Mitterrand's Disastrous Legacy
Thirty years ago this week, on May 10th 1981, François Mitterrand was elected president of France. For French socialists, it’s an event to be commemorated. For the rest of France, his legacy is more worrying.
In the early 80s, as the US and the UK were turning pro-market and finally taking the Cold War seriously, France under Mitterrand was enacting socialist reforms. The minimum wage was increased, the weekly work week was limited to 39 hours, a new wealth tax was adopted, many companies and banks were nationalized and public spending took off.
The Keynesian economic program was based on a consumption stimulus that was supposed to jump-start the rest of the economy, and which (unsurprisingly) never worked. Two years later, as unemployment and public deficits had reached new highs, the French government was facing a choice between a devaluation that would have pushed France out of the European monetary system and a repudiation of most of their policies. They chose the latter and that was the end of the "changement", the "change" that had been Mitterrand's motto during the campaign.
Yet, the Socialist party is now celebrating Mitterrand's election as if it had changed France's face forever. In a sense it did, but certainly not for the better. The conservatives (mostly Gaullists) never really reversed the Socialists’ policies for good.
Mitterrand was one of the most cynical and capable politicians in French history. As a student, before the war, he was part of the far-right. His political career started during World War II, when he managed to be part of the collaboration and resistance at the same time. During the decolonization era, he publicly adopted a liberal posture but acted as a hard-liner as Minister of Justice during the Algerian War.
Under De Gaulle's presidency, he became the leader of the Socialist opposition. He passed an alliance with the Communists during the 70s and won the 1981 election. He remained president for 14 years with a cancer that should have killed him by the mid-80's, but had to wait for the end of his second term to get him. He died in 1995.
The philosopher Jean-François Revel, whom Mitterrand approached during the 60s, described him as utterly uninterested by political ideas. Ideas were tools, and so were people, and Mitterrand knew how to use them as no one did.
The Socialists never recovered from his death. By the turn of the century, it was very hard for a politician to claim seriously that he was a truly committed "socialist". Mitterrand knew how to please the people he needed to, managing a coalition with social democrats, communists – and even some centrists. Without him, the socialists were left more divided than ever and even now, they are still stuck with a 19th century ideology, and a party organization dating from the same period, with "cells", a "secretary general", "currents", an obligation to produce a "common platform" which is expected to "synthesize" the party's views, and so on.
But at the same time, France, like other Western states, has become more and more of a statist country, partly because of Mitterrand’s 1981 victory, partly because of the 1997 election which also put into power a Socialist government, but also thanks to a general, almost mechanical, trend. Every state encroachment has to be followed by another. The French state now eats about half its GDP and it’s difficult to start a business without the state’s involvement at some level.
And that’s probably the most remarkable thing about the 1981 Socialist victory: it was never reversed. Politically, the Socialist victory was brought about thanks to the Machiavellian genius of a complete opportunist, not because the French people were so keen to live in an anachronistic socialist paradise. But socialism of any brand is a very convenient system of government for bureaucrats and politicians in general, even those who do not particularly favor socialist ideas.
A lot has been written about the tendency of a democracy to evolve into a statist tyranny of the majority to the detriment of the liberal ideas that brought about democracy in the first place. In France, the 1981 election accelerated that descent, and if it is reversible, no one seems to have found the solution yet.