If the Socialists win in France it will create a new pole of influence. But their options will be severely limited
For the majority of politically aware people in Britain, France might as well be on the dark side of the moon. The days have long gone when an informed Briton could be expected to follow domestic French politics – or indeed the domestic politics of any other part of Europe. If it's not American, the truth is that most people now neither know nor care.
This weekend, however, that indifference may change, if only briefly. There ought to be more than neighbourly interest at stake in the French presidential election, whose first round takes place on Sunday. The principal reason is simple. By this time next month – the second round of voting is on 6 May – it looks as if France will have a Socialist president.
In the early part of this year Nicolas Sarkozy's chances of re-election looked like toast. After a successful first 18 months in office following his election as Jacques Chirac's successor in 2007, Sarkozy was knocked off course – as so many political leaders were – by the financial collapse and eurozone crisis. By the start of the year, he was well adrift of his Socialist challenger, François Hollande, in the polls.
Then came the Toulouse jihadist shootings. Faced with a terrorist crisis, Sarkozy was able to exploit the power of the presidency to bring order back to France. His ratings overtook those of Hollande, who also faced a challenge from Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left. Suddenly Sarkozy's re-election took on an air almost of inevitability.
Yet that moment seems to have passed. In this week's polls, Hollande is back in the lead. In Wednesday's CSA poll Hollande leads Sarkozy by 29% to 24%, with Mélenchon dropping back to fourth in the race, behind the far- right's Marine Le Pen. In the straight fight between Sarkozy and Hollande that now seems likely to take place next month, the same poll now has Hollande 16 points ahead, with 58% to Sarkozy's 42%.
On one level this ought to come as no surprise. The financial crisis has dashed the careers of incumbent leader after leader: Gordon Brown, José Luis Zapatero, Silvio Berlusconi, José Sócrates, George Papandreou, Brian Cowen. The list shows no sign of closing: in November Barack Obama may fall. To expect Sarkozy to buck the trend may simply be to expect too much, if enough voters rally behind Hollande in the second round.
A victory for Hollande would not just be another run-of-the-mill ousting of any old European incumbent. It would be the victory of a Socialist, and in one of the two most important countries in Europe. That makes it an event with big potential consequences not just for France, where the left has been out of power for 17 years, but for Europe – since Hollande has promised to renegotiate the Brussels intergovernmental treaty on the eurozone – and the beleaguered European left more generally. Above all, the election of Hollande would create a Europe-wide pole of influence around which hopes of an alternative economic vision would inevitably cluster. The political impact would be felt from Scotland to Greece.
But how big will the influence actually be if Hollande does win? It is tempting to want the Hollande victory to be transformative for France, Europe and the wider left. But be careful what you wish for.
Hollande's very readable personal manifesto, Changer de destin, lays claim to the political inheritances of both Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand simultaneously. The invocation of De Gaulle is an obligatory deceit; all presidential wannabes have to pretend to the voters that they could assert the power of France as though the rest of Europe and the world did not exist.
But that of Mitterrand is much more relevant for Hollande. The fifth republic's only Socialist president thus far came to power in 1981 with what now seems an astonishingly radical programme of labour benefits, social reforms and nationalisation – 36 banks were taken into public ownership in the first year. A year later, amid growing unpopularity and a financial crisis, it was all abandoned in favour of European integration and what Mitterrand once called modernisation "à l'américaine".
Hollande's programme in 2012 is far less radical than Mitterrand's in 1981. Nevertheless it still promises a 75% income tax band on euromillionaires and pledges to keep the retirement age at 60, with all this implies for French welfare spending. But the times in which Hollande may inherit the presidency are much more difficult and allow far less political flexibility than Mitterrand enjoyed. Amid the eurozone crisis, France is struggling to keep its budget under control. Debt stands at 90% of GDP. Public spending stands at 56%. The AAA bond rating has gone. The trade deficit is ballooning. Unemployment is near 10%. Meanwhile the balance of power within the eurozone has moved relentlessly in Germany's favour. Unless Hollande wants to bring the eurozone down, his options are frustratingly circumscribed.
In these punishing domestic circumstances, how much credibility would a Hollande government have in changing the priorities of the eurozone? Logically, a less deflationary eurozone would help France. But it is unlikely that Angela Merkel, her voters or the bond markets would sanction such a thing on anything like the scale Hollande would want, especially as the vultures gather in Spain. Hollande may write of setting the European agenda "la main dans la main avec l'Allemagne", but the reality is that France is simply no longer Germany's equal. Does Hollande want to become Europe's leader of the opposition? That would mark a major change of destiny indeed.
And what of the European left? Hollande's victory would probably be welcomed by most social democratic parties. But it seems unlikely that Ed Miliband, for one, would tie his wagon to Hollande's, any more than Neil Kinnock did with Mitterrand. The British left has not been much in love with the French left since about 1791. Its real problem today is that it has never embraced the postwar German social democratic tradition either, and now it's too late.
France's Socialists remain significantly more dirigiste than most European social democratic parties. They are Gaullist mercantilists at heart too, just as Hollande says. France's politics, like Britain's, march to their own distinctive post-imperial drum. Rightly or wrongly, the British don't take kindly to French lessons any more than the French do to British ones. It's a great pity in countless ways. It's also a fact I have come to accept after decades of wishing it otherwise. But it doesn't mean I won't be cheering for Hollande on Sunday.
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