{"id":14337,"date":"2011-05-03T08:36:25","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T07:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pietroichino.it\/?p=14337"},"modified":"2011-05-07T14:00:39","modified_gmt":"2011-05-07T13:00:39","slug":"reforming-gloomy-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pietroichino.it\/?p=14337","title":{"rendered":"REFORMING GLOOMY FRANCE"},"content":{"rendered":"

SE L\u2019ITALIA PIANGE, LA FRANCIA NON RIDE: L\u2019AUTOREVOLE SETTIMANALE BRITANNICO TRACCIA UN QUADRO IMPIETOSO DEL CONSERVATORISMO DEI POLITICI FRANCESI, A DESTRA COME A SINISTRA<\/span><\/p>\n

Editoriale apparso sull’<\/em>Economist\u00a0il\u00a023 aprile 2011<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Behind the bustling terrace caf\u00e9s and bright municipal blooms of springtime, France today is not a happy place. Tense, fearful and beset by self-doubt, the French seem in a state of defiant hostility: towards their president, political parties, Islam, immigrants, the euro, globalisation, business bosses and more. Such is France\u2019s despondency that its people face \u201cburnout\u201d, said the national ombudsman recently; previously, he had described the nation as \u201cpsychologically exhausted\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/div>\n

It is a sign of French disgruntlement that the publishing sensation of the past six months has been \u201cIndignez-vous!\u201d (\u201cTime for Outrage!\u201d), a pamphlet by a 93-year-old urging his fellow countrymen to revolt. Indeed, the French currently rank among the world\u2019s most pessimistic. Only 15% told a global poll that they expect things to get better in 2011, a far smaller percentage than of Germans or even Afghans and Iraqis (see chart 1).<\/p>\n

French malaise shows up in various forms. President Nicolas Sarkozy\u2019s popularity has sunk to a record low, just 22% last month, according to TNS Sofres, a polling group. This is a level never matched by either Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand or Val\u00e9ry Giscard d\u2019Estaing, two previous presidents, and beaten only by Jacques Chirac towards the end of his second term. Fully three-quarters of those polled this month said that they did not want Mr Sarkozy to be re-elected president next year.<\/p>\n

The politician who ran up the steps of the Elys\u00e9e Palace in 2007 in jogging shorts, promising to modernise France, has become a damaged brand, weakened by his own errors of judgment and style, as well as those of so many of his ministers. Even Mr Sarkozy\u2019s brave attempt to restore French diplomatic credibility with muscular military action in Libya and C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire, although popular, seems unlikely to improve his standing at home.<\/p>\n

If French gloom were confined to just a personal rejection of Mr Sarkozy, the opposition Socialist Party would be enjoying a revival. But French disaffection reaches across the political divide. The Socialists are seen as divided and out of touch. Almost alone, the far-right National Front, under its savvy new leader, Marine Le Pen, is thriving, largely because it is grumpy about everything too. It complains about immigration and Islam, in a country with Europe\u2019s biggest Muslim minority, and about the mainstream political parties, both on the left and the right. Repeated polls suggest that Ms Le Pen could defeat Mr Sarkozy to take his place in the 2012 presidential run-off, just as her father, Jean-Marie, eliminated the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, in 2002.<\/p>\n

The French seem simply to doubt their politicians\u2019 ability to do much to improve anything. The economy is emerging only slowly from the recession, with GDP growth this year forecast to reach 1.7%, compared with 2.5% in Germany. Joblessness, at 9.6%, is high, and even more so for the under-25s. Although the government has embarked on fiscal consolidation, public finances remain under strain, with a deficit of 7.7% last year. Ordinary working people keep hearing that their high-tax, high-spending model provides them with one of the world\u2019s most generous social systems; yet even the middle class feels a squeeze at the end of each month.<\/p>\n

The upshot is a fatalistic France that seems to have set its sights on little better than controlled decline: a middling economic power, whose people cling to their social model and curse globalisation, while failing to get to grips with either. Considering what they hear from politicians, this attitude is perhaps not surprising. The Socialist Party promises, with a straight face, to restore retirement at 60 (the age was recently raised to 62) and urges greater European protectionism as a response to globalisation. Ms Le Pen vows to withdraw France from the euro and put back border controls. Mr Sarkozy\u2019s political day-trip of choice is to a metal-bashing factory\u2014although only 13% of jobs are in industry\u2014where he surrounds himself with workers in overalls and hard hats, telling them they need to be protected from globalisation and other ills.<\/p>\n

One conclusion from all this is that France and its politicians are irredeemably conservative. Indeed, France often seems to be in semi-permanent revolt, arms crossed and heels dug in against change. Only last autumn, unions and oil workers led weeks of strikes and blockades in protest at Mr Sarkozy\u2019s modest raising of the minimum retirement age. On a single day, up to 3.5m protesters took to the streets; petrol pumps ran dry across the country. \u201cWhy France is impossible to reform\u201d, lamented L\u2019Express<\/em>, a news-magazine.<\/p>\n

But if the French really are so allergic to change, how come the pension reform not only went through but has now been accepted, even forgotten? Only weeks after the new law reached the statute books in November, the matter did not rank among the nation\u2019s top ten subjects of conversation, according to a poll for Paris-Match<\/em>. France seemed to go through a painful spasm of rebellion, then to shrug it all off and resume business as usual. \u201cWe were able to demonstrate to the French people that there are things that a government just has to do,\u201d argues Christine Lagarde, France\u2019s finance minister. \u201cFor once, the government did not give in to the street.\u201d<\/p>\n

Various factors explain how pension reform passed: the modest ambition of the plan itself; a sense of crisis prompted by the Greek bail-out; the dwindling power of unions even in France to force retreat. As Guy Groux, an industrial-relations specialist at Sciences-Po university, points out, the last time French street protests forced a government to abandon a reform was five years ago, when Dominique de Villepin, then prime minister, tried to bring in a more flexible labour contract for the young. Protests in France are in part a theatrical ritual: a festive occasion for venting frustrations and making a point.<\/p>\n

The silent majority<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another reason, though, is that there is a second side to France. By holding firm, and ignoring charges of political deafness, Mr Sarkozy appealed over the heads of those on the streets to the silent majority. He took a bet that this invisible France would quietly back change, and prevail over the rest. For, in reality, two halves of the country co-exist. One half, mostly, but not only, in the public-sector, is led by hard-talking trade unionists promising to prolong benefits for privileged \u201cinsiders\u201d and entrench rigid labour laws. The other half, mostly found in the more dynamic, private sector, is plugged into global markets and just as despairing of its strike-happy fellow countrymen as anybody else.<\/p>\n

This is the France that does not go on strike, that defies disruptions to struggle into work, and whose voice is seldom heard. It is found among the 92% of workers who do not belong to a union. It is the small traders and artisans who are up before dawn scrubbing their shop-front windows. It is the workforce whose productivity per hour worked is higher than that in Germany and Britain, and which helped to make France the world\u2019s third highest destination for foreign direct investment in 2010. It is the third of private-sector employees who work for a foreign firm. It is France\u2019s leading global companies\u2014Vivendi, L\u2019Or\u00e9al, Michelin, LVMH\u2014which busily reap the benefits of globalisation, a force that the French say they deplore.<\/p>\n

This voiceless France, more adaptable and forward-looking, seldom permeates the national conversation. Yet a glance at the France behind the headlines hints at a picture that is a lot less glum. Shops are full, markets busy and consumer spending is buoyant. Property prices are up. The French have snapped up the iPad and 20m, or nearly a third of the population, are on Facebook. The French may moan about their country, their bureaucrats and their politicians, but they seem happy with their individual situation. Though only 17% of young people told one recent poll that their country\u2019s future was promising, a massive 83% said that they were satisfied with their own lives.<\/p>\n

Thanks to a decent diet and health system, the French, in particular French women, live longer than many others in Europe. Most strikingly, the French birth rate has risen to just over two babies per woman. By some estimates, France\u2019s population will overtake Germany\u2019s by 2037. The French, it seems, are persuaded by the ambient gloom that their country is doomed\u2014yet even their own behaviour suggests that they think it may have a future.<\/p>\n

Start me up<\/strong><\/p>\n

At a converted 19th-century warehouse on the Paris fringes a few months ago, French revolutionaries gathered to plot the future. They met, however, not to take to the streets but to take on the virtual world, at one of Europe\u2019s biggest tech events. The shirts were tieless, the iPads abundant and the language a blend of French and West Coast. There were Facebook workshops, and talks on such themes as \u201cTeen Entrepreneurs can Change the World\u201d. Glass jars filled with lime-green and crimson jelly bears were perched on the buffet tables and talent contests for start-up entrepreneurs took place on the stage. \u201cFrance isn\u2019t just about strikes,\u201d argues Lo\u00efc Le Meur, the event\u2019s organiser. \u201cThere is a whole network of entrepreneurs who are French, but also plugged into the rest of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

France\u2019s start-up scene may be relatively new, but a fresh generation of faces has begun to graduate into the big league. They include such figures as Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet of Priceminister, Marc Simoncini of Meetic, and Xavier Niel of Iliad, who launched Free, a telecoms firm, from nothing to take on the established giants. Three entrepreneurs now plan to launch an internet business school in France this autumn. Among them is Jacques-Antoine Granjon<\/a>, the founder of vente-priv\u00e9e.com, a private online shopping club. His firm employs over 1,300 staff, and turnover in 2010 jumped 15% to a handy \u20ac969m ($1.3 billion), mostly from sales in France.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are only at the beginning of the revolution,\u201d declares Mr Granjon, rolling off his plans to expand across Europe. He runs the firm from a converted printing works on the outer northern edge of the Paris p\u00e9riph\u00e9rique<\/em>, where staff are offered yoga classes, and the open industrial spaces drip with avant-garde art installations. \u201cThe French are very entrepreneurial, very creative,\u201d argues Mr Granjon. \u201cWhat we are doing gives a signal to young people that everything is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent years, the government has cut red-tape for new businesses, and boosted the tax credit for investment in research and innovation. Just setting up a company in France used to involve a battle of wills with bureaucracy. Now the time it takes to register a new business has fallen from 41 days in 2004, according to the OECD, to just seven in 2010\u2014lower than it is in Britain or Germany. Thanks to a simplified procedure, a record 622,000 entrepreneurs started new businesses in France last year, twice as many as in 2007. A recent advertisement for Rouen Business School, in Normandy, captures the innovative mood: \u201cThe ten most sought-after jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 2015, according to a study by McKinsey, a consultancy, France\u2019s digital economy could nearly double in value and create 450,000 new jobs. The appeal of the technology scene seems to be spreading. When a poll asked French teenagers which company they would most like to work for, the top three responses were not, as in the past, French state enterprises, but Apple, Microsoft and Google.<\/p>\n

This is a world that has little time for the preoccupations that blocked French roads and dried up petrol pumps. \u201cI\u2019m not against what they were doing, it\u2019s just not relevant to me,\u201d says Olivier Desmoulin, the 28-year-old founder of SuperMarmite, a start-up based on sharing home-cooked meals. It is the mindset of a different generation. St\u00e9phane Distinguin, another entrepreneur, founded a start-up, faberNovel; both his parents were civil servants.\u201cThe politicians don\u2019t make it easy\u201d, he says, \u201cbut I don\u2019t subscribe to the view that you can\u2019t do anything in France.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plainly, not every Frenchman is a budding internet entrepreneur. There is plenty of rigid conservatism, within France\u2019s big private firms\u2014and certainly among those early-rising artisans. The French still express particular hostility to capitalism. But the outlook of this conservative crowd chimes with broader French public opinion in surprising ways. In a recent study on lifestyles by the Foundation for Political Innovation, a think-tank, 64% said they had no confidence in unions, and 53% regarded international trade as a good thing for France. Fully 52% defined themselves as middle class, with aspirational values to match. Of the top four values ranked by respondents, three were \u201cfreedom\u201d, \u201cresponsibility\u201d and \u201ceffort\u201d.<\/p>\n

Even during the pension-reform strikes, when polls seemed to show wholehearted support for the protesters, attitudes were mixed. Pascal Perrineau, a political scientist at Sciences-Po university, makes the point that the French almost always back strikes, particularly at the start. A majority supported those against pension reform in 1995, which crippled the country and forced the rigid government of the day to back down. An even bigger majority was initially behind the 2010 pension protests. Yet, as the weeks went by, such support proved thin. Between September and November, it dropped from 70% to 47%.<\/p>\n

The French seem simultaneously to hold two conflicting views. When asked if they backed the strikes, a majority said yes. When asked in the same poll whether raising the retirement age was \u201cresponsible towards future generations\u201d, 70% also said yes. In other words, the French temperamentally liked the idea of protest, not least as a way of snubbing Mr Sarkozy. But, at the same time, they knew that raising the retirement age to 62, when the Greeks were being told to stay at their desks till 65, was the reasonable thing to do. \u201cPublic opinion\u201d, comments Ms Lagarde, \u201cis much more mature than people think.\u201d<\/p>\n

How much further could France go in modernising its social rules, so as to preserve what works best, while neither busting the state nor cramping growth? This is a pre-election year, and although Mr Sarkozy said that he would press on with reform, he is deeply unpopular and his prospects of re-election are in the balance. Already, he has abandoned one bold idea, of abolishing the anachronistic wealth tax, preferring merely to raise the minimum asset base at which the yearly tax kicks in, from \u20ac790,000 to \u20ac1.3m. The government will have to keep trimming spending, in order to get its deficit down to 3% by 2013, and to keep bond markets at bay. But it looks increasingly unlikely that Mr Sarkozy will launch any controversial economic reform ahead of the 2012 election.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The trouble is that France cannot afford to be complacent. Despite its failure to balance the government budget since the 1970s, it is not Greece or Ireland or Portugal. But nor is it Germany. For years, the French have comforted themselves with the illusion that their economy was more or less doing as well as, if not better than, their neighbour\u2019s across the Rhine. During the recession, thanks to a strong state and welfare system, its economy was indeed less battered than Germany\u2019s. But the recovery has exposed France\u2019s competitiveness problem. Over the past ten years, Germany\u2019s share of exports within the euro-zone has grown, while France\u2019s has shrunk. In 2000 French labour costs were lower than those in Germany; now they are 10% higher (see chart 2).<\/p>\n

Le mal fran\u00e7ais<\/strong><\/p>\n

A big part of the gap can be blamed on France\u2019s heavy payroll taxes. These make employers\u2019 total wage costs 41% higher in France than in Germany, according to Medef, the French bosses\u2019 federation. They are one reason why French firms hesitate to grow, let alone to seek to export, and are reluctant to hire staff on permanent contracts. The average French firm employs just 14 people, according to COE Rexecode, a French research group, compared with 35 in Germany. The upshot is high structural unemployment in France, an over-reliance on temporary work, and a two-tier labour market that over-protects insiders and under-protects the rest. The young, who have become serial collectors of short-term contracts, pay the price by lacking the security that the insiders enjoy.<\/p>\n

Such concerns ought to be at the heart of any debate today about French economic reform, and yet they are not. No politician dares to contemplate the spending cuts that would be needed in order to bring French social charges down to competitive levels. Nor does anybody seem ready to take on other blockages, such as the lobbies of taxi-drivers, pharmacies or notaries that keep such professions organised in their favour, rather than that of the consumer. Mr Sarkozy has achieved some useful reforms during his term, including pensions, the decentralisation of universities and some loosening of the 35-hour working week. But these are only a start.<\/p>\n

With pension reform, Mr Sarkozy showed that it is possible to lean on the silent majority in order to defy conservatism and stir up France. At his best, he is one of the few politicians bold enough to argue the case for reforming the social model in order to safeguard it. But even he no longer seems ready to talk of France in a way that portrays its people, not as victims of outside forces, but as a source of entrepreneurial energy who could contribute to the creation of the wealth needed to sustain France\u2019s social model. This France exists, and wants the government to do little more than get off its back.<\/p>\n

Over 30 years ago, in \u201cLe Mal Fran\u00e7ais\u201d, Alain Peyrefitte, a Gaullist minister and thinker, wrote that \u201cthe French are as attached to the status quo as they are discontented with it.\u201d He put this tension down to an over-bureaucratic system that crushes initiative and encourages passivity, and called for a shift in mentalities. A third of a century later, it is above all French politicians who have yet to change their outlook. French morosit\u00e9<\/em> and the politics of victimisation are overdone. France is a stronger, more resourceful place than its people seem to think. It is certainly not in as dire a condition as the euro-zone periphery. But it would be a sad reflection of shrivelled ambitions if that were the only standard it set for itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SE L\u2019ITALIA PIANGE, LA FRANCIA NON RIDE: L\u2019AUTOREVOLE SETTIMANALE BRITANNICO TRACCIA UN QUADRO IMPIETOSO DEL CONSERVATORISMO DEI POLITICI FRANCESI, A DESTRA COME A SINISTRA Editoriale apparso sull’Economist\u00a0il\u00a023 aprile 2011<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-21-lavoro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pietroichino.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pietroichino.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pietroichino.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pietroichino.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pietroichino.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pietroichino.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pietroichino.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pietroichino.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pietroichino.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}