Sarkozy's unpopularity is likely to land the left in power. Their struggle will be in formulating a credible alternative programme
It's been 17 years since France last had a leftwing president, in François Mitterrand. Since then, the left has been through a number of humiliating defeats: first in 2002, when its candidate, former prime minister Lionel Jospin, didn't even make it to the second round, and in 2007, when Ségolène Royal was badly defeated by Nicolas Sarkozy.
Now the odds are in favour of the Socialist candidate in next May's presidential election, both as a result of Sarkozy's deep unpopularity and the impact of the financial crisis.
This is quite a remarkable change of fortunes from only a year ago. Then, the overwhelming favourite for the French presidency was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then director general of the International Monetary Fund, a former finance minister under Lionel Jospin and a pragmatic socialist with the high economic credibility needed in times of crisis. The arrest of "DSK" last May came as a disaster for leftwing supporters, who initially were convinced of a plot to damage their hero. He was later cleared of the accusation, but his political career was destroyed.
With insight, this event was a blessing in disguise for the Socialist party. It took place before it had chosen its candidate for the 2012 presidential election, and revelations about Strauss-Kahn's private life would have been more damaging once he was designated as candidate.
In spring last year, the Socialist party conducted successful open primaries to select its candidate among six contenders. François Hollande, the party's former first secretary, who had been dismissed as a nonstarter when he decided to challenge Strauss-Kahn a year earlier, easily won after a disputed campaign.
In Hollande, leftwing voters chose a moderate and skilled politician to represent them, despite his lack of government experience. They selected him despite his unpopular promise to reach a balanced budget at the end of his five-year mandate if elected and his image of being on the "soft left", as his main rival, Martine Aubry, described him. Although he knows the right key words of the leftwing mythology, he is running on a program that is not very "socialist", just "social".
He's not the only one speaking for the left in France. The main figure of the "left of the left" is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former socialist minister of higher education, who split from the Socialist party in order to emulate Oskar Lafontaine's Die Linke in Germany and create a more radical party to its left.
Mélenchon is running in the next election in association with the remains of the once-powerful Communist party, under the name Front de Gauche. The latest opinion polls think he might get close to 10% of the vote, a significant increase from his early days.
Also classified on the left are the environmentalists of Europe-Ecologie-Les-Verts (EELV), who made strong gains in local and European elections, but seem heading for heavy defeat in May, with their candidate Eva Joly, a Norwegian-born former anticorruption judge. EELV has an election pact with the Socialists, who have given them some constituencies for the parliamentary elections in June.
There are wide ideological differences between these three families of the left (not including two different Trotskyist parties and former defence minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement's own "sovereignist" party, also running next May).
The main challenge to the left is not about gaining power: Sarkozy's unpopularity is doing the job for them; it is about their programme. Neither the Socialists, nor their leftwing rivals have been able to produce a credible alternative program adapted to the crises European economies are currently undergoing. They have struggled to reassess what socialism means today.
Hollande's pragmatism is probably best suited to rally moderate voters. But he will be faced with strong pressure for more radical reforms, which are not necessarily compatible with France's European commitments and market pressure.
As eager as they are to return to power, the French Socialists know that winning the election is the easy part of the challenge that lies ahead.
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