Murray Smith, Paris
As campaigning for the March regional elections moves into top gear, the familiar odour of corruption is once again wafting across the French political scene.
Ex-prime minister Alain Juppe, president of the governing Union for a Popular Majority (UMP), has just been found guilty of abuse of public money. Given a suspended prison sentence, he has also been banned from holding office for 10 years.
When he was in charge of the finances of the City of Paris before 1995, Juppe paid a string of full-timers of his own party out of public funds. But he is just the fall guy. The person responsible for this and a whole system of corruption in Paris was his boss, a certain Jacques Chirac, at the time mayor of Paris, now France's president. Chirac is immune from prosecution as long as he is President of the Republic. No wonder at over 70 he's in no hurry to retire.
Government ministers reacted to the sentence with outrage. Who did these judges think they were? Juppe announced he was to appeal — which suspends the ban on him holding office and allows him to stand in this year's elections. But the whole business is bad news for the UMP.
You would think it would be good news for the opposition Socialist Party — a nice juicy case of corruption just weeks away from an election. But in fact the Socialists have been avoiding exploiting the case for political gain.
Chivalry? Not quite. More like people in glass houses not throwing stones. The next case of corruption coming before the courts involves the parties that ran the Parisian Region in the 1980s and 1990s taking kickbacks on contracts for school building. The standard rate was 2% — 1.2% for Chirac's party (they were the majority) and 0.8% for the Socialists (they were in opposition at the time). The line-up in the dock is distinctly pluralist.
Recent polls haven't brought good news for either of the two main blocs. After a temporary recovery in popularity around the law against the Islamic headscarf, Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's approval ratings are on the way down again. As for the Socialists, only 19% of electors think they represent a real alternative, as against 58% who don't.
Tweedledum and tweedledee, against a background of corruption. No wonder many commentators are predicting a remake of the presidential election of 2002, when both the anti-capitalist left and Le Pen's far-right National Front made gains at the expense of the main parties.
As in the 1999 European Parliament election, there will be a united socialist ticket running in the elections, involving the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) and Workers Struggle (LO). The LCR-LO ticket won 5% of the vote in 1999, and the separate tickets the parties ran in the 2002 presidential elections totalled 10.5% combined.
The united socialist campaign is aiming to prove the commentators half right — by winning millions of votes and making sure as few working-class voters as possible are tempted by the racist demagogy of Le Pen.
[Murray Smith is a Scottish Socialist Party resident in France.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 25, 2004.
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