France’s unloved Socialists: Makeover wanted

Date: 01/11/03

Looking to Laurent Fabius for salvation

OUT with the haughty air, the technocratic earnestness, the cold ambition. In with jeans and T-shirts, motorbike rides and hot-dogs. Nearly 20 years since he became France's youngest-ever prime minister, at the tender age of 38, Laurent Fabius is on a mission to reinvent himself. But will his rebranding be enough to revive his own and his party's fortunes?

Only 18 months ago, the Socialist Party was humiliatingly evicted in the first round of the presidential election by the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen. The party has yet to pick itself off the floor. Each time the centre-right government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin stumbles, the Socialists are nowhere to be heard. The most vocal recent opposition has come from a rival centre-right party, led by François Bayrou. In October the Socialists' approval rating sank to 38%, according to SOFRES, a pollster - its most miserable score in nine years.

The party's dilemma is familiar: how to appeal simultaneously to centrist voters suspicious of the reckless left and to the other parties of the left without which the Socialists cannot hope to form a majority. But it has been sharpened by the electoral collapse of 2002. The party's traditional friends - the Greens and the Communists - crumbled. Above all, working-class voters deserted the Socialists. Among those who voted in the first round, only around 13% backed the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin. Many (23%) opted for the far right. Others were drawn to hard-left Trotskyite parties, or, worse, to extra-parliamentary anti-globalisation movements, which make even less likely bedfellows for the Socialists than the Communists did.

The party is divided over what to do next. Many Socialists think that they lost because they were too centrist in government, and so the party should now move further to the left. Others, including Mr Fabius, strongly resist a drift towards what he calls gaucho-populisme (leftie populism). For now, the party is evading the choice. It has plumped for a moderate leader, François Hollande. Yet its heart continues to beat elsewhere: its warmest standing ovation at its party congress earlier this year was for Bernard Thibault, leader of the CGT, a union with Communist roots.

If the party cannot decide where to position itself, can it at least unite around a single leader? With difficulty. Its two most popular figures are flawed: too semi-detached (Bernard Kouchner, 53% approval rating), or not heavyweight enough (Jack Lang, 46%). Bertrand Delano (42%) is a hugely popular mayor of Paris, but the party may not be brave enough to field a candidate who is openly gay. Others are less well-liked. Mr Hollande is uninspiring. Martine Aubry is tainted by the 35-hour-week, which she devised. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister, is considered too centrist.

Enter the rebranded Mr Fabius. The number two in the party, and a former finance minister as well as prime minister, he has the credibility to appeal to the centre. The trouble is the party's left. He may be to the left of Britain's Tony Blair, but that is still too right-wing for many traditional Socialists. So his best chance of propelling himself to the top is by demonstrating that he is the leader most likely to get the party re-elected. And for that, this high-flying graduate of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, the French elite training academy, needs more popular appeal.

Hence the relooke (madeover) Mr Fabius. He already has the grey hairs to look presidential. Now, we learn, he is a sentimental creature: he has confessed on television that he cries. He is in touch with provincial France: he has a book coming out soon that promises to be a personal political journey. “I see the image people have of me, they say: 'You are clever, ambitious, a bit cold, Parisian,” he says, dressed in his new uniform - this time, black cords and black polo jumper. “Then when people meet me they say 'You're taller than I expected, and you're actually quite nice.' So I need to work on it.”

Mr Fabius needs not only to seduce his party, but to find other friends on the left. As he points out, on its own the party lacks the critical size of its counterparts in Germany and Britain. That is why it has relied on the now-wilting Greens and Communists. But a change in French politics is working against it. In the past, one or other extremist party has thrived: the Communists until the early 1980s, the National Front from then onwards. Today, however, extremist politics are flourishing at the same time on both far right and far left, sapping both mainstream political parties. Finding a way to reach out to disaffected voters fed up with the unkept promises and phoney rhetoric of the political class altogether may turn out to be far harder than one man's makeover.14#vety=41;enum=0;

Looking to Laurent Fabius for salvation.

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