet they have still won a major victory. All three are delighted with the disastrous picture these primaries have painted of the UMP as a credible opposition party and their victory is already total after watching Fillon and Copé condemn themselves to a hellish future, whoever is declared to have won this lamentable and irrelevant primary 'election.'