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February 6, 2004
Something Is Rotten In the State of France
By Mark Hunter
PARIS -- The conviction on corruption charges of Alain Juppe, the leader of France's biggest political party, the UMP, and until now its likely candidate as successor to President Jacques Chirac in
2007, should serve as a wake-up call to other members of the country's political elite. But it probably won't, precisely because Mr. Juppe embodies their failure to understand their increasingly central role in
France's decades-long economic and social crisis.
Since the early 1980s, beginning with the governments of the late Francois Mitterrand and continuing under his archrival, Mr. Chirac, the French have been
asked to accept steadily deeper sacrifices in terms of their buying power, job security, retirement benefits and health insurance, along with a rising tax burden. One can argue about whether and to what degree these
sacrifices are necessary and inevitable, but one cannot argue about the increasingly dangerous perception that they have not been shared to anywhere near the same extent by the political elites.
On the
contrary, those elites, on both right and left, have persistently sought to protect their interests -- as a caste and as individuals -- from the forces bearing on their fellow citizens. An annotated list of the
tactics France's politicians have employed in pursuit of this end would require a fairly long book. The one for which Mr. Juppe was just convicted is "illegal taking of profit" -- or more exactly, getting
companies wishing to do business with public entities to put party officials on their books in "no-show" positions.
This isn't the first instance in which Mr. Juppe demonstrated the elite's
particular sense of entitlement. When he was prime minister in 1995, at the moment he sought to push through a reform of the social security system, it was revealed that he had personally approved a below-market
rent for an apartment occupied by a member of his family, and owned by the City of Paris, which was controlled by his party. Mr. Juppe narrowly escaped prosecution, though his government soon faced a general strike
and was creamed in the next elections.
Then, as now, Mr. Juppe's colleagues protested that he is an honest man and a great public servant. Then as now they roared that if he had ever done wrong, it was only
to preserve the ideals defended by his party, for the greater good of France. Interestingly, the same arguments were heard about a decade ago, when former Socialist Party treasurer Henri Emmanuelli was convicted of
forcing businesses that worked for the public to subsidize his organization.
Perhaps Messrs. Juppe and Emmanuelli and their friends truly believe these propositions. If so, they might explain better where
personal ambitions stop and selfless public service begins. Mr. Juppe did not manage to adequately explain it to his judges. Their ruling coldly states that as an "eminent" political leader, he could not
"ignore the state of the law concerning the facts" of his crimes. They noted that the "submission to the law" of political parties is explicitly written into France's Constitution. And they
positively raged that "the nature of the acts committed is unacceptable to the social body" as well as illegal. Alain Juppe, they concluded, had "betrayed the trust of the sovereign people."
Alain Juppe is not the only one who will pay for such crimes, petty or not -- even if Mr. Chirac is never brought to trial for his own possible rule in the scandals wracking his party. Politicians of both right
and left have protested repeatedly over the years that weakening the elites will only help Jean-Marie Le Pen and his extreme right National Front. That's true, and the risks are growing. In 1995-96, I spent a year
on campaign with the Front, and discovered to my surprise that anti-immigrant arguments were rarely heard at its rallies. What came first, and by far, were attacks on corruption and high taxes.
In 2002, Mr.
Le Pen was the second-ranking candidate in France's presidential election. The next elections, for the regional councils that control crucial education and unemployment programs among others, will be held this
spring. The Front's militants will soon be knocking on doors and telling the voters that while they struggle to earn a living and pay a rising share of their income in taxes, their rulers rip them off and brag about
how honestly they do it.
Only the elite can stop that threat at the source, by cleaning up its act and showing that it is helping the French to carry their load, and not adding to it needlessly. Political
business as usual has not made the lives of the French obviously better. The crisis of France is above all a crisis of leadership, and its elites are currently making that crisis worse.
Mr. Hunter, senior
research fellow at Insead, is the author of "Un Americain au Front: Enquete au sein du Front national" (Stock, 1998).
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