NOT OVER YET : FRANCOIS HOLLANDE FACES NATIONAL ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS

What if the new president of France does not win them next month ?

BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL.

François Hollande, the socialist candidate, won the French presidential election on May 6. He got 51.63% of the vote against 48.37% for the incumbent conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Quite a good score, even if Sarkozy did much better than expected.

However, the presidency is only a first step. A lot will depend on the National Assembly elections, which are due to take place on June 10 and 17. If the socialists and their allies secure themselves an absolute majority, Hollande will enjoy quasi-monarchical powers for five years. If they do not, he will be a lame duck.

Americans are familiar with similar scenarios, except the United States Constitution provides a clear-cut separation of powers and thus preserves many of the presidential powers and prerogatives, even against a hostile or uncooperative Congress. Whereas the French Fifth Republic constitution, a creation of Charles de Gaulle in 1958, combines — in an uneasy and uncertain way — presidential and Westminsterian features, and thus turns any conflict between the powers into a ballistic zero-sum drama. In theory, France is not ruled by its president, as in the American presidential system, but rather by its prime minister who, as in the English Westminsterian system, is answerable to the National Assembly. As long as both officials are political partners, the president — endowed with such special powers as the right to call for an early election or a referendum — is a de facto but undisputed CEO. When they belong to different and competing parties, the prime minister takes over.

De Gaulle perfectly understood the logic — or the illogic — of his system: he made clear that the president, once deprived of electoral support, had no choice but to resign. He actually acted accordingly in 1969, when he abdicated following a failed referendum on comparatively minor issues. Things changed, however, when François Mitterrand, the Fifth Republic’s first socialist president, was faced with a conservative National Assembly in 1986: instead of resigning he agreed to become a lame duck — but a lame duck with teeth who made full use of his residual powers in order to undermine the cabinet, to hasten its fall, and to win a reelection in 1988.

A conservative and allegedly Gaullist president, Jacques Chirac, followed in 1997 when his party lost an early election he himself had called. For the five ensuing years, he “cohabited“ (to use the authorized French expression) with Lionel Jospin, the socialist prime minister. Both under Mitterrand and Chirac, cohabition led to such ridiculous situations as the president and the prime minister of France together attending international summits like G7 or the European Council.

Things went even further in 2002, when Jospin introduced — with Chirac’s assent — a constitutional revision that shortened the president’s term from seven to five years. Since the Assembly is also elected for five years, the obvious outcome was that the parliamentary election would closely follow the presidential one. It worked to Chirac’s advantage upon his reelection in 2002, and then to Sarkozy’s advantage in 2007.

Hollande is convinced that the same will be true about him next month. But will it? There is at least one precedent that he should consider. After being reelected in 1988, Mitterrand called an early election to get rid of the 1986 conservative National Assembly. What he got was a lame Assembly with a relative but not an absolute majority for the socialist party, and a weak centrist minority that could not act as a steady ally. Five years later, he lost the 1993 parliamentary election and was reduced to a lame duck position again. Since he was then dying of cancer, he could not again mastermind a socialist revenge; on the other hand, he was treated in an extremely respectful and dignified way by the day’s ruler, conservative Prime Minister Edouard Balladur.

Can the Right actually wrest the National Assembly from Hollande next month? It is not wholly unthinkable. First and foremost, one must remember that the main factor for Sarkozy’s defeat was his personal unpopularity, and not just among the Left — which hated him from the onset in the most irrational way — but also among the Right, which felt he had not implemented the platform he had been elected for in 2007. Even given such unpopularity, Sarkozy managed to win back most of the conservative vote.

What, then, of a new and less controversial conservative leader? For the time being, there are three potential leaders. Jean-François Copé, the UMP (conservative party) boss, is an overambitious young man who opposed Sarkozy on many issues but is nevertheless seen as a Sarkozy’s clone (a bad point). François Fillon served as Sarkozy’s underling prime minister for five years and enjoyed some kind of popularity among conservatives for looking more conservative than his boss, but he could not possibly cut it against Hollande. Alain Juppé, the mayor of Bordeaux and a former prime minister under Chirac, seems to enjoy as much gravitas as Hollande and could actually be up to the job.

A second argument for a conservative rebound next month is that a socialist parliamentary victory would subject France to a one-party regime. The socialists and their allies would control the presidency, both houses of Parliament (the Assembly and the less consequential Senate), the government, almost all regional councils, most counties, and most big towns. They would, in line with France’s statist character, control the media, the academic sphere, and many of the most important industries even more tightly. Sarkozy declined to mention this throughout his campaign for reelection — another mistake of his. I have noticed that Nadine Morano, a Sarkozy archloyalist and a rising conservative star, started talking about it right after Hollande’s election.

A third argument is that Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, and François Bayrou, the centrist maverick, may have lost some of their luster. Both declined to support Sarkozy on the presidential second round. Le Pen said her voters were free to act as they wished. Bayrou said that while he would vote for Hollande, he would allow his voters to decide for themselves. That ran against the wishes of most of their respective supporters. Most National Front voters switched to Sarkozy in order to defeat Hollande at any cost; most Bayrou voters supported Sarkozy or abstained. A new conservative leader with charisma, vista, and guts could certainly get them to “vote for France” or to “vote for democracy” in June.

Hollande’s toughest challenge is to make sense of his economic platform. The new French president is a follower of Keynes: he believes in state control, high taxes, and extended welfare. The fact that the global economy has undergone massive changes since the days of Keynes and that Barack Obama failed while implementing similar policies in the United States does not deter him. What he takes seriously, however, is the European Union, which will not allow for too much state control, and the euro, which does not allow for inordinate welfare spending. He can quit the EU and the eurozone as both the Far Left and the Far Right recommend, a move that would probably bring about a “Greek effect” on the French economy. Otherwise, he can abide by European rules, thus negating his platform altogether. Since both options are beyond him, he frantically insists for a drastic “production-oriented” and “people-oriented” revision in the European and euro policies.

His European partners may listen to him to a point. He may then tell the French that in order to overcome a very dangerous situation a broader coalition or even a national unity government is needed, and that a “socialist cum allies” parliamentary victory may help.

Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Paris.

FRANCE/ A REFERENDUM ON NATIONAL IDENTITY

BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL.

There is one thing every French citizen agrees upon: the second and final round of the presidential election will have far-reaching consequences. It will not just decide between two candidates, or two parties, or even two political or economic philosophies. Rather, it will settle the fate of France as a nation.

For clarification, examine the 18th district in northern Paris. It voted heavily for the left in the first round on April 22, and is poised to do the same in the second round. François Hollande, the socialist candidate, garnered 43% of the vote there, much more than the 28% he received nationally. Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon received 15% there but only 11% nationally. The other left candidates received a combined 7% both there and nationally. All in all, the left won a staggering 65% of the vote in the 18th, about 20 points higher than the national returns.

Incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy took only 19% of the vote in the 18th; nationally he took 27%. Far-right contender Marine Le Pen won only 6.5% there, a huge difference from her 18% nationally. Centrist François Bayrou received 7.7% locally and 9% nationally. With the addition of 2% won by conservative dissenter Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the combined strength of the local right and center amounted to no more than 35%, compared to the national take of 55%.

A completely different picture emerged in the neighboring northwestern 17th district of Paris. There, Sarkozy was the undisputed frontrunner, with 44% of the vote. While Hollande lagged with 26%, Bayrou finished slightly better than he did nationally, with over 10%. Mélenchon stayed near 7%; Le Pen fell to 6%. The far left took 3%. The right and the center took 60% of the vote in the 17th, while the left did not even reach 40%.

Politically speaking, why are these neighboring districts worlds apart? The 17th is a bit richer as a whole, a bit more bourgeois than the 18th, but there are both affluent and working class areas in both districts. The actual differences are ethnic and cultural.

The 18th is essentially a “neo-French” stronghold: a place where most inhabitants are immigrants (or children of immigrants) from non-European countries and where Islam is the dominant religion. Admittedly, two major tourist spots with a distinct French flavor — Old Montmartre, the Disneyland-style artists’ village near Sacré-Cœur Basilica atop Montmartre Hill; and Pigalle, nowadays merely a sex shop row — are to be found here. But they are just enclaves in an otherwise increasingly alien environment.To understand what the 18th district really is, one must examine everyday life. For instance, note the street prayers that Muslim Arabs and sub-Saharan Muslims have been routinely organizing on Fridays. Though an illegal practice — it blocks cars and even pedestrian traffic for hours — the socialist mayor of Paris and the police have had no option (so say they) other than tacitly tolerating it.

On the contrary, the 17th remains staunchly French in outlook. Its inhabitants, whatever their race, ethnicity, or religion, prefer France to be Western, Judeo-Christian, and democratic. They do not want it to become a post-Western, “globalized” nation. (Or, to use a formerly rude and now politically correct French expression: “Une société métissée” – a mongrel society). Quite remarkably, the 17th district today hosts — along with more districts and communes in western Greater Paris — the largest French Jewish community. Many of the local Jews are Sephardic immigrants (rather, refugees) from Arab countries who upon coming to France lived in the same areas as Muslim immigrants from North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa. They were forced over the years to migrate to areas where they could expect to be both physically and emotionally safer.

What is true of Paris is equally true of the rest of France, except that in many places the National Front gets a much larger share of the conservative vote. Anywhere the left is winning, the neo-French factor makes the difference. Anywhere the right is ahead, opposition to métissage and Islamization is the key mobilizing argument. The political class, right or left, does not like to mention it too loudly. Even Marine Le Pen sees to it not to dwell only on “national identity” matters, but rather to also run as a champion of the poor and the outcasts. Still, this is the real issue. A Hollande victory on Sunday will resonate as a great leap forward for the neo-French and as the beginning of the end for traditional France. A Sarkozy victory will mean that the case is deferred for at least another five years.

Just how many do the neo-French number? Under French law which bars global and interlinked statistics to race, religion, or ethnic origin, it is very difficult to compute reliable figures. An additional difficulty stems from the special character of the French polity, which consists of France proper (European France including Corsica) and distant overseas territories from the French West Indies to French Polynesia. Technically, overseas-born citizens or their children cannot be referred to as immigrants, though most of them are cultural aliens in many ways and tend to behave much as foreign immigrants when they settle in metropolitan France.

A further difficulty: there are marked differences among immigrants, between Europeans and non-Europeans on one hand, and even among non-Europeans on the other hand. Some of them came to France to be French, some to turn France into their own thing.

We may rely on some figures. According to Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union), metropolitan France was in 2011 the most immigration-oriented of all EU countries: 26.6% of its inhabitants were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. A similar figure is provided by Insee, the French National Institute of Statistics: they found that 23.9% of all babies born in metropolitan France in 2010 had at least one parent born outside of Europe, including the overseas French territories. Roughly speaking, this amounts to one quarter of the 63 million population, or about 15 million people.

Some 40% of the global immigrant community must be subtracted from these figures: the European, East Asian, or Latin American immigrants, as well as the Christian or Jewish refugees from the Middle East or North Africa, see themselves as French rather than as neo-French. On the other hand, the five million French citizens from overseas territories tend to identify with the neo-French and the post-Western project (overseas France voted overwhelmingly for Hollande on April 22). Which brings us back to 15 million.

By and large, this is a rapidly growing community. Its birthrate is much higher than the average French birthrate, and further immigration is constantly reinforcing it. Legal immigration only amounted to 180,000 individuals in 2011, which means that almost two million new citizens, most of them neo-French, might have aggregated to the French population as a whole by 2010. Illegal immigration is said to be as important, which would lead to a net immigration surplus of four million people, most of them neo-French. All in all, half the population of France writ large — the younger half — can be forecast to be neo-French at some point between 2020 and 2030.

While not all neo-French are Muslim (the French polity’s Muslim population amounts to less than 10 million people, and some French Muslims are in fact quite secular), militant Islam — endowed as it is with a purpose, a will to power, networks, foreign money, and leverage — is clearly the driving force behind the neo-French project. But what makes Islam irresistible is a tactical alliance with the left. In France, like everywhere, the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy has eroded the left’s largest voting blocks: the working class and the civil service. Immigrants and the so-called minorities are however providing an alternative and potentially more important constituency. Philosophers like Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek, as well as“anti-globalist“ pamphleteers like Stéphane Hessel (a guru of the Occupy movement), have revamped the old Marxist topoi in order to make the switch palatable. The proletariat is known nowadays as the “Multitude,” and the West as the “Empire.” Jews, once the chosen people of the revolution, have been recast as Zionists, the spearhead of counter-revolution.

The killings in southern France a few weeks ago were a moment of truth in this respect. As one will remember, a neo-French jihadist of Algerian origin named Mohamed Merah murdered in cold blood three non-Caucasian soldiers (whom he saw as traitors) and then four Jews: a teacher and three children of 7, 5, and 4. For about 36 hours, there was some reason to believe that the killer was in fact a far-right extremist, similar to the Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik. The left parties and various Muslim groups started organizing mass rallies against racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia throughout France. When the killer’s identity was finally established, and when it appeared that the French Muslim community nurtured ambivalent feelings, if not sympathy, towards him, the whole idea was dropped. Some democratically minded Muslims, led by Hassen Chalghoumi, the mufti of Drancy in northern Paris, set up an anti-racist and anti-terrorist demonstration on April 29, the French national Shoah memorial day. They attracted less than one hundred followers.

In between the two presidential rounds, Nicolas Sarkozy constantly mentioned France’s national identity as one of his priorities. France, he said in Toulouse on April 29, “was twenty centuries old. … It was the combined produce of Christianity, the Enlightenment, the Revolution, and the anti-Nazi resistance. … It was the land of Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Joan of Arc. … It was keeping the memory of the Shoah and of the thousands of North African Muslims who had fought in its armies during WW2.” Clearly, he was wooing both Marine Le Pen’s and François Bayrou’s supporters, the key voters in the second round. But his words rang true.

Hollande has also undertaken winning at least some of Le Pen’s votes. During his debate with Sarkozy Wednesday evening, he repeatedly said that he would be as tough as anybody on immigration matters, and would uphold a strict separation between state and religion. He even said that his most controversial and most pro-immigration proposal — granting electoral franchise to legal foreign residents in local ballots — was not to be taken seriously, since it implied a complex and unlikely constitutional revision in the first place.

But such cynical short-term tactics cannot change that the long-term future of the left lies with the neo-French only.

Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Paris.

© Michel Gurfinkiel & PJMedia, 2012

THE FATE OF FRANCE

Socialist François Hollande leads presidential election. But Marine Le Pen looks to be the real winner, and Nicolas Sarkozy is not done yet.

BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL.

Under a first-past-the-post system, socialist contender François Hollande would have won Sunday’s presidential election in France: he garnered 28.5% of the vote, while the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy lagged a bit behind with 27.1%.
 
Right-wing populist Marine Le Pen received 18.2%. Neo-communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon received 11.1%, and centrist François Bayrou received 9.1%. Five other candidates — including the Green Party’s Eva Joly and local Lyndon Larouche activist Jacques Cheminade — received less than 7% combined.
 
However, France uses the two-round electoral system (along with beacons of democracy such as Afghanistan, Argentina, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe). Sunday’s ballot was thus no more than a preliminary test — the real election will take place on May 6, when French voters will decide between the two frontrunners only. And here is a splendid paradox: every poll points to a Hollande victory, yet statistics show there is a potential conservative majority and that Sarkozy may still win.
 
On the first ballot, the global Left (Hollande, Mélenchon, and most of the very small candidates) received less than 45% of the vote. The global non-Left (Sarkozy, Le Pen, Bayrou, and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, a Gaullist loyalist who received 1.8%) summed more than 56%.
 
The Le Pen and Bayrou votes are crucial: it is unlikely, to say the least, that most of them will throw their support to Hollande.
 
So why did Sarkozy finish second (a disgrace that no French incumbent president had yet suffered)? He had been a conservative — perhaps neoconservative — candidate in the 2007 presidential election. However, he disappointed many if not most of his followers thoughout his first term, even though — through a piecemeal approach — he introduced many suitable economic and business reforms and took timid steps to reform the constitution in a truly democratic and bipartisan way.
 
His failure was in part a matter of character. As a president, he lacked gravitas, vista, charisma: some things the French, who never really jettisoned their old monarchic culture, couldn’t forgive. His troubled private life (a divorce from his politically minded wife Cecilia shortly after his election, his instant romance and marriage to model Carla Bruni) did not help.
 
Then he proved to be a poor manager. He didn’t know how to lead a team, to share authority, to avoid micromanagement, to sell his achievements in a convincing way. But what mattered most was his constantly shifting policies. A French Reaganite upon being elected, he became a classic French statist and welfare provider after the 2008 financial meltdown. Though a fierce critic of illegal immigration, he didn’t launch any real policies to curtail it. He defended the pro-Western republic of Georgia in 2008, but he then became a Putin sympathizer.
 
Though an anti-Turkish militant while campaigning, he later engaged the misty design of a Mediterranean alliance of democratic European nations with undemocratic Arab countries and Erdogan’s Turkey. A great supporter of Israel in 2007, Sarkozy later criticized the Jewish state’s self-defense operations in the Gaza as “disproportionate”; he even called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nethanyahu “a liar” in a conversation with Barack Obama.
 
Once a close friend of Tunisia’s dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s ruler Hosni Mobarak, and a distant friend of Libya’s dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi (whom he invited for a lavish visit in the fall of 2007) and Syria’s henchman Bashir al-Assad (whom he hosted during Bastille Day celebrations in 2009), he turned against them all as soon as the Arab Spring broke out. He even led the NATO onslaught on Gaddafi that delivered Libya to the local Salafists.
 
It comes as no surprise that so many conservative voters deserted Sarkozy throughout his term (he lost all intermediate elections, whether local, regional, or European). The hatred he had formerly elicited from so many parts of French society for being conservative or neoconservative, pro-American, and pro-Israel, was later compounded by the disillusionment of his supporters. Indeed, not much was left of him by the second half of his term.
 
It is all the more remarkable that he was able to come back from the dead and to almost achieve parity on Sunday with François Hollande, the socialist champion. The thanks go to a few advisors — including Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, Minister of the Interior Claude Guéant, and his top political advisor and pollster Patrick Buisson — who convinced Sarkozy to again concentrate on conservative basics.
 
Hollande is supposed to be a nice, decent man. I must admit I was impressed by him at the French Jewish Representatives Board’s annual dinner last February. He sat rather modestly at a second row table while Sarkozy delivered a well-written but unconvincing speech, and Hollande even shook hands with him afterwards. Hollande was born into a conservative family, opted for socialism out of ambition (like most of the present socialist leaders), graduated brillantly from ENA (the hotbed of French statist aristocracy), worked for Francois Mitterrand personally, became the Socialist Party boss, was bypassed by his ambitious ex-consort Ségolène Royal in 2007, and finally was anointed as the 2012 candidate in the socialist primaries of 2011 — the first American-style primaries ever held in France.
 
As a political leader, Hollande cannot be distinguished from the French Socialist Party and the French Left at large, which is ten times wilder than the entire Barack Obama administration.
 
Hollande’s tactics have been, for the best part of his campaign, almost entirely passive. He speculated that Sarkozy was so intensely disliked that all he himself had to do was just be an alternative. This tactic did work quite well throughout the winter. Hollande then met an unexepected challenge: the rapid rise of two strong populist parties.
 
Front de Gauche (Left Front) is modeled after Die Linke, the German Far Left party founded by Oskar Lafontaine. Front de Gauche federates the former communists with the most leftward elements in the socialist party, and attracts quite a lot of Trotskyites and green militants.
 
The other party is a reborn National Front that — by supplementing its old anti-immigration rhetoric with a quasi-socialist platform — has been able to take over the working class and parts of the middle class.
 
Both populist parties owe their sudden fortunes to charismatic new leaders. Jean-Luc Mélanchon of Front de Gauche, a former socialist MP and junior minister, is a robust if sketchy Castro- or Chavez-style orator. His rallies throughout France, complete with red flags and the Bolshevik or Spanish Civil War paraphernalia, have gathered tens of thousands.
 
Marine Le Pen, the daughter of National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, is a much more brilliant and nuanced orator and debater. Mélanchon always wears a business suit with a red tie. Le Pen, a very attractive woman in her forties, wears a business suit as well: a dark blue jacket with dark blue trousers. Le Pen’s equivalent to Mélanchon’s emblematic tie is her face: half-long blond hair and deep blue eyes. While Mélanchon acts as a plebian tribune (his campaign motto was “seize power”), there is something almost royal in Le Pen’s demeanor. Her motto was, quite boldly, “France, indeed”.
 
Even more striking are the political similarities between Front de Gauche and the National Front. Both parties call for a “revolution” against the present elites of France. Both oppose the European Union and the euro. Both insist on national independence and are defiant of NATO. Both claim to be “secular”. Both support a strong state. While Front de Gauche is fiercely pro-Palestinian, the National Front seems to be “neutral” — Ron Paul-style — on Israel, a far cry from the pro-Israel stand of other right-wing populist parties in Europe, not to mention the conservative populists of North America.
 
The main differences lie with immigration: whereas Front de Gauche praises it, the National Front opposes it. But even so, Marine Le Pen avoids anything in her speeches or in her party’s literature that smells of racism or hatred of Islam as a religion.
 
Hollande woke up quite late to the two-fold populist threat. In recent weeks, he has been much more active and has engaged in the exacting business of rallies and public speeches and meetings with the average citizen in the street. His activity may have cut Mélanchon’s wings to a point, but not Le Pen’s, who emerged on Sunday as the ballot’s real winner.
 
The case of François Bayrou, the centrist outsider, is much different. A former minister of Education with strong Christian and peasant roots, Bayrou is concerned with national unity (with himself as the unifier) rather than with revolution. Until 2007, he was the leader of a sizable third party, in between Right and Left. Then most of his centrist allies deserted him to support Sarkozy — and to keep their seats, with conservative support, as MPs or local elected officials. For a short while, pollsters credited him with 13% or even 15% of the national vote in 2012. Now that he has dropped to a frustrating 9%, he must play his last card: join either Hollande or Sarkozy or neither, in the most cautious way.
 
The first polls, taken right after the first ballot on Sunday night, are rather confusing, yet still they show that Sarkozy stands a chance to win over the Le Pen vote. According to a CSA poll released on Sunday night, 40% of Bayrou’s supporters will settle for Hollande on May 6, along with 27% of Le Pen supporters; Sarkozy will retain 25% of the Bayrou vote and 52% of the Le Pen vote. According to a Louis Harris poll, Hollande will get 38% of the Bayrou voters and just 17% of Le Pen’s, whereas Sarkozy will attract 32% of Bayrou voters and 44% of Le Pen’s. A third poll by firm BVA ascribes 36% of the Bayrou votes and 20% of the Le Pen vote to Hollande; Sarkozy would gather 39% of Bayrou supporters and 57% of Le Pen supporters. Chances are that two weeks of hard campaigning will help Sarkozy make inroads into both camps.
 
The major task for both the conservatives and the socialists is to woo the National Front voters. Sarkozy has called for “every patriot” to join him on May 6. As for the socialists, they say openly that the Le Pen sympathizers must be “understood” and “won back”. Marine Le Pen is going to hint as to her final stand on the second ballot on May Day. Clearly, she wants to hear from both sides regarding what they are willing to give her. One prize could be an explicit promise to change the electoral law in order to give the National Front full access to Parliament and to other electoral offices.
 
On the other hand, she would be mistaken to believe that she owns her supporters votes. Many people voted for her not in order to get her elected but just to make it clear to the classic Right that immigration and Islamization are definitely non-starters. Even long-time supporters hate the Left even more that they despise Sarkozy. If she helps Hollande win, she will be seen as a traitor by many of them, especially since the Left will then quite probably win the National Assembly next June, and thus be in control of almost all political powers: the Executive, the Assembly, the Senate, almost all regional councils, most local councils, and the French représentation to the European Parliament.
 
One party rule by another name.

 
© Michel Gurfinkiel & PJMedia, 2012

WAITING FOR FRANCE

Final polls on the eve of the presidential election at France showed Francois Hollande edging past the more conservative incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the first round of the vote. M. Hollande was pegged at 29% and M. Sarkozy at 26%, followed by the charismatic neo-communist Jean-Luc Melanchon and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter, Martine, who each are at approximately 15%, with Francois Bayrou, the Pillsbury dough-boy of French politics, at 13%, with other far left candidates bringing up the rear at 4%. Then, as the Reuters newswire put it, the polls foresee Mr. Holland “comfortably winning the May 6 runoff to become France’s first Socialist president since Francois Mitterrand left office in 1995.” It’s a dismal prospect.


All the more reason to note a cable just in from our erstwhile Paris correspondent, Michel Gurfinkiel, who is not so certain that Mr. Sarkozy is doomed. “In Right-Left terms,” he writes, the outlook is “that all non-Left parties combined garner about 53%, and all Left parties combined 47%.” So, he says, “the question is how many Le Pen and Bayrou voters will rally Sarkozy on the second ballot. My guess is that 2/3 of them at least will. Which, on the face of it, would bring Sarkozy to 46 % only or so.” On top of that, though, “there is another dimension to the picture: so far, some 30 % of the voters say they will not vote, or they are still undecided. I am sure that at least half of them will vote on the second ballot. And most of them are conservative voters who got utterly disappointed by Sarkozy during his first term, but still hate the Left even more.”


“If I am correct on this account,” Mr. Gurfinkiel concludes, “Sarkozy may win by a small margin.” We report that possibility not because we’re invested in M. Sarkozy’s success, though he is better than either Presidents Chirac or Mitterrand. Rather to mark the possibility that France may not take such a dramatic turn but rather is only teetering at the brink of a long decline. All the more reason to we wonder whether an American president who had a better grasp of the European drama, a clearer commitment to the idea of American exceptionalism, a more emotional connection to the possibilities of France than President Obama has on any of those points, whether such a president could have played a more constructive role in incenting the French away from the disaster that socialism would, if it comes, be for them. We comprehend that it’s a long shot, but one way to think of a France bereft of inspiring leaders is as an opportunity for a strong and articulate American president to inspire the French in our direction.


(Editorial of the New York Sun. April 21, 2012.)

MEET AZAWAD, AFRICA'S NEWEST NATION

A secular Berber, pro-Western, nation is born in the middle  of Sahara.

BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL

On the map of Western Africa, Azawad looks like a big irregular triangle set in between Algeria, Niger, Burkina Fasso, Mauritania – and Mali, the country it belonged to for fifty-two years. It is approximatively 650 000 square kilometers – the size of Texas – and has fewer than 2 millions inhabitants. Azawad declared its independance on April 6, after a quick war wherein the Azawad National Liberation Movement (MNLA) forces, equipped with weaponry looted from Libya, routed the Malian government forces.

Azawad is certainly entitled to be a free nation. It is an almost homogeneous Muslim and Berber-speaking society : an offshoot of the larger Touareg confederacy that controlled  most of the Sahara and its commercial trade routes for centuries if not millenia. In the early 1900’s, the French amalgamated it for adminitrative purposes with Sudan, a black-populated colony on the Niger river ; but they did not interfere much with its distinctive way of life (Touareg nomads are known to dress in blue and wear a veil ; whereas Touareg women are veil-free). Things changed in 1960, when French Sudan was granted independence as the Republic of Mali. The Azawadians insisted for a separate State. They rebelled against Mali in 1963, only to be crushed mercilessly by Malian forces. They rebelled again in 1990, a bit more successfully ; and then again in 2006 and 2010.

Now, can Azawad endure as a State ?

In military terms, the MNLA’s present superiority can be easily reversed. The stockpile from Libya will not last forever. The Malian forces may be reorganized and get new armaments. Foreign countries may send troops or « advisors » to help suppressing the secession.

In terms of international law, Azawad is hardly better off : the very fondation of African regional order is the immutability of the former colonial entities and borders, however arbitrary or absurd they may be. Still, many of the postcolonial States have been collapsing or desintegrating in the recent years, Libya being just the latest case. And in one instance – South Sudan in 2011 -, a rebel nation succeeded in securing its independence de jure, with the full backing of the international community. 

Evidently, Azawad would like to make use of that precedent. The new country insists, in its declararation of independence that it recognizes all existing borders and countries, including Mali proper, which would be left with an 800 000 square kilometers area and some 13 million inhabitants. It also insists that it adheres to the UN charter and principles.

Finally, is MNLA as much in control of Azawad as it claims to be ? Two other rebel organizations operate in the area. Whereas MNLA resorts to a purely secular brand of Berber and Touareg nationalism, Ansar Dine (« The Fighters for Religion ») combines Touareg insurgency with radical Islam. The second group, AQIM (Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb), it is clearly linked to the global jihadist networks.

MNLA has taken so far a conciliatory attitude towards Ansar Dine, who is based on the powerful Ifora tribe in Southern Azawad, and whose leader, Iyad Ag Gheli, played an important role in the 1990 uprising. The two groups have actually coordinated their moves and tactics in the conquest of Gao and Timbuktu on April 1st. Yet the differences between them are startling. They don’t hoist the same flag : the MNLA banner is green, red and black with a yellow triange, Ansar Dine’s is plain black with Quranic verses in white ; MNLA leaders and officials speak Berber and French, Ansar Dine speaks Arabic ; MNLA is drawing a Western-style secular democratic constitution, Ansar Dine advocates for Sharia rule.

For the time being, MNLA is focused on AQIM, which it characterizes as an interloping non-Touareg element and an Algerian proxy. The MNLA leadership vows to crush it as soon as possible. If not « within days ».

Ever since the 1960’s, the Arab States in North Africa have attempted to seize chunks of the Sahara desert – and its mineral resources : oil, natural gas, uranium,  gold, bauxite, phosphates. Morocco tried to annex Mauritania and then occupied the former Spanish colony of Rio de Oro (known now as Western Sahara). Gaddafi’s Libya was constantly interfering in Mali, Niger and Chad. Algeria, already in control, of the northern half of the area thanks to colonial France, has steadily claimed paramountcy over the southern half countries : either by countering Morocco in Western Sahara or by undermining the existing governments in other places.

For a while, Algeria contended its primary concern was to fight radical islam and to eradicate drugs trafficking. As of today, the Algerian secret services seem to be aligned with both.

The core of AQIM consists of former Algerian jihadists that were pardoned by the Algerian government on the condition that they propagate radical islam and terrorism in foreign countries. They were reinforced by volunteers or mercenaries from Arab countries and Subsaharan African countries (like Burkina Fasso or Nigeria).

Clearly, AQIM’s strategy is to entice Ansar Dine to turn against MNLA. For Algeria, the creation of a fully independent Berber State on its Southern border is a major threat, not just against its imperial designs on Sahara, but against its own existence as an Arab-Islamic nation. Half of the Algerian population is Berber-speaking. One province, Kabylia, is completely berber and has started the process of secession. A Kabyle provisional government in exile – the strongly pro-Western Anavad - was even formed last year. The consolidation of Azawad may initiate a domino effect.

On the other hand, the nastier Algeria gets with MNLA, the closer MNLA gets to the Kabyles. Azawad  owes at least part of its secular and law oriented agenda to them. And it agreed to take part, last month, in a pan-Berber conference in Morocco hosted by Kabyle leaders.

The French may grant some measure of help to MNLA in order to protect its subsaharan former colonies against Algeria. But only American support can guarantee Azawad’s independence. And ensure that MNLA will get rid of its jihadist competitors.

(c) Michel Gurfinkiel & PJMedia, 2012

JIHAD IN FRANCE

Mohammed Merah is suspected of killing seven people in eight days, including three Jewish children. A sign of things to come ?

BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL.

Midi-Pyrénées, the region in southwestern France stretching from Massif Central — the dark, wooded mountains of Auvergne, Rouergue, and Quercy — to the spacious Toulouse Valley and the Pyrenean cordillera on the Spanish border, was, since March 19, under “scarlet” alert: the closest France comes to martial law.

The army and police patrolled the entire area. Vehicles were subject to inspection at will. Police could half traffic without prior warning. Schools, shops, offices, and factories could be shut down by order and citizens required to stay home. Twenty-five sharpshooters from Raid had been dispatched from Paris. And naturally, telephone and internet connections were extensively monitored. No small matter considering that Greater Toulouse, the region’s capital and the seat of Airbus and other major industrial companies, is France’s fourth largest city with over one million inhabitants. In fact, this was the first time since the introduction in 1995 of Vigipirate, the French equivalent of Homeland Security, that France resorted to such drastic measures.

A chilling succession of killings in Toulouse and Montauban, an important military center one hundred miles away, triggered the “scarlet” alert.

The killing spree began on March 11, when a NCO of Maghrebine descent from the Montauban-based 17th Paratroopers Engineer Regiment was drawn into a trap and shot in Toulouse. According to one witness, the attacker dressed as a motorbiker. Then, on March 15, three soldiers from the same unit — two Maghrebines and one Caribbean — were shot in Montauban while stopped at an ATM. The aggressor rode a motorbike ; he wore a leather outfit and opaque helmet.

Finally, on March 19, another biker in full motorcylce gear — or possibly the same one — attacked the Jewish Ozar Hatora school complex in Toulouse. He first randomly fired at the parents, children, and teachers in the school’s courtyard before stepping down from his bike to kill four people in cold blood: 30 year-old religion teacher Jonathan Sandler, his sons Aryeh and Gabriel (5 and 4), and a 7-year-old girl, Myriam Monsenego, whom he grabbed by the hair to lodge a bullet in her head. He then jumped back on his bike and vanished from the massacre.

According to French Interior Minister Claude Guéant, the similarities between the assassination of soldiers in Toulouse and Montauban and the eerie butchery at Ozar Hatora were “compelling.” Moreover, investigators established that the criminal used the same weapon, a World War II 11.43 gun, in all three instances. What remained unclear, according to police, was the number of killers and whether they had received support from a larger criminal network. Motive also remained a mystery.

For 48 hours, many speculated about a neo-Nazi psychopath, some sort of French Tim McVeigh or Anders Breivik. What seemed to encourage this view was the fact that the shooter targeted only non-Caucasian soldiers and Jews and that a neo-Nazi network had been investigated and prosecuted among the Montauban military four years ago.

In fact, the police already knew their suspect: one single killer, a jihadist. The man — Mohammed Merah, a French citizen of Algerian origin — was not even hiding. Confident that police sought a neo-Nazi, he stayed at his unassuming home in Toulouse.

Tuesday evening, the Raid huntsmen and dozens of other police personnel circled the building. At 3:00 AM they tried to apprehend him alive. He fired on them, wounding two. By 9:00 PM local time, the police expect him to surrender soon.

According to various sources, Merah is primarily a thief who grew radicalized by jihadists while incarcerated. After jail he traveled to Pakistan and possibly Afghanistan, where he received first class combat training. While negotiating with the police on Wednesday, he claimed to belong to al-Qaeda. That may be true or not. Little doubt remains, however, that his systematic murders of French soldiers (especially Muslim French soldiers, seen as renegades) and Jews (including children) fit with jihadist and al-Qaeda ideology, strategy, and tactics.

One month ahead of the presidential election, the French political class wanted to both draw on the emotional impact of the killings and avoid gaffes or politically incorrect statements. All presidential candidates expressed their shock and anger about the deliberate killing of Jewish children. Most attended Jewish services in Paris and Toulouse. President Sarkozy suspended his campaign for three days and his rivals did the same. On the other hand, Sarkozy warned against “amalgamating” the “peaceful and law abiding Muslim community” with jihadists and other radicals, or “calling for retribution.” Many other candidates, or national leaders, said the same.

Such attitudes displease French Jews. For one thing, they know that if all Muslims are not jihadists, jihadism and other extremist movements still spread among French Muslims, especially the younger, French-born, generation. Conversely, they believe that their own global image and condition have steadily deteriorated for years and that this explains at least in part the torturing and killing of Ilan Halimi in 2006 and the Toulouse massacre today.

According to Sammy Ghozlan, a former police superintendent and the head of a French antisemitism monitoring group, street violence against Jews is increasing, and is largely perpetrated by Muslim thugs. (Just one week ago, a Jewish high school student was beaten at Porte de Bagnolet in Paris, until he was rescued by horrified witnesses.) The so called BDS campaign (anti-Israel boycott), while illegal, gains ground and grows more violent. It is not uncommon for BDS activists to “occupy” stores that sell Israeli products or bookshops that sell pro-Israel literature and to dump or damage the items, a practice reminiscent of the SA, anti-Jewish boycott in the 1930s. One hears “Death to Jews” mottos frequently in Muslim-populated areas. Such cries sounded last month in Champigny, near Paris, upon the release of a comedy about Sefardi Jews, La Vérité si je mens 3.

French radio and TV indulge routinely in Israel-bashing and even, more recently, Jew-bashing programs; a laxity encouraged, French Jews surmise, by the rampant anti-Zionism of many government agencies and initiatives (like granting sovereign state status to the Palestinian Authority at UNESCO). Last but not least, Prime Minister François Fillon crossed a red line three weeks ago when he bluntly decried both hallal and kosher slaughtering as irrational “ancestral customs” and President Sarkozy failed to reassure when he advocated “voluntary tagging” for ritually slaughtered food.

Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Paris.

(c) Michel Gurfinkiel & PJMedia, 2012

WILL ISRAEL ENDURE ?

BY ROGER KAPLAN. Special to the Weekly Standard's blog, July 14, 2011. 

The new book by our friend and occasional Paris correspondent Michel Gurfinkiel could not be more timely. The talk is all of Arab springs and revolutions, while the United States appears by all evidence to be going through the most broad-ranging reappraisal of its Mideast position since Lyndon Johnson made support for Israel one of the cornerstones of American policy.  

Readers familiar with Gurfinkiel’s earlier historical studies will recognize the deft combination of erudition and intuition, rigorous attention to the contemporary political and psychological climate, and feel for the large world-historical canvas against which the details of today’s news appear, by turns, puny and fraught with significance. At a time when the legitimacy of the Jewish state is questioned by the oddest collection of bedfellows (eg, European secular democrats and Arab theocrats), Gurfinkiel demonstrates the Jewish claim on Israel from historical, linguistic, legal, and even genetic evidence. At the same time he asks, Why is this still an issue?

The answer is that a curious evolution in the geopolitics of ideas has left Israel’s enemies in a position to set the agenda of any discussion of that old perennial, “Middle East peace.” They have done this partly by rephrasing many of the basic facts about the origins of the contemporary Middle East and even, when possible, replacing the facts altogether with fictions or memory holes. If Gurfinkiel’s earlier Roman d’Israel, The Israel Story, was written to provide a handy and highly readable narrative of the modern rebirth of Israel, the purpose of the new book is to run down the list of errors, misconceptions, and omissions that distort current debates, in policy circles no less than among the popular media, regarding Israel and the Arabs.

In a characteristic example of “counter-revisionism,” Gurfinkiel examines the term naqba or catastrophe. In current discussions, this refers to the fate of the Palestinian Arabs during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. The misfortunes of this population are not a matter of controversy, though their causes and magnitude are. He delves into these issues, in some detail, in other chapters, but his purpose in discussing the “catastrophe” is to ask why it is the only one, of the many that marked the blood-drenched 20^th century, that has achieved and maintained the status of an “unresolved question” that the “international community” must address.

Along with the events of 1948, there were many other catastrophes in the Middle East’s recent history. Perhaps 250,000 Palestinian Arabs (noncombatants) were displaced at that time. Leaving aside the documented facts (which he discusses elsewhere) that the civilian and military authorities of the fledging Israeli state by and large (and with some exceptions) tried to discourage the Arabs from leaving the new nation while the Arab leadership did just the opposite, Gurfinkiel observes that during the same period and in the years following, some 900,000 Jews were summarily expelled from Arab countries where they had lived for millennia, in many cases long before the advent of Islam.

The Arab world, Gurfinkiel notes, in the early decades of the 20^th century, contained large Christian minorities, in some areas comprising 20 percent or more of the population. The Middle East, after all, is where Christianity emerged, not only as a faith and a tradition of thought and dogma, but as a community with characteristic institutions like the church and the episcopate. Beginning in the 1920s, millions of Christians found themselves, in successive waves of persecution, forced to choose between death, exile, and conversion to Islam or to one of the secular ideologies, such as pan-Arabism and anti-Zionism, that might buy a temporary and highly probationary acceptance in the Arab “awakening.”

This catastrophe is scarcely ever mentioned, even though the Christian remnant populations of the Arab world, including recently liberated Iraq and newly transitional Egypt, continue to be drastically reduced.

Looking to other lands, including areas in the Muslim world, Gurfinkiel does not find the same obsession with a catastrophe, even when the disaster in question was at least as devastating, and often more so, than the one that befell the Arabs of mandatory Palestine. The Muslims of the Indian sub-Continent experienced a catastrophe when the British withdrew in haste, well over a million slaughtered by fanatical Hindus and millions more displaced to a new nation, Pakistan, soon to become two new nations when Bangladesh (the eastern portion) broke away.

It is, frankly, difficult to see how this relentless process of imposing a new conventional wisdom—conventional fiction, rather—can be reversed. It suits too many purposes. Whether it can be resisted is another question. So far it has been, and Gurfinkiel, familiar with the long history of relations between America and Israel, knows that ebbs like the current policy climate in Washington have been followed by flows. In the interest of resistance, it would, at any rate, be an act of considerable merit to get this book translated as quickly as possible.

(c) Roger Kaplan & The Weekly Standard, 2011

Israël Peut-il Survivre? (Will Israel Endure?)
By Michel Gurfinkiel
Paris (Hugo & Co., 2011), 304 pp.

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