Under France's 1958 Constitution, the president is a kind of elected monarch with wide powers. In the mind of the Constitution's framer, former president Charles de Gaulle, France's head of state should leave daily management and small issues to the prime minister and focus on key issues instead. He should be above the political parties and represent all the French people. Today, particularly since the mandate of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the president does not leave much room for the prime minister. Thanks to the media and to the development of public opinion, all issues are equally relevant, and the head of state should take care of each one of them. However, if he obliges, as Sarkozy did, and, to a lesser extent, current French president François Hollande has, he risks being criticised by people who lament the loss of prestige of the president. In theory, a delicate balance between “doing too little” and “doing too much” should be achieved. In practice, this has proven to be quite difficult. The president remains an elected monarch, however, and the presidential elections campaign is about choosing the right candidate and opting for a programme. It is, so the theory goes, an encounter between two men (or two women) and the nation. And it is also a debate between the advocates of competing sets of proposals. The elections should be the peak and the consecration of democracy. But in fact things do not go to plan. The European Union, the seeming ineluctability of capitalism and globalisation and the perpetual extension of the rule of law have, among other factors, severely constrained the possibility of credibly different agendas. Rightly or wrongly, people feel they are in a quandary. Either they can endorse a credible programme they do not like, or they can behave irresponsibly by voting for a populist candidate who could also be distasteful. Or they can vote for a candidate who tries to sell them an implausible programme within the constraints already mentioned. The French electorate has had a tendency to vote for the latter in the country's presidential elections. Former presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac and current President Hollande were all elected after putting forward a programme that was both inherently absurd and unrealistic. I have often been stunned by what has seemed to me to be the credulity verging on stupidity of the French electorate. But there is a satisfactory explanation. “Of course”, a friend said to me after the 1995 elections, “I do not believe Chirac when he seems to imply that we will no longer have to pay tax. But this indicates the direction he is taking. I understand that he will be unable and unwilling to abolish taxes, but I believe he will be compelled to accept a small reduction in them, and this matters for me.” Another friend had a different explanation when he said that “we do not consider the programmes to be political projects. We are buying dreams, and dreams matter.” Today, the French people are in an anxious and disillusioned mood. One observer told me last week that 80 or 90 per cent of the French people agree that things are going wrong and that the country is not on track. They would like to cling to the old French model, and they want to keep things like French identity, secularism, meritocracy and schools that help people to climb the social ladder. They are skeptical of the European Union, and they do not like the deterioration in security and the absence of frontiers with other European countries. However, they also realise that changing track might be terribly costly, and most do not want to elect the National Front leader Marine Le Pen. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the French media and intelligentsia thinks differently, believing national identity to be a dangerous concept and trying to portray an emphasis on it as a first step towards fascism. The media and the intelligentsia thus in the main advocates multiculturalism and the abandonment of secularism. France's leaders are well aware of the public's mood, but they are afraid of the firepower of the media and the intelligentsia and the costs and risks of radical change. With some important and sometimes radical differences, French philosopher Michel Onfray delivered basically this message in a long interview on the French TV channel BFM last Sunday. France's leaders, he said, were unable to put forward a convincing programme that would entail credible policies that would be supported by public opinion or that would at least address its worries. Moreover, the present mood was too gloomy to believe in an implausible programme claiming that radically different things could be achieved within the same framework. And populist option remained dangerous. So much for the elections' competing programmes. The encounter between man and nation, the other part of the elections that leads to the election of a virtual monarch, does not look much better. The vast majority of the candidates are well-known figures who have held key positions in France many times over the last three or four decades. Many of them are considered to be partly or largely responsible for France's poor performance and its decline. The French may be, as one commentator claimed this week on the French TV channel France 5, mostly indifferent to stories questioning the integrity of their political class and to scandals investigated by the judiciary. But to combine these things with poor performance is too much even for the French to bear. All the leading candidates in the French elections, with Marine Le Pen an exception, have the handicap of their past records to deal with. They will have to find a way to convince public opinion that they can now succeed after so many failures. Both Hollande and Sarkozy have problems in this regard, and memories of their time in office are still fresh. The right-wing candidate Alain Juppé might be less handicapped in this regard, despite his abysmal performance as French prime minister in the 1990s, but he has other problems to face, one of them being that the general tone of his discourse is not in tune with public opinion, or at least is not as far as I can judge from Cairo. As if all this was not enough, both the French Republicans and the Socialists are organising primary elections. The contests are already turning nasty, and it may be expected that the main candidates will suffer from attacks, polemics, and leaks from various “friends” who want them to fail. I have already noted in a previous article that Hollande expects this process to weaken his Republican opponent. Insiders say he would prefer to see Sarkozy emerging as the Republican candidate, believing that this could strengthen his own hand. The writer is a professor of international relations at the Collège de France and a visiting professor at Cairo University.
