France unites against François Hollande

Even the Left is turning hostile to the president, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Francois Hollande has built his career on being a canny political manoeuvrer Photo: Reuters

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:00AM GMT 03 Nov 2013

As he stood at a military airport last Wednesday to greet four French hostages released by al-Qaeda militants in Niger, François Hollande could have been forgiven for thinking his disastrous run of bad news in the past months might finally be coming to an end. 

Having announced an assortment of taxes the previous week, Mr Hollande suspended most of them over the weekend after widespread popular protests. He had managed to unite unlikely bedfellows, more often at loggerheads against one another, in the fiercest demonstrations seen in Brittany in a decade.

A proposed green tax on lorry fuel that would raise transport costs by 4 per cent had brought out farmers and supermarket owners as well as labourers and trade unionists, brandishing the black and white Breton flag as a symbol of their outrage against the cluelessness of Parisian technocrats, of whom Mr Hollande is a central member. This was the face of a future French Tea Party, a political development that seems increasingly likely.

Mr Hollande also had to “suspend” — a word that fills the French with unease, as it promises a stealthy return of the same measures whenever the fracas dies down — a 15.5 per cent retroactive tax on savings schemes that seemed tailor-made to infuriated his most natural voters.

A Parisian barrister, himself not a Hollande voter, told me that his Portuguese-born cleaning lady, a single mother of five children, had sworn never again to cast her ballot for the president, as she did last year. “You work hard all your life, you do what’s right, and then they come after the little bit you’ve managed to put aside for your retirement age?” she said. “What kind of a Left-wing government is that?”

Once again, the government’s “method”, if it can be called that, seemed to be to first float the idea of a new tax for a few days, then back down if the outcry became too loud. “It’s probably the worst way you can run a fiscal policy,” says Erwan Le Noan, a competition lawyer and international consultant. “The amateurism and uncertainty alone mean businesses have no visibility, and will defer investment — and hires — as long as they possibly can.”
 

An insider suggests that the ministry of finance mandarins at the Treasury and budget departments, held in check by their previous bosses, have been trying out all their pet tax plans, even the most outlandish, on Pierre Moscovici, the finance minister, and Bernard Cazeneuve, the budget minister. “Moscovici believes the tax burden is as high as it can go, but he has little authority,” says the insider. “Cazeneuve, his junior, is a hard-working realist, but he suffers from having been an exemplary European affairs minister. He is convinced that France must abide by her European Treaty obligations, which means reducing the deficit. Since the spending ministries do not really want to make hard cuts, the only way — or so he thinks — is through more taxes.” The Laffer curve theory (too much tax kills tax revenue) does not seem to have made it to Bercy, the massive brutalist fortress built 20 years go to accommodate the finance ministry’s plethoric troops.

An unchecked French civil servant can think up some pretty outlandish tax ideas. The French property market is under threat of a new rent control law. This is the pet project of Cécile Duflot, the housing minister and a canny Green ideologue who believes, against all concrete evidence to the contrary, that it will make rents more affordable. Paris estate agents reply that this, alongside the heap of protective regulations skewed towards renters, has already convinced many landlords to just sell and get out, even though the law has not yet been passed.

This is, however, small beer next to an earlier proposal, last June, by the Conseil d’Analyse Économique, the prime minister’s office’s forward planning think tank, advising the creation of a “virtual rent” that all property owners would pay, in order to restore more equality between households burdened with rent and the other, rent-free ones. After the CAE report came out, the subsequent fury caused the virtual rent proposal to be shelved, “but that shows you how they think”, says Mr Le Noan. “People remember this. They have no trust at all in this government.”

The beginning of the week saw Mr Hollande’s ratings plunge even lower than before, breaking records of unpopularity. Two separate polls have given him the worst ratings of any French president. Their breakdown shows, perhaps predictably, implacable, near-total hostility (93 per cent for one, 97 per cent for the other) on the Right; but opinions on the Left and within his own Socialist party are solidly negative too. He is perceived as “lacking courage”, “indecisive”, “incompetent”, “weak”, even “incoherent”.

To the French who elected him in May last year, Mr Hollande controls nothing and has no authority anywhere. Not in his own home, not in his party, not in his Cabinet, not in the country, and not — after Barack Obama eventually spurned his offer of military help in Syria — in the world.

The one bright spot in which he received across-the-board support was the French intervention in Mali, back in January. In two weeks, French troops, called by the Malian president Dioncounda Traoré to help the country fight an Islamist invasion in the north, pushed back the rebels, liberated Timbuktu and stabilised a country whose fall to al-Qaeda affiliates would have been a disaster for several French allies, from Algeria to Sudan. This was perhaps the model of a foreign expedition done well: experienced troops knowing the region, limited and clear aims, regional and local support. Mr Hollande, quite rightly, saw his popularity edge back up. Visiting Bamako, the Malian capital, in early February, basking in popular adulation, he told an enthusiastic rally that this was “the most beautiful day of his political career”.

And one he’s seemingly tried to replicate ever since — it’s probably the reason why he was so gung-ho on a Syrian intervention, even though French intelligence is perfectly aware of the complexity in which the Syrian rebellion is mired. It was therefore difficult not to wonder at the timeliness, in political terms, of the four hostages’ liberation. Questions about a ransom were raised immediately. Mr Hollande denied any payment had been made.

For one moment, it seemed as if Mr Hollande’s luck might turn: Marine Le Pen commented on television on the look of the head-covered and bearded hostages, implying they might have been “Islamicised” in captivity. It was tactless and crass — a boon, you might think, to the mainstream political class, who duly grabbed the ball and ran with it in their hurry to re-demonise the Front National leader.

Their moment of good, clean fun lasted only for a couple of hours. That very afternoon, Le Monde came out with an authoritative piece of reporting laying out the different stages of the negotiations that succeeded in getting the hostages back, complete with payment of €20 million (£16.9 million) to the kidnappers and Malian intermediaries. Intelligence experts in Paris agree that the article was completely accurate, “with great chunks taken under dictation, I should say”, one jokes.

They explain that Mr Hollande took the negotiations off the hands of the French intelligence service, DGSE, to give them to a series of local intermediaries and presidency advisers, exactly the same type of associates that Mr Hollande, in opposition, criticised Nicolas Sarkozy for using. The implication is that DGSE leaked the entire story to Le Monde, furious both at this and because the ransom, of which they disapprove, seems to have been paid out of their own budget.

You can get away, in French politics, with lying, or looking extremely likely to have lied, to the nation. Mr Hollande’s job is as safe as the Fifth Republic constitution makes it, which is very safe indeed. But as for the hoped-for reprieve in the polls? That is not happening.

How long can this last? Normally, until the next presidential and general elections, which are in 2017. There are no provisions for getting rid of the president, unless he resigns or calls for an early general election, which will not happen. Nationwide municipal elections will take place in March, and European Parliament elections are scheduled for May. The municipal elections, and local deals for the second round, explain why Mr Hollande has been pandering so much to the Greens and the Left of his party. Voting in the European elections, on the other hand, is full proportional representation, which makes them, in effect, a life-size poll.

Ms Le Pen’s party is expected to poll somewhere between 25 per cent and 30 per cent, and, as an MEP herself, she has already been busy making European alliances for the day after. Her platform, in many ways, is indistinguishable from that of the hard-Left: protectionist, anti-euro, anti-capitalist, pro-national regulations, supportive of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. She is hoping to steal from Mr Hollande many of the disenchanted voters on his Left.

Mr Hollande may not be a very successful president, but he has built his career on being a canny political manoeuvrer and, like a rabbit in a Citroën’s headlights, he understands this, without being able to change his essential nature. He is currently pondering a Cabinet reshuffle — from all accounts unenthusiastically, as it means a complete rebalancing of his majority such as it is, for less than game-changing results. He is therefore likely to keep trudging on, earning himself a place in the Guinness Book of Records in the chapter on unloved political leaders.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

Down and out: the French flee a nation in despair

The failing economy and harsh taxes of François Hollande's beleaguered nation are sending thousands packing - to Britain's friendlier shores, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

 

By 2014, France's public expenditure will become the world's highest, at 57 per cent of GDP Photo: Howard McWilliam

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:00AM BST 20 Oct 2013

A poll on the front page of last Tuesday’s Le Monde, that bible of the French Left-leaning Establishment (think a simultaneously boring and hectoring Guardian), translated into stark figures the winter of François Hollande’s discontent.

More than 70 per cent of the French feel taxes are “excessive”, and 80 per cent believe the president’s economic policy is “misguided” and “inefficient”. This goes far beyond the tax exiles such as Gérard Depardieu, members of the Peugeot family or Chanel’s owners. 

Worse, after decades of living in one of the most redistributive systems in western Europe, 54 per cent of the French believe that taxes – of which there have been 84 new ones in the past two years, rising from 42 per cent of GDP in 2009 to 46.3 per cent this year – now widen social inequalities instead of reducing them.

This is a noteworthy departure, in a country where the much-vaunted value of “equality” has historically been tinged with envy and resentment of the more fortunate. Less than two years ago, the most toxic accusation levied at Nicolas Sarkozy was of being “le président des riches”, favouring his yacht-sailing CEO buddies with tax breaks and sweet deals. By contrast, Hollande, the bling-free candidate, was elected on a platform of increasing state spending by promising to create 60,000 teachers’ jobs, as well as 150,000 subsidised entry-level public-service jobs for the long-time unemployed and the young – without providing for significant savings elsewhere.

By 2014, France’s public expenditure will overtake Denmark’s to become the world’s highest: 57 per cent of GDP. In effect, just to keep in the same place, like a hamster on a wheel, and ensure that the European Central Bank in Frankfurt isn’t too unhappy with us, Hollande now needs cash. Technocrats, MPs and ministers have been instructed to find every euro they can rake in – in deferred benefits, cancelled tax credits, extra levies. As they ignore the notion of making some serious cuts (mooted at regular intervals by the IMF, the OECD and even France’s own Cour des Comptes), the result can be messy.

On the one hand, the lacklustre economy and finance minister Pierre Moscovici recently admitted that he “understood” the French’s “exasperation” with their heavy tax burden. This earned him a sharp rap on the fingers from the president and his beleaguered PM, Jean-Marc Ayrault. On the other, new taxes keep being announced, in chaotic fashion, nearly every week. “Announced” doesn’t mean “implemented”: the Hollande crowd have developed a unique Wile E Coyote-style of leaks, technical glitches, last-minute tweaks and horse-market bargaining whereby almost nobody knows, at any given time, who will be targeted by the taxman, and how. Unsurprisingly, this is liked by no one except us reptiles of the press, eager to report on the longest series of own goals in the history of government communications.

Take last year’s famous 75 per cent supertax, on individuals earning over one million euros a month. This has still not been implemented. First, it got struck down by France’s Constitutional Council on a technicality. Leaks suggested the rate would fall to 66 per cent. They were confirmed, then denied. Hollande eventually vowed that the tax would be paid by the targeted individuals’ employers, for daring to offer such “obscenely” high salaries. This has just been approved by the National Assembly, and must still pass the Senate. So far, it is only supposed to apply to 2013 and 2014 income, but no one knows if the bill will be prolonged, killed or transformed.

What we do know is that this non-existent (so far) tax has been the clincher that sent hundreds, possibly thousands of French citizens abroad: not just “the rich”, whom Hollande, during his victorious campaign, said he personally “disliked”, and who now are pushing up house prices in South Kensington and fighting bitterly over the Lycée Charles de Gaulle’s 1,200 new places; but also the ambitious young, who feel that their own country will turn on them the minute they achieve any measure of personal success.

In the heart of Paris’s Right Bank, where I live, only foreigners seem to buy flats, at prices entirely disconnected from reality. In my street, I have spotted three new Maseratis. Even before seeing their Qatari plates, I knew they couldn’t belong to local owners: they’re an ostentatious admission of wealth no one wants to make in Hollande’s France. (A luxury car is one of the “outward signs of wealth” your tax inspector has been specifically trained to query. The lesson has been learnt: last year, Rolls-Royce sold no cars in France.) On the Left Bank, elegant Americans buy bijoux apartments on place de Furstenberg, at 30,000 euros per square metre, and venture into the fine Café de Flore for elevenses.

“It’s not only that people don’t like to be treated like criminals just because they’re successful,” says a French banker friend who has recently moved to London. “But this uncertainty in every aspect of the tax system means it is impossible to do business: you don’t know what your future costs are, or your customer’s. You can’t buy, you can’t sell, you can’t hire, you can’t fire.”

While I’m still happy in Paris, I envy him his surroundings, the vibrancy of London, the feeling that anything is possible, the sense of fun I remember from the years I lived there in the Eighties and Nineties, and that I gladly find again every time I zoom in on the Eurostar. Paris, my city of birth, is an elegant museum – where any new idea, in any context, seems to be fated to be shot down by a combination of old, structural conformism and blasé disenchantment.

Today, one out of four French university graduates wants to emigrate, “and this rises to 80 per cent or 90 per cent in the case of marketable degrees”, says economics professor Jacques Régniez, who teaches at both the Sorbonne and the University of New York in Prague. “In one of my finance seminars, every single French student intends to go abroad.”

“The French workforce is now two-speed,” explains a headhunter who shuttles between Paris and London. “Among the young, perhaps a third speak English, are willing to relocate, and want to work. For one thing, their dream employers are the more prosperous of the large French multinationals, almost all those in the CAC40 index, who make over half of their profits abroad, sometimes over 90 per cent – companies like, say, L’Oréal, Schneider or Danone. This is why French universities have shocked the Académie française and now teach many courses in English.

“But I’ve also seen determined young people take jobs in places like Vietnam, with local contracts and nothing like the level of protection afforded by French labour law, in order to gain a proper first experience of business in a competitive environment. And then you have a large group whose ambition is simply to stay outside the economy.”

This means a trade-off with which anyone in France is familiar: young people, and many of their parents, dream of getting any kind of state or local administration post, usually badly paid, very often frustrating, but which ensures complete job security, unrelated to the economic situation, the market, or their own performance.

More than a quarter of the French workforce is employed by some public body or other: schools, hospitals, local and regional councils, the police, the civil service proper – or those new subsidised public-service jobs the Hollande government is so keen on.

While the young French generations were aspiring to cocoon themselves away from the realities of the world, our nearest neighbours were following the opposite trend. In 2000, under a socialist chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, German businesses paid an astonishing 51.6 per cent company tax – largely to pay for the previous decade’s reunification. Today, this is down to 29.8 per cent, when the French equivalent, the highest in Europe, is 38 per cent. By 2003, Schroeder had embarked on a widespread reform programme, lowering taxes and drastically slashing benefits, curtailing the influence of the unions, and eventually reducing German unemployment from 10 per cent to 7 per cent (it’s 11 per cent in France).

There are many reasons why this wouldn’t work in France, not least because the French Socialists happen to have noticed that Schroeder and his party reformed themselves out of a job. Another is that French unions represent very little: less than 8 per cent of the French workforce overall is unionised, a figure that falls to between 3 per cent and 5 per cent in the private sector. Unions do, however, play a mandated part in a number of negotiation and welfare net structures, the unemployment benefits system, retraining schemes and the national health and pensions co-administration. This, not members’ contributions, keeps them afloat. The law also provides for legal labour dispute fines to be paid to the unions.

French unions see as their main goal the preservation of the status quo: from overprotective labour laws that make it so hard to fire employees that French bosses will do almost anything to avoid hiring new staff (who cost them a whopping 70 per cent in payroll taxes), to perpetuating antiquated regulations dating back to Vichy France, banning Sunday trading and evening shifts.

Recent union legal actions have forced businesses to close on evenings and Sundays, from the cosmetics chain Sephora – where employees protested that they wanted to keep working their late hours – to the British-owned DIY chain Castorama, which belongs to Kingfisher: no wonder Ian Cheshire, Kingfisher’s chief executive, complained last Friday that this harmed the French economy as well as his stores. “The president has said that recovery is in sight: I’m not sure where he’s looking at the moment. The mood is improving in the UK, not in France.”

It wasn’t fated to happen. “By 2000,” says Jacques Régniez, “French multinationals had achieved a very high level of competitiveness. Having committed to the strong franc, in the run-up to the euro they were forced to become lean and efficient. They rationalised production, and French workers became some of the most productive in the world.” French utilities, insurers, aerospace makers and luxury-goods conglomerates were up there with the best. If you wanted the best nuclear plant, crocodile handbag, commercial aircraft, high-speed train, you bought French.

What went wrong, says Régniez, was a bill passed by the then socialist Lionel Jospin government reducing the working week to 35 hours. “Where our competitors, especially the Germans, saw the need to keep prices and costs down, France spent money she couldn’t afford.” The entire system, he explains, tilted fatally to the side of salary hikes, perks and a lowering of retirement age, in the face of every observable demographic trend. Investment slowed down in the private sector, and almost stopped in the public one. “Each year, France has missed out on four GDP points of capital investment. By now, after a decade-and-a-half, we are not only lagging behind, it’s not certain we can make up for it. It would cost a 4.5 per cent hike in VAT, and other significant hikes in payroll taxes. That, quite simply, is not realistic.”

Even France’s vaunted infrastructures – those trains, roads, telecoms cables, the once ultra-performing electrical grid, the nuclear plants, the delayed 4G network – have taken a severe hit.

A French businessman who moved to London last year and asked not to be quoted by name, “because my tax audit would be even more retaliatory than what I’m currently being subjected to”, compares July’s Brétigny train crash, France’s worst rail disaster in a quarter of a century that killed six and injured 100, to the Paddington and Potters Bar derailments. “The rolling stock is ageing, the tracks are in a constant state of disrepair, even the TGVs now have regular delays because of catenary failure.”

Despite disputing allegations of negligence, SNCF have said they will reinforce maintenance “without waiting for the conclusions of the inquiry”. Criticisms have also been made that vast sums went on salaries, benefits and pensions.

But most analysts share the blame between Left- and Right-wing French governments in the past two decades. An investment banker, who has also moved to London recently, dates the wrong choices from the first Jacques Chirac presidency, in 1995. Chirac and his PM Alain Juppé, both Gaullists, decided to reform the huge French public sector’s pension system, to align civil servants’ pay-as-you-go pensions, which were (and still are) much more favourable, with those of the private sector.

There followed three weeks of hard strikes, shutting down the entire country, from schools to public transport to utilities and the post office. Juppé was ready to stick it out, but Chirac blinked. The reform was shelved, and for the next 12 years he stayed in office, Chirac never, ever tried to clash with vested interests again.

Sarkozy had great plans after his 2007 election. He believed in business, and good pay for hard work, and was devastatingly frank about it. It might – perhaps – have passed in prosperous times: one year on, the financial crisis hit, and his brusque style and love of bling clashed with both the times and age-old French preferences. (France is an old Catholic country that, for over a century, was influenced by unapologetic Marxism. It is atavistically hostile to money.) The reforms Sarko managed to pass, much milder than necessary, still ensured his unpopularity. He bet on French realism, and lost.

Realism – actual, real-life realism – is not an accusation you can levy at Hollande. Like Chirac – who supported him both because of a deep personal dislike for Sarkozy, and because they are in many ways very similar – France’s unlikely seventh president of the Fifth Republic is a professional politician, a graduate of the top government school ENA, and has never held a job in the private sector. Both Chirac and Hollande come from Corrèze, in central France, a region that has regularly provided French politics with a certain type of wily opportunist. Both appear easy-going and friendly, and both are complete cynics, with very little in the way of ideals, and an infinite capacity to scheme in order to stay in power.

Chirac, like Hollande, knew how to cultivate an array of political allies: in the case of Hollande, this means keeping the Left of his party as well as his Green allies happy with a number of symbolic measures, from the supertax to the recent anti-fracking bill.

Uninterested in the impact of morale and image on politics and the economy, Hollande believes that the economic cycle is bound to turn (he has said several times already that the recession is behind us), and that all he’s got to do is stay in power until things get better – thanks to the Chinese, the Americans, it hardly matters which. He doesn’t even worry about Marine Le Pen’s inroads in local elections: a junior aide in the Mitterrand Élysée 25 years ago, he believes the National Front, conjured up by his old boss, is a convenient accessory designed to split the Right and help him win a second term in 2017.

Professor Régniez believes this is very dangerous. “Sarkozy narrowly lost in 2012 for personal reasons – his style annoyed voters who could have agreed on his policies, but who wanted to punish him: 18 per cent of them voted for Marine Le Pen, against only 5 per cent for her father in 2007.

“This should be a warning to other countries, like Britain – it’s all very well punishing a conservative politician you’re dissatisfied with by voting for a maverick, Le Pen here, Farage there. But it gets the likes of Hollande elected. Think well: is ours the kind of future you want for your country?”

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

France prefers subsidy to égalité

Competition is a dirty word in France. It threatens the privileges of state employees, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Do French unions have too much power? Anne-Elisabeth Moutet debates on F24.

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

1:40PM BST 15 Jun 2013

217 Comments

As the French rail strike followed the French air traffic controllers’ work stoppages last week, and tens of thousands of passengers and commuters saw their plans disrupted, it became a point of perverse pride for French commentators to deny that anything was very much amiss. The government, we were told, wasn’t really unhappy with the popular message being sent to Brussels, whether on the Single Sky Initiative, or the (very slow) opening of the French railways to free competition. In fact, it was felt at the Élysée that François Hollande, a man who doesn’t come equipped with a handbag, would only find his negotiating stance against too-fast reforms strengthened by this visible expression of national hostility.

British public opinion sees the EU as a source of Byzantine regulations hampering free trade. A large cross-section of the French are incensed by what they see as the European Commission’s Anglo-Saxon-tainted liberal economists and free-marketeers attacking the myriad privileges and protections that make the life of those happy enough to benefit from them so comfortable.

Competition is often a dirty word in France: never more than when it threatens to disrupt “avantages acquis” (acquired advantages), the gold-plated benefits a group of (usually) public employees has managed to have enshrined in contractual agreements. For years, among the various bonuses that can double an SNCF railwayman’s salary, was a “prime de charbon” (coal allowance), finally cancelled long after the last steam engine was retired. Pension age starts at 50 (soon 52) for train drivers and 55 for most other personnel.

Similarly, the 300,000 employees of EDF, the nominally privatised national electricity utility (the French State still owns 85 per cent of its equity) enjoy subsidised meals, holidays, cultural events, housing, as well as huge discounts on their power bills, lifetime employment, and early retirement provided for by a pension fund separate from the cash-strapped national system. Most of these perks are managed in-house by a committee dominated by CGT, the Communist union, on a €500 million budget funded by a statutory 1 per cent contribution of the company’s turnover. As a result, EDF, a multinational corporation of recognised excellence, turns only nominal profits compared with its competitors.

It hurts to lose these benefits, which explains why the French public sector strikes so often and so fiercely. The paradox is that apart from the quarter of the French workforce employed by the bloated French state, almost no one else in France belongs to a union – only 7 per cent of the 22.3 million-strong workforce do. Yet because the role of the unions is enshrined in French labour laws, the country’s main union representatives are party to all government negotiations on social reform – with predictably intransigent results.

Since 1979, when Giscard d’Estaing’s then PM, Raymond Barre, a no-nonsense professor of economics, tried to go blood, sweat and tears on the French after the second oil crunch, and lost, the mantra in Paris has been negotiation, negotiation, negotiation. Less than two years later, Ronald Reagan broke a lockdown with striking American air-traffic controllers by firing every one of them, and replacing them by requisitioning their military counterparts. The French still haven’t recovered from such a terrifying spectacle. The only prime minister to try to hold firm against a public service general strike, Alain Juppé, had to cave in ignominiously after two months in 1995, and his boss Jacques Chirac lost a general election just 18 months later. In short, courage doesn’t pay in France.

Needless to say, François Hollande doesn’t want to consider such extremes. For one thing, all this week’s strikers are his natural constituents: the last group of socialist voters in France are government employees. Teachers will, in all likelihood, stay with him, but train or air-traffic workers could succumb to Marine Le Pen and her populist, anti-Brussels, anti-“international finance” stance –or the increasingly similar-sounding Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the extreme-Left leader.

France’s socialists have had no New Labour conversion in which they officially renounced Marxist ideology. Hollande declares himself to be a social democrat in private, or abroad; but denies it frantically in public. As a result, a strange parody of class war will continue here for the foreseeable future, defending privileges instead of fighting them, led by unions representing little more than their own apparatchiks.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

Mr Normal has become the Pitiful President

One year in, François Hollande has alienated most voters, antagonised Angela Merkel, driven droves of French into exile and presided over a worsening economy. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet reports.

 

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet debates the Cahuzac scandal rocking the Hollande presidency.

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:31PM BST 02 May 2013

111 Comments

With hindsight, it seems as if François Hollande’s troubles started the day he was inaugurated, on May 15 2012. First he was drenched by a surprise storm as his open Citroën drove up the Champs-Elysées. Then, the very same day, his Falcon plane was hit by lightning on the way to Berlin, where he was scheduled to meet Angela Merkel – making it possibly the first and last time the German Chancellor has felt unreserved sympathy for him.

The new president had to turn back before travelling to Berlin in another aircraft. When he got there – in more pouring rain – he missed a turn on the airfield red carpet while reviewing German troops, and had to be steered back in the right direction by Mrs Merkel’s firm grip on his elbow, a moment that presciently symbolised their future relationship.

And everything went downhill from there.

One year later, the man who had billed himself as the “normal president” during his victorious campaign against Nicolas Sarkozy is breaking records for unpopularity. With 75 per cent against him, Hollande is scoring the lowest approval ratings of any president of the Fifth Republic since the country started conducting polls. Unemployment has risen by 11.5 per cent since his election, reaching an all-time high of 3.2 million. An estimated 150,000 young people have left the country in search of better prospects abroad: the only jobs created in France have been in the public sector, usually in fields such as teaching that are solidly controlled by Socialist voters.

Despite a widely touted “austerity” drive, public spending stands at 57 per cent of GDP – the figure in Britain is 45 per cent – and the country’s public debt is about to reach 94 per cent of GDP. The largest street demonstrations since 1984 – when the country also had a Socialist president, François Mitterrand – have brought more than a million people on to the streets of Paris on two occasions (and more are planned), to protest against justice minister Christiane Taubira’s new law on gay marriage and adoption: given that France is a fairly tolerant society, these were effectively a street referendum against Hollande.

France’s very visible spat with Germany is a good example of how Hollande manages to make a bad situation worse. It is hardly new for French and German governments to disagree on economic issues; nor is it unusual that its leaders belong to different political parties. Yet, mindful of the European leverage afforded by the French-German axis, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a conservative, was excellent friends with the Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt, while the Socialist Mitterrand spoke in almost Gaullian terms of his German counterpart, the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl. Even Jacques Chirac never clashed with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the way he did (as PM) with Margaret Thatcher.

Hollande, however, still seems to manage France the way he managed rival “currents” during his long tenure as Socialist Party leader, trying to play one against the other while trying to keep everyone happy by granting them some sort of concession. This was in evidence at last year’s European summit, where instead of sitting down with Mrs Merkel to hammer out a viable compromise, he tried to rustle up an alliance with Spain and Italy behind her back, thinking this would be enough to counter the German position.

“This may work in Corrèze [Hollande’s constituency in central France]; it doesn’t in the real world,” a French diplomat commented at the time. “At the end of the day, the Germans were annoyed, the French line was all but absent from the final communiqué – and Mrs Merkel and David Cameron found themselves in closer alliance than they’d ever been.”

Recently, a trio of ministers including the flamboyant Arnaud Montebourg, minister for industrial recovery, started making increasingly belligerent statements about “German-imposed austerity”, accusing Mrs Merkel of “egotistical intransigence” and calling for “a democratic confrontation with Germany”, without being taken to task by the president.
It didn’t take long for Mrs Merkel’s entourage, who are much savvier in the ways of French politics than the French are about Berlin affairs, to counterleak a memo – plausibly produced by the Chancellor’s coalition partners, the Free Democrats – on France being “Europe’s biggest problem child”, with a stalled economy and a “meandering” reform programme. Mrs Merkel then gave a perfunctory denial that she thought anything of the kind.

The truth is that she is incensed with Hollande, not least because of her growing conviction that the French president and his spin doctors allowed the German-bashing because they felt that it would displace domestic dissatisfaction with Hollande on to Germany.

Even the notoriously complacent French press is now giving the president a hard time. “Is 'GrandPa’ [one of Hollande’s mildest nicknames] really up to it?” asked the news magazine L’Express on a recent cover. Le Point called him “Monsieur Faible” – Mr Weak – after Hollande confessed that he hadn’t believed the economic crisis would “last so long”.

No relief was to be expected after the announcement yesterday that Arnaud Montebourg had scuppered a deal by which Yahoo had agreed to acquire 75 per cent of Dailymotion, a successful French internet video site, valuing it at $300 million. “Yahoo wants to devour Dailymotion, but we told them no and that it had to be a 50:50 split,” the avowedly anti-American Montebourg boasted to Europe 1 radio. Whereupon Yahoo called the whole thing off.

Similar grandstanding by Montebourg had already driven the Indian tycoon Lakshmi Mittal from the Florange steelworks in Lorraine, and the American company Titan International from a floundering Goodyear tyre plant in northern France.

“The country is drowning in an ocean of discouragement,” said Christophe Barbier, the influential editor of L’Express. “It’s not just the tax-avoiding rich, artists like Gérard Depardieu, businessmen – everyone is now tempted to leave for a better life elsewhere. Young people feel they will never get a break, a job, a sign of trust. Entrepreneurs have to fend off red tape, rising costs and levies.”

In April, to add to this toxic climate, came the Cahuzac scandal: France’s budget minister, the man in charge of fighting tax fraud, was revealed to have a secret bank account in Switzerland – and in all likelihood another in Singapore – and to have lied to the president and parliament about it.

In the past week, polls have given Marine Le Pen, the far-Right National Front leader, record numbers in a hypothetical presidential election – 23 per cent, well above Hollande at 19 per cent, while Sarkozy scored 34 per cent. Were Sarkozy to stand, he would beat Le Pen easily in the second round but the talk in France has been of the dangers of Fascism, beginning with the very real distrust of all politicians and of the ruling class.

It says a lot about Hollande’s tin ear that he chose that very moment to compel ministers to disclose their personal assets, arguing for the virtues of “transparency” against corruption. This may work in the United States, where personal success is admired: but in France, a country where unregenerated Marxist thought still largely holds sway, overlaying a centuries-old Catholic mistrust of money, it prompted Claude Bartolone, the Socialist Speaker of the National Assembly, who is fighting suggestions of a similar obligation for MPs, to talk of “voyeurism and envy”.

Embattled in the Élysée Palace, where at times it seems his only remaining supporter is his partner Valérie Trierweiler – a woman so unpopular that Hollande has to fend off unpleasant remarks about her during his rare walkabouts – the president is now mulling a cabinet reshuffle as a way of signalling to the French that he has taken their displeasure on board.

But whom to choose to replace his weak prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, a former German language teacher? The 2007 Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, is unacceptable to Mme Trierweiler. The former Socialist leader Martine Aubry, Jacques Delors’s daughter and the artisan of the rigid 35-hour working week, may be unacceptable to Mrs Merkel. François Mitterrand’s former PM, Laurent Fabius, now the foreign minister, is hampered by having just been revealed to be the richest man in the Cabinet.
Hollande’s instinct is probably to try to trundle along with the same tired team. His latest attempt to show that the presidency is doing its part to relieve the public debt has been to announce that he will sell part of its cellar of fine wines, lovingly accrued since the Vincent Auriol presidency in 1947.

On May 30 and 31, 2,200-euro bottles of 1990 Pétrus and Château d’Yquem will be auctioned off, “to be replaced by more modest vintages”, according to the president. So speaks a self-proclaimed modest man, who may be feeling that he has a lot to be modest about.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

Titan boss Maurice Taylor says it's a hard job getting the French to work

A row with Maurice Taylor, the US tycoon behind Titan tyres, shows how employment and tax laws in France keep the idle in business, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

 

Working lunch: the boss of the US tyre firm Titan has accused the French of taking long breaks and being unproductive Photo: Getty Images

 

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:27PM GMT 21 Feb 2013

273 Comments

If Maurice “Morrie the Grizz” Taylor didn’t exist, François Hollande’s embattled socialist government would have tried to invent him. Just when the government’s bluff was being called over France’s unrealistic growth predictions by the EU (finance minister Pierre Moscovici kept promising 0.8 per cent for 2013 until Tuesday, when incontrovertible European figures forced Hollande to admit that it will be much closer to zero), here comes the textbook Ugly American from Illinois, boss of the Titan tyre firm, thwarted in his dastardly aim to lay off French workers from an ailing tyre factory he was hoping to acquire, now spitting venomous slurs at the entire French working population.

Cue, on all news channels, the perfect Two Minutes’ Hate (more like two days so far) in which everyone — union reps, party leaders, the commentariat — bemoans in touching unison the gall of this unreconstructed, boo-hiss Anglo-Saxon Reaganite, who, in a letter to Arnaud Montebourg, the minister for industrial renewal, asked: “Titan is the one with the money and the talent to produce tyres. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government.” Taylor added: “The French workforce gets paid high wages but only works three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that’s the French way!”

The letter was leaked within hours to a business daily. Montebourg, a former militant barrister whose grandstanding habit had been curtailed for a couple of months after he insulted Lakshmi Mittal for wanting to close loss-making steel furnaces in Lorraine, grabbed the opportunity to get back into the limelight. He claimed in an open response to Taylor that “the entire French population had been grievously insulted”, and listed the many American industrial investors who managed to make do with France’s 35-hour week and strict labour laws.

Morrie the Grizz has in fact given a free-spending, high-taxing government the perfect moment to bury more bad news. Intent on reversing Nicolas Sarkozy’s reforms, Hollande has already rescinded the very timid pensions change in which retirement age had been pushed, with exceptions, from 60 to 62. Ditto for a mild attempt to curtail the comforts of a Socialist-voting public sector that employs a quarter of the labour force: to fight chronic absenteeism, Sarkozy had instituted a day without pay before civil servants would be paid for sick days. Civil service minister Marylise Lebranchu announced yesterday that it was reversed, in an interview with the newspaper that had published Maurice Taylor’s letter.

Consider that two of the best-selling books in the past decade were Bonjour paresse (“Hello, Laziness”) by Corinne Maier, employed by the largely state-owned utility EDF, in which she rolled out a number of clever strategies to do the least work at the office, and Absolument dé-bor-dée! (“Li-ter-al-ly Snowed Under!”) by Zoé Shepard, a civil servant who vividly described her experiences in the Aquitaine administration of “how to work 35 hours in the month”, from sick day competitions to misappropriation of expenses.

These books sold well because they rang a familiar bell. The French are used to long queues at one counter at the Post Office while three more people behind closed desks carry on private conversations. And don’t try to call someone for business between 12.45 and 2.30pm in Paris. Every time the notion of opening up Sunday trading is mooted, an alliance of family associations and unions kills off the attempt with pieties about “the family day”, no matter that Sunday sales sometimes exceed half the week’s takings in stores (like Ikea) that, with staff support, brave the law and pay the fines. As for the 25 mandatory days of paid annual vacation, no one, Left or Right, has suggested that they should be reduced.

Yet once you get them into the workplace, the French can be efficient, competent and hard-working: 2011 OECD productivity figures show them coming first in Europe at $57.70 per working hour, ahead of the Germans at $55.80, and of the British at $47.20. No wonder: labour is expensive (payroll levies amount to 65 per cent of total salary outlay) and stringent employment laws make it difficult and costly to fire anyone. A French boss will wait to breaking point before he will hire anyone – and in the meantime that production will have been automated to quasi-Japanese standards with the best robots extant: machines, unlike people, are not subject to employment taxes. The losers are the young, the over-50s, and anyone who’s had the mischance to fall off the protected ship of the full-time employed. Structural unemployment, even in boom years, has very rarely fallen below 8 per cent. It exceeds 11 per cent today, and almost all of those claiming the dole would have welcomed the opportunity to work for Morrie the Grizz.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013

Arnaud Montebourg: France's love-hate relationship with 'the madman on the third floor'

He is the firebrand minister who told Indian industrialist Lakshmi Mittal that he was "not welcome in France". He is also the surprising new hero of the Left, as Anne-Elisabeth Moutet writes.

In happier times: Audrey Pulvar announced her split with the minister via the media Photo: REX FEATURES

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris

7:00AM GMT 09 Dec 2012

He is the grandly-named and grandstanding "minister for productive economic recovery" - an outcome which France, and Francois Hollande's struggling Socialist government, sorely needs.

But to say that all is not well with Arnaud Montebourg, a firebrand and populist left-winger who opposes most of the features of a modern economy, would be an understatement of equally grandiose proportions.

And the fact that this weekend he remains - just - in his post indicates the confusion at the heart of the French government.

Last weekend Montebourg, 50, had almost resigned; on Wednesday he was very nearly fired by Jean-Marc Ayrault, the prime minister, who gave him a sharp dressing down in front of group of goggle-eyed Socialist MPs.

Only the previous week, he'd been dumped by his high-profile girlfriend, Audrey Pulvar, a television personality who let him know by a text message she sent Agence France Presse.

Speculation on the beautiful Miss Pulvar's reasons for deciding to end their very public affair is rife, but everyone in France is well-aware of how Montebourg ended in the political doghouse.

A former crusading lawyer who built up popular support on the left of the Socialist party, and beyond, for his anti-corruption, anti-globalisation views, Montebourg drew international ire and national dismay for his response to industrial negotiations on the possible closure of the loss-making Lorraine steelworks at Florange.

He proclaimed that their owner, the Indian tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, was "not welcome in France" – where Mittal still employs some 20,000 people in many other locations.

 Coupled with a threat - now seemingly abandoned - of "temporary" nationalisation, in a style not unlike the General Motors bailout, of the Florange steelworks, this gave out a strong echo of the last time a Socialist government took over in France: more than 30 years ago, in 1981, when President François Mitterrand's Socialist-Communist cabinet decided to nationalise banks and large industrial corporations.

This is not the impression Hollande, and especially Ayrault (who happens to have a Mittal plant in his own Loire Atlantique constituency) want to make on the financial markets.

Until now they have kept lending to France at exceptionally reasonable rates - a smidgeon under 2 per cent for 10-year bonds, despite the recent downgrade from AAA-rating by Moody's that followed a similar move from Standard & Poors in January.

In the almost seven months since he took office, Hollande has acquired a reputation for economic shilly-shallying: hefty tax increases on business were almost immediately followed by tax breaks, for instance, while an announced 60 per cent capital gains tax for start-up entrepreneurs was rescinded after a few days of furious Tea-Party style Facebook campaigning by opponents. But so far this has not been punished internationally, even though it has translated domestically into the worst poll ratings of any president of the Fifth Republic since 1962.

Ayrault was of a mind to let Montebourg go, supported – even egged on – by Pierre Moscovici, the finance minister, who in theory is Montebourg's boss, but in practice has been frequently outshone by the figure referred to by many at the ministry's mammoth futuristic pile on rue de Bercy as "the madman on the third floor".

Their partnership is hardly a meeting of minds: Moscovici, a former European affairs minister under Lionel Jospin 10 years ago, is of a moderate Social-Democrat bent: pro-European integration, pro-business. Montebourg, by contrast, voted No in the 2005 referendum on the European constitution and would block the import of goods from countries without social welfare provision.

"Mosco" had loathed Montebourg's ideas from the start, but things rapidly became personal as well.

After the election, but before the finance team had moved into Bercy - the name by which the ministry is known - back in May, Moscovici was forced to adjudicate on territorial disputes caused by Montebourg.

The office of the finance minister himself is traditionally on the sixth floor. Montebourg tried to dislodge the budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, from the floor below, at the same time as attempting to appropriate the parking space in the courtyard assigned to the foreign trade secretary, Nicole Bricq.

In both cases Montebourg's machinations failed and he ended up, fuming, on the third floor, even further down the building than the minister for tourism and trade secretary, Sylvia Pinel. Tempers have only deteriorated over the following seven months, while the country's economic and political governance has given an impression of endless flip-flopping.

This may sound more like Big Brother on steroids than proper political disputes, but it's emblematic of the confusion reigning under François Hollande.

France's president made a lifelong career, as regional politician and party boss, of being a master of compromise, conciliating the Socialist Party's various "currents" by granting favours and advantages according to precisely-calibrated assessment of weight within Hollande's view of the ideal political balance at any given time.

Hollande is very much aware that a majority of his Socialist base likes Montebourg's flamboyance, even his gaffes – which they see as speaking truth to powerful interests. In the Mittal crisis, some polls found up to 63 per cent of French opinion supporting Montebourg's stance.

Unlike the German SDP or Britain's New Labour, the French Socialists have never formally renounced Marxist theory, and even the name "social democrat" remains a political insult in many quarters.

And this is before taking into account the sensibilities of the myriad parties to the left of the Socialists – the Greens, three small Trostkyite parties, the rump of the once-mighty French Communist Party, and a couple more tiny splinters – whose votes, added up, ensured Hollande's victory over Nicolas Sarkozy last May.

Because of France's first-past-the-post system, the Socialists enjoy in fact a clear majority in both houses of the French parliament, but still Hollande calculates as if hamstrung by a coalition, perhaps aware that he has to keep several currents within his own party from defecting to the militants on the Left.

His resulting indecisiveness is worsened by his own nature, as well as by his single previous experience close the presidency. He was a junior aide to François Mitterrand in the 1980s, and learned much from the wily old politico - who always arrived late everywhere and famously believed that you should "give time to time". In other words, wait and see how a situation would decant.

It worked for an autocrat like Mitterrand, born in 1916, and who viewed the telephone as a cutting-edge technological device. It is far less effective in Twitter time, in a man whom neither best friend nor worst foe would ever think of calling an autocrat.

And so when Montebourg spoke of "nationalisation", Hollande crucially stayed silent for five days, even inviting the troublesome junior minister to the Elysée to assure him, Montebourg afterwards said, that "nationalising the Florange steelworks until a credible buyer [was] found" was "still a possibility".

Hollande staved off Montebourg's resignation, seemingly only to let his prime minister threaten him with the sack four days later.

Hollande had his reasons – Montebourg increasingly appears to Lakshmi Mittal as the pitbull the president releases when his concessions are seen as just not good enough – but such tactics carry their own risk.

Emboldened by Montebourg's stance, and a militant political vocabulary unheard from a cabinet minister for decades, enough Socialist defectors voted with the Communist group in the Senate to defeat the Budget and the bill funding France's state health and pensions systems last week.

This was only a warning shot: both bills will now be amended, and are likely to pass the next time they return to the upper house. But the impression of weakness remains - even as most of Hollande's campaign promises, including new civil service jobs, lowering the retirement age and more teachers, go unfulfilled.

Meanwhile Montebourg is fuming at his treatment by Hollande and Ayrault, but upbeat in one respect: amid all the publicity he has become a hero for the Left.

When he stood in the last Socialist Party primary elections for a presidential candidate, he received just 17 per cent of the vote. If Hollande's government goes on giving the impression that no-one is really at the helm, the inevitable clamour for change next time may mean there's a demand for even more grandiose promises.

In the strange world of the French Left, Montebourg may consider his own prospects of becoming president himself have just risen, from impossible to merely improbable.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

We're very fond of you eccentric Anglaises

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:28PM GMT 29 Nov 2012

 French men aren’t too sure what they think of les Anglaises (this includes the Welsh and the Scots in the national perception) but, pace the shrewd Ms Géraldine Lepère, who advises unrestrained use of the word “petit” to mark your approval, they are very, very fond of les petites Anglaises.

They know exactly whom they mean by that: Jane Birkin, la petite Anglaise par excellence, reigns at the pinnacle of this pantheon, flanked by the young Charlotte Rampling and Kristin Scott Thomas. There was even a hugely successful 1976 rom-com, À Nous Les Petites Anglaises, that features a trio of hapless young Frenchmen sent to Brighton to learn English, who fall in love with the exotic, alluring, incomprehensible geishas of East Sussex.

Naturally, French women were all set to take umbrage – until we realised that very few Anglaises are, in fact, petites Anglaises. The rest are still largely incomprehensible to us, but in a far less threatening way.

They are – what’s the word? Bizarre. They laugh all the time. They often stay in gaggles of women, rather than flirt with the men. (Yes, we are relieved, of course, but this still seems unnatural.) Rather than cleaning their homes, they garden.

English women think beer is a major food group and that Pimm’s contains all the vitamins you need. They prefer their dogs or their horses to their boyfriends (or husbands). They don’t seem to take anything seriously, especially those things we consider with due respect: work hierarchies, their French husband’s friends (when they’re married), the proper way to give a formal Parisian dinner-party, French politics, fashion.

Especially fashion. The things an English woman wears would never pass the threshold of a French woman’s closet: Ugg boots; thick opaque black tights; lots of Bedouin-like scarves; unmatching underwear of dubious provenance; baggy jumpers and gumboots worn in the country, even in Provence (which, as we know, is Paris’s extended formal garden, not – shudder – farmland); or, suddenly, a far too grand taffeta balldress, never entirely ironed, with old-fashioned jewellery in need of cleaning.

But I will admit to playing both sides against the middle in this – as a martyred French child shipped off to a Shropshire boarding school when I was 11, I actually grew up to understand, and like, English women – in fact (shhhh!), often more than my compatriots.
English women make far better friends than French women. The high tolerance for eccentricity that pervades English society makes them fun, sisterly, unconventional. They don’t care if they lose face – something that turns your proper French Mademoiselle into a taut-skinned bore by the time she is 35. But I do sometimes wish they’d lose the Ugg boots.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

François Hollande and the bedroom farce paralysing France

As a new book scrutinises French president François Hollande’s unique personal life, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet reveals how his inability to stand up to his love interests is now threatening his administration

French president Francois Hollande and his former partner Segolene Royal Photo: REX FEATURES

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:00AM BST 14 Oct 2012

It started off like a French farce. Will it end up like a Greek tragedy? France’s “First Girlfriend”, Valérie Trierweiler, may well cause the political downfall of the man she fought so bitterly to catch – and still can’t get a marriage commitment from.

Five months after he was elected, François Hollande’s popularity figures are the lowest of any French president since Charles de Gaulle signed the 1962 treaty acknowledging the independence of Algeria after a bloody anti-colonialist war.

The general consensus is that Ms Trierweiler is one of the chief reasons why the Fifth Republic’s seventh president is seen as henpecked, inefficient and vacillating – in short, not in charge.

“The five women who make his life hell” was last week’s headline on news magazine L’Express. First on the list were the president’s partners, past and present: Ségolène Royal, the former presidential contender and mother of Hollande’s four children; and Valérie, the Paris-Match journalist who won Hollande from Royal.

The other three were former Socialist leader Martine Aubry, Green leader Cécile Duflot, and Angela Merkel: they would never have been qualified by gender if Hollande’s chaotic private life wasn’t the first subject of gossip and conjecture these days.

In this toxic environment came the revelations in La Frondeuse (“The Troublemaker”), a new biography published last Thursday by journalists Alix Bouilhaguet and Christophe Jakubyszyn, that while she was busy prying Hollande away from the home he’d been making with Royal for more than two decades, the (still-married) Trierweiler was three-timing – or should it be four-timing? – him with Patrick Devedjian, a former Sarkozyste cabinet minister.

The book also recounts how, around the same time, a spitting-mad Ségolène accused Hollande of cheating on her with Anne Hidalgo, an elegant brunette Socialist politician, now Deputy Mayor of Paris, and expected to run for City Hall herself in 2015.

If, by this stage, you’re getting confused, let’s take a deep breath and plough on. Hollande and Royal meet while students at ENA, the top government school that in France guarantees you a network and a career Oxbridge graduates can only dream of. They became one of France’s Left-wing power couples, seemingly unmarried because it was so un-bourgeois, so much, well, cooler. Assigned to cover them for Paris-Match was a young and elegant political reporter, Trierweiler, herself twice-married. When, in 1992, Royal, then minister for social affairs, invited the press to the maternity clinic where she’d just had her daughter Flora, it was Trierweiler who covered the birth, in breathless prose. The fact that a woman minister would admit the public to such a personal event was treated as a feminist breakthrough.

Hollande and Trierweiler didn’t get together then; but in La Frondeuse it is alleged that they had linked up by 1997, far earlier than the official version which dates it back to 2005. Meanwhile, Trierweiler was making a name for herself in the old style of French women political journalists: getting inside information with, let’s say, allure and poise.

If this sounds distasteful, that is because it is. And for this (happily receding) journalistic tradition, we have to thank one of France’s great magazine editors, the late Françoise Giroud – later Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s minister for women’s rights – who, when she headed L’Express in the Sixties and Seventies, sent out a large number of personable female reporters to “charm” the largely male political class and get good stories.

Giroud, herself a hugely gifted writer, but also the mistress of the flamboyant politician and L’Express proprietor Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, would teach her young reporters how to dress and give them social deportment tips.

All of her alumni were talented in their own right; most of them later became top executives in television news or newspapers. Still, acceptance and access was given to them because of their youth and looks rather than their competence – and most of them had quite public affairs with (married) top politicians.

Starting out in the 1980s, I still remember how every politician I was sent to interview seemed to assume that I would be available if they cared enough to ask: after a couple of weeks, I asked my then employers to transfer me to the foreign desk. Nothing untoward had happened, but I hated every single minute it. Getting shot at in southern Lebanon was blissfully uncomplicated by comparison.

The zeitgeist moves on, even in France: while affairs still go on, the relationship between politicians and the press has been “normal” for a while. The Giroud world is as alien to politicians under the age of 40 as to the reporters covering them.

But Valérie Trierweiler is, in many ways, an old-fashioned girl. “She is insecure, jittery, unable to make a choice,” wrote the authors of La Frondeuse. “She wants it all, a career and the job of First Lady – the press pass and the office at the Élysée Palace.”

When her editors at Paris-Match, unwilling to antagonise the Élysée but aware of the conflict of interest, finally summoned up the courage to ask her to cover culture rather than politics, Trierweiler’s very first article last June was a review of an Eleanor Roosevelt biography.

“Well, well, well, a First Lady who’s also a journalist! Obviously in America these things do not cause a scandal,” the piece began, one of many examples of her tin ear. Another was the highly publicised tweet in support of Ségolène Royal’s opponent in June’s general election.

Trierweiler’s friends and critics both explain her many public mistakes, as well as her well-known sudden rages – much feared by Hollande – by her seemingly bottomless insecurity. “She dreams of getting him to marry her, but he’s not the marrying kind,” one of them told the book’s authors, who allege that if Trierweiler finally chose Hollande over Devedjian, at the time a politician with a brighter future, it is because Devedjian would not leave Corinne, his wife of 30 years.

The French are notoriously more lenient on homewreckers than les Anglais – the feeling here is that It’s All More Complicated and Not Just The Woman’s Fault. This, however, plays against Hollande.

Trierweiler is uniquely disliked (less than 29 per cent of the public have a good opinion of her), but the President is seen as commitment-shy. Increasingly, there’s a feeling that he applies the same aimlessness to his management of public affairs.

Political observers recall how under his 15-year stewardship of the Socialist Party, his unique compromise style led the party’s “currents” – a fancy name for the infighting factions more divided by personal ambitions than by ideology – to complete gridlock. Nothing ever got done. When Martine Aubry took over as leader from Hollande in 2008, she said the place was such a mess in every possible way that she even had to unblock the loos herself.

“He’s unable to take a decision,” says a friend of Aubry’s. “It doesn’t do that much harm running an opposition party. But when he negotiates with Angela Merkel, it’s a real problem.”

Just as Hollande tries to hide the occasional contact he still has with the mother of his children – prompting outbursts from Trierweiler when she finds out – he chose recently to gang up with the Italians and the Spanish rather than ask Merkel directly for the concessions he sought in the latest Eurozone negotiations, to the German Chancellor’s outrage.

And just as Merkel is now surprised to find herself missing Nicolas Sarkozy’s more direct style, the French may begin to wonder whether having a “hyper-president” in the Élysée wasn’t a better idea in difficult times than a henpecked figure hiding from the women in his life.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

The politics and sex scandal that brought some glitz back to France

Does Rachida Dati's paternity suit finally solve Paris's most tantalising mystery?

 

Rachida Dati: opponents say she is simply stirring the pot Photo: Rex Features

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

9:03PM BST 03 Oct 2012

All it took was one legal injunction – and François Hollande’s depressed, tax-burdened France was suddenly recalling the glitz of the Sarkozy years. Rachida Dati, the Dior-clad former justice minister, now a Euro MP, had for the past four years steadfastly refused to name the father of her daughter Zohra. Miss Dati – always referred to in France as Rachida – has just filed a paternity case against the hotel tycoon Dominique Desseigne, heir to one of France’s great fortunes.

Rachida’s rapier-writ seemed finally to answer one of Paris’s tantalising mysteries: the identity of the country’s most famous single mother’s mysterious lover. Mr Desseigne’s had been among the names bandied about, but so was that of Spain’s former premier José-Maria Aznar. The married Mr Aznar had to issue a denial. Also mentioned were the EDF Energy chairman, Henri Proglio; Qatar’s attorney-general, Ali Bin Fetais al-Marri; the then President Sarkozy’s brother François, a star paediatrician; the former sports minister Bernard Laporte; and the actor Vincent Lindon. All hurried to deny the rumours.

All Rachida’s men are of a type: raffish, worldly, elegantly middle-aged, either well-off or seriously rich, and close to Nicolas Sarkozy (rightly or wrongly, the former president himself was briefly included in the tally, for which his third wife, Carla Bruni, never forgave Rachida). I remember thinking that for the Becky-Sharp-ambitious Rachida to keep such a close lid on the name, it was possible that baby Zohra’s father was a complete unknown.

Within 10 minutes of working my telephone yesterday, I felt thrown back into the overheated rumour mill of the Sarkozy Noughties. Two sources had radically opposite readings of the situation. One was a long-time friend of Mr Desseigne’s: “He’s absolutely, positively not the father. Rachida is just trying to stir the pot.” He’s betting on Aznar. “They were texting all the time when she was pregnant.” No proof, of course, was given.

The other – a Sarkozyste politician – was quite sure Mr Desseigne was the father: “Rachida isn’t stupid. There will be DNA testing. She wants some sort of child support, I expect. It also puts her back in the news at a time when the opposition is in dire need of a strong candidate for Paris mayor in 2014.”

All the same, Rachida Dati, once the bright star of Sarkozy’s rainbow cabinet, may have overplayed her hand. She was given a sinecure as mayor of Paris’s seventh arrondissement, a district that makes Knightsbridge look depressed, but couldn’t get chosen for a safe MP’s seat last June. She must have felt in danger of being forgotten – but will the whiff of bling she brings back be an asset or a liability in austerity-hit France?

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The former president himself suddenly seems to be everywhere. Apart from calls for a halt to the Syrian repression, Sarkozy has kept uncharacteristically silent since his defeat in May. He now jogs in the Bois de Boulogne, or attends football matches or society weddings. At a time when François Hollande’s ratings have plummeted faster than any Fifth Republic president’s – to more than 50 per cent negative – Sarkozy is basking in a new-found popularity: 44 per cent now say he’d tackle the economic crisis better than the current lot.

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The French rarely feel that foreigners can write convincingly about their history, but the first readers of Jo Graham’s new novel, The General’s Mistress, say her portrait of Ida Saint-Elme, a Dutch-born courtesan loved by Marshal Ney, gets it right. Saint-Elme rode with Napoleon’s army, travelled from Russia to Egypt and wrote the biggest-selling memoirs of the early 19th century, earning herself the scandalous name of “the female Casanova”.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

France's battle royal between Ségolène Royal and Valérie Trierweiler has the nation gripped

The warring women on the frontline are giving politics a sharply feminine edge.

Valérie Trierweiler: giving France a delightful taste of personal strife Photo: AFP/Getty Images

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

9:28PM BST 13 Jun 2012

89 Comments

The French, like most of us, love a catfight. When First Girlfriend Valérie Trierweiler tweeted her support for the opponent of Ségolène Royal, the rival she supplanted in the affections of President François Hollande, in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, the entire nation sank with delight into the bliss of watching the political become personal.

Barely a month ago, the day after her partner was elected President of the French Republic, Trierweiler confidently told Agence France Presse how much better suited to the job she was than her predecessor, Carla Bruni, Nicolas Sarkozy’s third wife. “Carla Bruni comes from a world entirely alien to politics: fashion, showbusiness. She doesn’t know its codes.” She, on the other hand, Trierweiler explained somewhat smugly, had been a political journalist for 20 years. “I know politics, I know the media.”

The woman many of the French are calling “Rottweiler” then illustrated the shortest way to link the words “pride”, “goeth”, “before” and “fall”. Nicolas Sarkozy had been kicked out of office chiefly for having paraded his private life with ostentation. Demurring that she would play “no political part whatsoever”, Trierweiler made it difficult to forget her existence for one minute. Whether she was bemoaning that she didn’t like the title “First Lady” and inviting the public to think up a new one, or insisting that she could remain a working Paris Match reporter “in all independence” while maintaining a staff and office at the Élysée Palace, she was hardly ever out of the news.

Scenting a rich vein, the political puppet show Les Guignols de l’info hastily recycled the puppet they’d used for Jacques Chirac’s spin-doctor daughter Claude, slapping on a new wig and redoing its make-up to rush their Valérie on air. They now portray Hollande as a bumbling, henpecked husband. Deferring to She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, the President is depicted fleeing to the comforting arms of a softer, sweeter, more understanding female – Angela Merkel.

But in real life, the woman Trierweiler has been obsessing about for nearly a decade is Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s former partner of 23 years and the mother of his four children. Trierweiler admits to having started her affair with Hollande in 2005. He was then Socialist Party leader; she had been covering the Left as a Paris Match political correspondent for years. But they’d met years before: it was a young Trierweiler who reported from Royal’s maternity ward after she gave birth to her and Hollande’s last child, Flora, in 1992. She’d remained friendly with Flora’s father ever since.

Royal, who had gradually become aware of her partner’s betrayal, kept silent until the night of her 2007 defeat against Nicolas Sarkozy. Then, minutes after the result, she announced that the doors of her house were “now closed to Hollande” – who, while still officially living with her, had in fact moved into Trierweiler’s flat. It transpired that Trierweiler had egged him on to sabotage Royal’s presidential bid during the campaign.

Having lost her bid for a second presidential try in last year’s Socialist primaries, Royal immediately gave her support to her children’s father. Meanwhile, Trierweiler went to absurd lengths to sideline her. In rallies, Royal found herself seated away from other party bigwigs, and excluded from pictures. The children, who also were involved with the campaign, tried to intervene with Hollande, but to no effect; instead he often remonstrated with his advisers that they should “support Valérie: she’s so insecure”. Royal was excluded from Hollande’s Élysée swearing-in, but he did give her his official support in her bid for the La Rochelle seat, in the region where she has been council president for eight years.

This infuriated Trierweiler and led to this week’s tweeting extremes, igniting the kind of nationwide ruckus which is still in full swing. She has dug her heels in, refusing to recant her tweet. Meanwhile, several former Royal adversaries, all women, including Socialist leader Martine Aubry and Green leader Cécile Duflot, have very loudly sided with her. “I hope this tweet gets [Royal] elected,” Aubry said yesterday.

Feminine solidarity is relatively new in France, in politics and elsewhere: it was really only seen last year, at the height of the Strauss-Kahn affair, when women politicians from Marine le Pen to a Trotskyite, including two then Cabinet ministers, denounced casual sexism and double standards. Earlier, Rachida Dati, Sarkozy’s glamorous justice minister, found relatively little support when she chose to become a single mother in office, then got sidelined partly because she’d been a friend of her boss’s second wife. But all signs are that Trierweiler’s latest outburst may have triggered unintended consequences. “You started missing Sarkozy, now you will miss Carla,” Nadine Morano, a former Sarkozy minister, tweeted yesterday.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012

Valérie Trierweiler: France's feisty new first lady seizes the limelight from her rivals

France's new first lady is already ruffling feathers as she seizes the limelight from her rivals, writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in Paris. 

 

Trierweiler first met Hollande in 1988, when she was a bright, 23-year-old reporter and he was a 34-year-old MP Photo: AP

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:30AM BST 13 May 2012

François Hollande moves into the Élysée Palace this Thursday, but he is already facing a very domestic crisis. Ever since he was declared France’s 24th president a week ago, his lover, the elegant Paris Match journalist, Valérie Trierweiler, 47, has been making headlines of her own.
 

For instance, Le Canard enchaîné, France’s answer to Private Eye, published an angry text message from Trierweiler to Mariana Grépinet, a colleague.

Grépinet had mentioned, in what would otherwise be described as a puff piece about France’s new presidential couple, one of Hollande’s children with Ségolène Royal, the 2007 Socialist presidential candidate and Hollande’s former lover of 23 years.

The article did not explicitly state that the couple were no longer together. "What game are you playing?" the text threateningly ended
 

Then there was Olivier Bourg, the radio presenter and stand-up comic, who tried to pull his trademark trick of calling Trierweiler’s mobile to wheedle careless statements from her, as he had from countless celebrities before. Trierweiler sussed him out fast enough, and retorted on air, in a pinched voice, "I won’t forget this", before hanging up.

In case anyone hadn’t got the message, on Wednesday, Trierweiler, who a UMP party ally of Nicolas Sarkozy once referred to as "Rottweiler", blocked Julien Dray, an MP and one of Hollande’s key campaign managers, from setting foot inside the victory party.

His offence appears to have been to invite Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund chief, to his birthday event days earlier. Strauss-Kahn, Hollande’s rival for the Socialist presidential nomination until a New York hotel maid complained of sexual assault, mingled with Hollande’s closest advisers. Even worse, the party was held in a fashionable new restaurant in a refurbished sex shop in Paris’s red light district.

Any doubt over the political jeopardy this entailed was dispelled when Sarkozy brought up Strauss-Kahn’s attendance, to lambast Hollande during their heated television debate three days before the final vote.

But party insiders suggest Trierweiler has "had it in for Dray" for far longer. Since 2007, in fact, when he was Royal’s election campaign manager. "Valérie", they will tell you feelingly, "can certainly bear a grudge".

This had been known in political circles for a long time, but is emerging only now that media attention has turned to France’s new première dame.

When Trierweiler, a twice-divorced history graduate who has spent almost her entire career at the celebrity-obsessed Paris Match, told an interviewer she would not be a "potiche" (a decorative nonentity), it was widely interpreted as a swipe at her predecessor, Carla Bruni.

Asked how she would cope with life in the front line of French politics, she said, patronisingly, that she was far better equipped than Bruni for the role: "She came from a world totally alien to that of politics. She did not necessarily know the political codes."

This is not only dismissive but ill-judged. During her four years in the Élysée, Bruni did not put a foot wrong. She is cultured and has excellent manners. She has a sense of humour and even made friends with the journalists who lampooned her. When Le Canard enchaîné ran a spoof column, Carla B’s Diary, Bruni laughed about it among her friends and invited its author to the Élysée.

Trierweiler, by contrast, has already alienated people she ought to have been assiduously cultivating; and much of that stems from her involvement with Hollande and antagonism with Royal.

Trierweiler first met Hollande in 1988, when she was a bright, 23-year-old reporter and he was a 34-year-old MP, a former Mitterrand aide and part of the new intake.

In 1992, Trierweiler covered the birth of Flora, Royal and Hollande’s fourth child. Meanwhile, Trierweiler had three boys during her marriage to Paris Match sub-editor, Denis Trierweiler.

In 2005 she began her affair with Hollande, who was still living with Royal and their four children. When news of it reached Alain Genestar, the then editor of Paris Match, she refused to see any potential conflict of interest between her private life and her job covering the Socialist Party for the magazine. Eventually, Genestar told two journalists, he had to shift her to the cultural section of the magazine. Trierweiler, who loves the political scene, was said to be resentful.

By 2007 Royal had beaten Hollande to become the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate. Despite his affair with Trierweiler, he campaigned alongside Royal as her lover, but appeared resentful and unconvincing.

Some wondered whether Trierweiler encouraged Hollande’s seemingly passive-aggressive stance towards Royal’s candidacy. Royal would send Hollande her speeches in advance; he’d then call her minutes before she stepped on to the dais to say that the speech was all wrong. The night Royal lost to Sarkozy, the fiction that she and Hollande were together was dropped with a very public press release from Royal.

But Trierweiler’s apparent hostility towards Royal seemed to persist. One insider recalls the time that Hollande answered a question about Royal during a television interview in 2010, then received an angry text message from Trierweiler. As Franz-Olivier Giesbert, his interviewer, tried to reassure him that he had not strayed from politics in his reply, he said: "You don’t realise, I’m going to get hell at home."

In January, Hollande’s first major campaign speech as Socialist presidential candidate was introduced by a video tracing the past 40 years of the party. Jarringly, to many of the rank and file, it ended in 2002, the year that Lionel Jospin came third in the first round of the election, leaving the party without a candidate in the final run-off. Royal’s 2007 presidential bid was omitted, a decision that was chalked up to Trierweiler’s influence

Despite loyally supporting Hollande as he fought for the party’s nomination, Royal was relegated at the campaign launch to a distant seat, while Trierweiler stood close to her lover. Aides said Royal collapsed in tears afterwards.

Trierweiler had her own office at Hollande HQ during the campaign, but her feminist-sounding line is that she remains a journalist and, in any case, needs the work to support her own family. Friends say she’s writing the text for an instant coffee-table photo book on the campaign, to be published next month.

Yet Royal is not about to slink quietly from the Socialist scene. She is aiming for a role as Speaker of the National Assembly, keeping her at the forefront of French political life.

Trierweiler’s career is now under the spotlight. When the political talk show she hosted on a cable television station was cancelled, Paris Match offered to pay her to, in effect, stay at home. She is resisting that plan angrily. In an interview with tomorrow’s Elle magazine, she says she would rather interview "foreign personalities" to keep "a proper distance" without "impeding François Hollande’s work".

But she will never be far away. On election night at the Place de la Bastille, it was she who ordered Hollande, whose style this definitely is not, to kiss her on the mouth, thus securing the perfect picture.

Trierweiler will make her international debut at next weekend’s G8 summit at Camp David in the US. At the time of writing, there is wild speculation that the president and his love might hastily get married this week. And live happily ever after, of course.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012