Ever since its referendum on the constitutional treaty, France has been silent on European affairs, both at home and abroad. And when this spring the government tried, without prior consultation, to impose reform in the sensitive area of youth employment, it was its turn to be told “No” by the citizenry.
In other words, the country’s “republican monarchy” has today seemingly lost all authority, while French society is itself clearly in no mood for reform. The leaderships of France’s political left and right have shown more interest in “protecting” the citizens’ social acquis than in encouraging them to wake up to reality. As a result, the nation is still looking for scapegoats, whether it be financial globalisation or the so-called constraints of EU membership. Meanwhile, the country’s real problems are the shortcomings of the education system and the lack of genuine democracy in France’s governance.
Successive French governments have nevertheless managed to launch real reform of the pensions system, and have also opened-up some of the most entrenched public companies, notably by liberalising the ownership structure of the giant monopoly Electricité de France. Labour market reform however, has once again been postponed.
Awareness of the reform challenges that France must sooner or later confront is growing, and being voiced by reformist trade unions, liberal Socialists and some right-wing politicians. The mood is that greater flexibility could be accepted provided that lifelong employment and learning is secure, even though the job itself may change. But that perspective comes up against major barriers like the complete absence of mobility in the public sector and the reluctance of civil society and business to share responsibility for this “flexsecurity”.
The dawning consensus is that France needs a new system of values for both education and work. But that would also mean reform of the way the state manages the economy via the subsidising of jobs and “social treatment” of the unemployed. A special study undertaken by top banker Michel Pébereau, to which I myself contributed, demonstrated a general laxity in public expenditure and recommended that this needs to be stabilised for at least five years to curb France’s rising public debt. This would mean reducing the layers of public administration and creating a culture of results assessment.
The most difficult challenge of all is the reform of France’s hallowed but outdated national education structure. Deeply elitist, its rigidities contribute substantially to the educational “failure” of a quarter of all the country’s young people, who then become cut off from economic life. These young people are left, disoriented and mistrustful, to fend for themselves as they try to enter the labour market. The government approved the Pébereau report, but has postponed its implementation.
French society is therefore anxious, racked by tensions and inner contradictions. The need is to mobilise the reform-minded and to bridge the political divides that separate them. The question now is whether any of the main candidates to succeed Jacques Chirac will have the courage to do so during the presidential election campaign of 2007.
European integration remains a driving force that exerts strong pressure on France to reform itself. For the moment, most political leaders ranging from former socialist foreign minister Huber Védrine to President Chirac himself have buried the Constitution and are instead highlighting the political issues of the nation state. They say they want the European Union to move forward on concrete projects like energy and industrial development, but then they contradict themselves by calling rather unconvincingly for “economic patriotism”. Although once the standard bearer of Social Europe, France no longer has much credibility in that field thanks to its own social conservatism and its opposition to the free movement of workers within the EU. When the European Parliament put to the vote a new balance between market pressures and the European social model, as embodied in the revised Services Directive, the French left cast its votes against it!