Mitterrand
Page 47
He hated it. French sovereignty was being flouted and his own freedom of action reduced to nothing. He knew now that remaining within the EMS was the only reasonable choice. But he was not ready to lock himself into a policy on such a crucial issue until he was convinced that every alternative was ruled out.
This was the time when Jean Riboud said of him: ‘He is so afraid that someone may read in his face what he has decided that he hesitates to admit even to himself what he is really thinking.’
However actions speak louder than words, and words are louder than thoughts.
In Brussels that weekend, the EEC finance ministers met in emergency session to deal with yet another crisis over the exchange rate of the franc. For France’s partners, the game had gone on long enough. The consensus was that Mitterrand was bluffing. If France was really set on leaving the EMS, why negotiate at all? The best Delors could get was an 8 per cent devaluation, with the West Germans doing most of the heavy lifting by revaluing the mark, but on condition that France undertook not to erect trade barriers against other EEC members and that the austerity programme was intensified. Mitterrand raged at being dictated to. But that was the choice he had made. If France wanted to stay in the EMS, it had to align itself with the policies of its EEC partners.
It was a political more than an economic decision. To Mitterrand, France’s fate lay with Europe. Whatever else was at stake, he would do nothing which might dilute French influence on the continent’s political future.
One piece of unfinished business remained, trivial by comparison with the strategic drama of the previous week, but important nonetheless. Who would be Prime Minister? Four days earlier, Mitterrand had offered the post to Delors. Then he had allowed Bérégovoy to believe that he had been offered it too, while sending multiple signals to Mauroy that he would be asked to stay on.
Throughout Monday, March 21, and most of the following day, the President pondered. Finally, after lunch on Tuesday, he asked Delors to head the new government. But on one condition: he would have to accept Fabius as Finance Minister. Delors jibbed. If he were at Matignon, he explained, he would need a completely free hand in economic policy. It was ‘a crime of lèse-constitution,’ Delors acknowledged afterwards. ‘In the Fifth Republic, you don’t dictate conditions to the President.’ Mitterrand ‘was very angry [but] he controlled himself and we left it at that. I quit the Elysée feeling that I hadn’t handled it very well.’ Some thought Mitterrand had been miffed at Delors’s hostility to Fabius, whom the President regarded as a protégé and in whom he had great hopes for the future. But it was more complicated than that. To the Socialist Party and, still more, to the Communists, Delors was an outsider. With Fabius and Bérégovoy to keep him in check, his nomination would be grudgingly accepted. If he did not want to act as a team player, the appointment did not make sense.
Bérégovoy had never been a serious candidate and Mitterrand let him down gently: he would stay on as Social Affairs Minister, ranking third in the government.
Mauroy, who by then was so convinced that he would be replaced that he had already called in movers to start packing up his files, arrived at the Elysée shortly before 7 p.m., resignation letter again in hand, to be told that he would continue as Prime Minister. Delors was left at Finance. He preceded Bérégovoy in the hierarchy and, by way of consolation, Mitterrand got Fabius off his back by appointing the younger man Minister of Industry. The new government, whose make-up was announced just before midnight, was half the size of the old with 15 Cabinet members instead of 34. Michel Jobert, the regime’s solitary Gaullist, was replaced by Édith Cresson, rewarded for her victory at Châtellerault.
Three days later, on Friday, March 25, Mitterrand chaired an emergency Cabinet meeting to approve the austerity programme that Delors and his colleagues had drawn up.
The plan was unprecedented. In 1981, the Left had pumped into the economy the equivalent of 1 per cent of GNP. Now, less than two years later, it would claw back twice that much. Altogether 65 billion francs (£6.5 billion, or US $10 billion) of government and household spending was to be amputated in 1983. Exchange controls were brought in; income tax raised; new taxes imposed on alcohol and tobacco; hospital charges increased; savings not only encouraged but for most taxpayers made obligatory through government loans to which they were compelled to subscribe; and the budget deficit sharply reduced. Still worse was to come. In 1984, taxes increased by a further 8 per cent, government spending by 2 per cent less, the harshest dose of deflation the French had had to endure for almost forty years.
The change of policy initiated in June 1982 and confirmed nine months later was a disavowal of everything Mitterrand had stood for since he had become First Secretary of the Socialist Party more than a decade earlier. His wife, Danielle, spoke for the Party’s core when she said long after: ‘He was happy, those first two years. Because he could do what he wanted to do. But afterwards? Afterwards he had to act like all the rest.’ There was some truth in that. He confided to a friend:
You remember what they called ‘the honeymoon period’ in 1981. That was an extraordinary moment. I could do anything . . . I am not saying I was tempted, but still, I sometimes thought of it, a utopia like that. I saw myself shaking up the country . . . Robespierre . . . Lenin . . . Towards a kind of collectivism . . . I would have left my mark on history, I would have got France moving for four years . . . I would have nationalised everything. Why not! [But] I know why I did not do it. You can guess . . .51
He did not do it because he was not Robespierre or Lenin. In a country with a defiantly revolutionary tradition, he had known that it was essential to act fast, to wage ‘a frontal combat against capitalism’, as Louis Mermaz put it, ‘to make the world of money submit to our will’. But Mitterrand was not a revolutionary. Intellectually the idea attracted him but he had never been ready to tear down the existing order and replace it with something new. His goal was more modest: to improve society as it was.
From the summer of 1983 Mitterrand’s overriding aim was to get France back on its feet so that it could compete on equal terms with its European partners. It saddened him that his initial strategy had failed, not just because of the political consequences but because he felt that it had been morally right. However, he was willing to reinvent himself and meet a new set of challenges.
The transition was painful. In the autumn of 1982, after one of Mauroy’s aides had called for the austerity plan to be reinforced, he had told the Prime Minister icily: ‘I did not appoint you to carry out the policies of Mrs Thatcher. And if, for some extraordinary reason, I intended to follow in her footsteps, I would not choose you to do so.’
Yet that was exactly what he had done. Not only was he following Thatcherite prescriptions for returning the economy to health but he had maintained Mauroy in his post to enforce them.
The decision to keep the same Prime Minister turned out to be a boon. Had he appointed Delors, it would have signalled much more strongly that the government was changing course. Mauroy’s presence emphasised continuity and made it easier for the Socialists, not to mention the Communists, to swallow what for most of them was a very bitter pill.
For the second austerity plan, in March 1983, as for the first, nine months earlier, the Socialist Party maintained that the direction of policy was unaltered, even if, to use Mitterrand’s Tour de France analogy, the stage through the mountains was now full of hairpin bends. It was a hard sell and provoked some noteworthy verbal contortions. Mermaz spoke in terms of ‘a respite’, Mauroy of ‘a period of management’, Jospin of ‘a parenthesis’. It was not very honest but it helped the Left through a seriously bad patch. ‘For us,’ Jospin explained, ‘it was a way to accept what had happened, albeit with great difficulty, without denying it outright and without criticising the government.’
At public meetings, Mitterrand reminded his supporters that the key reforms of the first year – the 39-hour week; retirement at 60; the fifth week of paid holiday; the rise in the minimum
wage – had all been left untouched. In private he insisted that, even if France had been forced to capitulate to the free-market norms of its partners, the government would continue to promote social justice and to protect those who were most vulnerable. When Delors wanted an across-the-board increase in Social Security charges, Mitterrand instructed Mauroy instead to impose a surtax on the incomes of the rich.
Margaret Thatcher was scandalised. Danielle remembered her husband returning from an Anglo-French summit chuckling over her latest advice. ‘But what are you thinking of, François, doing something like that?’ she had asked him. ‘There aren’t enough rich people to be worth it. Tax the poor instead! At least there are plenty of them.’
The story may have been embellished in the telling. But it summed up well enough the distance Mitterrand sought to maintain between his image – if not the reality of his policies – and that of the Iron Lady across the Channel. ‘If we follow Britain, the US and Germany,’ he warned the Cabinet, ‘we may have an effect on the indices, but we will lose our majority.’
That was a real concern. Already Alain Krivine and others on the far Left were accusing the government of ‘making those who are the victims of the crisis pay for it’. Parliamentary elections were still three years away. But Mitterrand’s popularity had been hard hit by what was perceived as his indecisiveness, not just during the crucial ten days when France’s future in the EMS and, with it, the future of the government, had been hanging in the balance, but over the whole of the previous year, when the country seemed to be rudderless and people were asking themselves, ‘Is there a pilot in the plane?’
Only after it became clear in June 1983 that Delors’s strategy would succeed did he finally throw his weight behind it. ‘Suddenly nothing could stop him,’ wrote Serge July, the influential editor of the left-wing daily, Libération. ‘The word [austerity] used to burn his lips. [Now] he shouts it from the rooftops, like an adoptive father proudly brandishing his new progeny.’
Strikes broke out as the trades unions found themselves torn between the need for political solidarity with the Left and the growing anger of their members. But, as even some on the Right acknowledged, there was less unrest than there might have been given the brutality of the 180-degree turn the government had undertaken.52 That summer, for the first time, Mitterrand conceded publicly that he had made mistakes in his handling of the economy. When he took office, he said, he should have devalued at once (as Delors and Rocard had urged). ‘But I was carried away by victory. It went to our heads. We underestimated the length of the international crisis [and] overestimated the goodwill of the Americans’, a reference to Reagan’s refusal to lower US interest rates.
Mitterrand had been converted. He spoke with the zeal of a born-again Christian about the need for modernisation, the conversion of the rust-belt industries, the necessity for profit and – echoing Deng Xiaoping in China, whom he had visited in Beijing in May and who had recently presided over a similar sea change in left-wing ideology – the right to become rich, ‘provided it is by personal effort, [not] by speculation’. There was no more talk of ‘a rupture with capitalism’ and still less of ‘class struggle having a second youth’. Now he insisted that class struggle was not the Socialist Party’s objective: the reason he wanted more social justice was in order that it should cease.
Speaking on television that autumn he declared that the tax burden, which had increased by almost 1 per cent a year since Giscard’s arrival in power in 1974, had become intolerable. In the next budget, it would be reduced by 80 billion francs (£8 billion, or US $10 billion). In the event, the reduction was not fully achieved. But at least it stopped increasing.53
The decision to put a cap on taxation, although it made good economic sense, was as much political as economic. Mitterrand needed to win back the middle-class electorate which had helped him to victory in 1981. He revealed the key to his thinking at a Cabinet meeting six weeks after the second austerity plan was approved. ‘The economic measures we have taken,’ he said, ‘are neither right-wing nor left-wing. They are an attempt to spare – not as much as we should – the categories that are most disadvantaged . . . There’s no reason to feel guilty. If we had not started out by [trying to give] more [social] justice, who would be our audience today?’
Social justice, not socialism, was once more the guiding star. After seventeen years, from the winter of 1965 to mid-1983, spent riding a wave of left-wing rhetoric, Mitterrand had returned to his roots. The ideological garb he had assumed to win power had at last been sloughed off. It had never been a good fit. Part of him regretted the lost illusions. Part of him was glad to be rid of them.
* * *
fn1 Mitterrand confessed years later that he put the codes in his jacket pocket and promptly forgot about them, remembering their existence only the next day when the suit was already on its way to the cleaners. Jimmy Carter had a similar misadventure, although in his case the codes were recovered more easily as his suit had been sent for cleaning within the White House.
fn2 Such fears have been a constant of American foreign policy under both Democratic and Republican administrations. In the 1960s the Vietnam War gave rise to the domino theory in Asia; in the 1980s Washington worried that Communist participation in government would spread from France to Italy, Spain and Portugal; thirty years later, after the Arab Spring, there was anxiety that anti-Western Islamic regimes would replace the Arab dictatorships ousted by popular revolts. Only once in the last century have these predictions of ‘contagion’ been borne out, and that was in the case of decolonisation after the Second World War which, for ideological reasons, the United States supported, not always to its own advantage.
fn3 There were other sources of terrorism in France in the 1980s, but none came close to attaining the intensity of those originating in the Middle East (or with Middle Eastern connections, like Action Directe, an extreme left-wing French group, some of whose members had attended training camps in Lebanon, which had links to the Rejectionist Front as well as to the Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction). Corsican separatists, after a brief truce when Mitterrand took office, resumed their attacks, but they were either directed against property – empty holiday homes belonging to families from the French mainland – or were symbolic actions against French police stations. There was also some spillover into the French Basque country from the ETA conflict in Spain. During Franco’s rule, France had turned a blind eye to ETA activities on its soil. After the Dictator’s death attitudes changed slowly. It was not until 1982, when the Spanish Socialist, Felipe González, took office, that the French and Spanish police forces began to cooperate and the first ETA members were extradited. With rare exceptions, Corsican and Basque terrorism in France were no more than irritants, as were the occasional actions of Breton nationalists.
fn4 There are conflicting versions of why the relationship ended. Jean was still living at the rue de Bièvre at the time of Mitterrand’s election but, as he explained later, found Danielle increasingly taken up with Third World causes and his own role reduced to that of a factotum, ‘looking after the dogs and the garden at Latche . . . By then I was forty-five and I felt that I needed to think about the future.’ Danielle may also have thought that, with her husband now President, the time had come to break off the arrangement. Others, including Pierre Tourlier, have written that she was deeply unhappy at Jean’s departure. Wherever the truth lies, Mitterrand stayed on good terms with Jean throughout his years in office, giving him the use of the presidential estates to indulge his passion for hunting.
fn5 The name, ‘Tonton’, a children’s term for ‘Uncle’, was first applied to Mitterrand by his chauffeur, Pierre Tourlier, as a code word for use in communicating with Socialist Party headquarters on CB (Citizens Band) radio in the 1970s, when portable telephones barely existed. It was picked up by the satirical weekly, Le Canard enchaîné, and after Mitterrand’s election became a familiar nickname in the press.
fn6 After Mitterrand’s death
, the courts took a different view. In November 2005, the 16th Chamber of the Paris Criminal Court sentenced Ménage and Prouteau to suspended prison terms of six and eight months respectively, which were immediately amnestied, and to fines of 5,000 euros (£3,300 or US $6,000), for invasion of privacy. The court upheld claims for compensation on behalf of Hallier and his family, Edwy Plenel of Le Monde and four others. Mitterrand was held responsible for the order to place them under surveillance.
fn7 The Industry Minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, who had been the strongest advocate within the government of leaving the EMS, had resigned some weeks earlier in a fit of pique after Mitterrand had rapped him over the knuckles for taking too Stalinist a view of his ministerial functions.
12
The Sphinx
BY THE WINTER of 1983, Mitterrand had taken the two strategic decisions – supporting the deployment of Euromissiles and remaining in the EMS – which together would determine the course of the next stage of his presidency.
Relations with the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had stabilised. In the Middle East, the ‘complicated Orient’, France had been forced to recognise the limits of its power. At home, the wave of terrorism appeared to have subsided. The country was entering the second frame of the triptych which Mitterrand had imagined when he came to power, the ‘long and difficult period of managing the crisis’ that was to end, or so he hoped, with the Left emerging successfully from austerity to triumph in the parliamentary elections due in 1986. It was the midpoint of the legislature elected in a left-wing landslide two and a half years before – a time for taking stock and reflecting on what remained to be done.