24 April 2012
France: Mr Normal Takes Charge
By Gwynne Dyer
“My true adversary does not have a name, a face or a party,” said Francois Hollande, France’s next president. “He never puts forth his candidacy, but nevertheless he governs. My true adversary is the world of finance.”
No other leader of a major power would dare say such a thing. If Hollande, who will be France’s first Socialist president in 17 years, simply defies “the markets”, they will certainly punish him and France severely. However, it remains to be seen how he plays his hand.
Hollande still has one hurdle to cross before he is officially president-elect, but he beat the incumbent president, Nicolas Sarkozy, even in the first round of voting last Sunday, when ten candidates were running. In the run-off vote on 6 May, the polls predict that he will trounce Sarkozy by a margin of 14-16 percent.
Hollande is a shoo-in because in the second round his centre-left party will collect almost all the votes of parties to the left of the Socialists, and also most of the votes of the centrist candidates. Sarkozy leads a centre-right party, but he has to pretend to be much harder right than he is for much the same reasons as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the United States.
If Sarkozy does not spout anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric, he will not even win over the 18 percent of French voters who backed the far-right National Front last Sunday. If he does talk like that, he will lose the swing voters in the centre – and he may still not get the endorsement of National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who reckons that if Sarkozy loses the presidency his party will disintegrate, making her own party the dominant force on the right.
So it will be President Hollande, who recently said that “if the markets are worried (by my policies), I will tell them here and now that I will leave them with no space to act.” Tough words, but what does “no space to act” actually mean? Does it mean anything at all? The markets don’t think so, which is why they did not go into meltdown as soon as Hollande’s election became a certainty.
Hollande is certainly tougher and smarter than the “Mr Normal” who he claims to be. His calm, modest manner presents a striking contrast to the hyperactivity, bad temper and sheer bling of Nicolas Sarkozy, but he graduated from France’s most respected post-graduate school for high flyers, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and he has been in politics for more than thirty years.
For over a decade he was the leader of the famously fractious Socialist Party, and was nicknamed “Meccano-builder” for his ability to bridge the endless personal and ideological disputes, a process he once likened to picking up dog turds. And he has not promised French voters the moon.
What Hollande has actually promised is slightly less austerity than Sarkozy. He will balance the French budget by 2017, rather than 2016. For symbolism’s sake he will introduce a new 75 percent income tax band for people who earn more than a million euros, but he understands that bringing the budget deficit under control must be accomplished mainly by cutting spending, not raising taxes.
The markets will not have it any other way, and they have France in a corner. In order to cover the interest on its existing debt plus this year’s budget deficit, France must borrow almost one-fifth of its entire Gross Domestic Product this year, and the same again next year. Most of that enormous sum must be borrowed from foreign lenders, so Hollande cannot afford to frighten them by radically changing the austerity policy he inherits from Sarkozy.
He says what he must to get elected, but in office Mr Normal is likely to conduct business as usual – or at least, that is what the markets think. It may be too simplistic a view. Hollande doesn’t agree with the current European orthodoxy, because it has put the eurozone (the 17 out of 27 European Union members that use the euro “single currency”) into an economic death-spiral.
Germany’s huge and healthy economy gives it the whip-hand in the eurozone. Berlin insists on savage austerity measures by EU member governments to bring their budgets back into balance, but if the austerity is so extreme that it kills economic growth, then the budgets will never balance. Hollande argues that growth, especially in the form of big infrastructure projects, must be stimulated by easier credit even while budgets are still in deficit.
Many European leaders agree, as do outside observers like Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who said recently that Europe would “commit suicide” if it did not add reflationary policies to strict budget discipline. Hollande will not start printing money right away, because the euro means he cannot, but he is certainly going to argue for “quantitative easing” (as we now call reflation).
Without openly defying Berlin, he is likely to become a rallying point for Europeans (and there are a great many of them) who believe that the eurozone will never solve its crisis without economic growth in other countries besides Germany. “Change in France will allow Europe to shift direction,” he says. He may be right.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 4 and 5. (“Hollande is…right”)
13 March 2012
Sarkozy’s Last Stand
By Gwynne Dyer
Faced with renewed allegations that Muammar Gaddafi had poured up to fifty million euros into his presidential campaign in 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally lost it. “If he did (finance my election), I wasn’t very grateful,” he snapped on prime-time television.
Sarkozy, after all, was the prime mover of the bombing campaign that brought Gaddafi down, while the man who made the original accusation during that war was Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the late Libyan dictator’s son and hardly an impartial witness. It was mainly a measure of how much Sarkozy is disliked in France that he had to go on major French television channels once again last week to deny the eight-month-old story.
Plausible or not, many people want to believe the story because it provides a rational basis for their loathing of the man. And Sarkozy’s own behaviour, as he flails around with growing desperation for some new policy that will bring the voters back to his side, is equally unattractive.
His latest proposal, made last Tuesday, was to cancel the Schengen Agreement, the treaty that provides for freedom of movement within the European Union. Unless the EU as a whole agrees within a year to cut drastically the number of foreigners allowed to settle within its boundaries, he said, France will leave the treaty and reimpose its own border controls.
Sarkozy, whose own ancestors were Hungarian and Greek immigrants, was aiming this policy directly at France’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim voters, but it is unlikely to woo them away from the real neo-fascist party in the country. Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, immediately replied by promising to cut immigration by 95 percent, and for good measure added a promise to quit the common European currency, the euro.
Meanwhile Francois Hollande, the Socialist leader, cruises towards what seems like an inevitable victory in next month’s presidential election despite the fact that he has never held any high government office. Everybody agrees that he is a very nice man, but he would never have got the Socialist nomination if Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the World Bank, had not ruined his chances by getting caught up in several sex scandals.
It’s odd that the polls should be predicting that Hollande will win the election, given that he is an old-fashioned tax-and-spend socialist in a time of financial crisis when most French voters, rightly or wrongly, think the solution is spending cuts and balanced budgets. Being a lifelong party apparatchik doesn’t win him many points either. The only rational explanation is that he is benefiting from the anybody-but-Sarkozy mood of the electorate.
Sarkozy can be cruel about Hollande, comparing him to a sugar cube: it looks solid, but put it in water and it will dissolve to nothing. But that’s no more cruel than the French public’s assessment of Sarkozy himself. He is generally seen as a flashy, fast-talking salesman who lacks the gravity to be president, and whose promises to make France a more competitive, more prosperous society have all come to naught.
A fair person might argue that Sarkozy’s inability to transform France is not really his fault, since he entered office just before the financial collapse of 2008 wrecked everybody’s big plans, including his. But politics is not about fairness, and in the popular view his administration has been a failure.
Then there’s Francois Bayrou, a perennial presidential candidate whose main attraction is that he is none of the above. Every party he ever led – and he has led quite a few in his career – eventually collapsed because he couldn’t get along with the members. He’s pro-European, orthodox in economics, but with a social conscience – the ideal centrist. But he has never won more than 18 percent of the popular vote, and this time he’s sitting at 13 percent.
Marine Le Pen, for all her success in softening the image of the National Front, is only predicted to win 16 percent of the vote in the latest poll, so it comes down to a two-horse race: Hollande vs. Sarkozy. They will be the top two candidates who go through to the all-important second round on 6 May – and then Sarkozy will almost certainly lose.
In the first round of voting, a four-way race, neither Sarkozy nor Hollande is likely to get more than 30 percent of the vote. (Currently, each man is predicted to win 28 percent.) But when every other candidate’s votes must go to one of the two leading candidates in the second round, Francois Hollande wins hands down. No opinion poll this year has given Hollande less than 54 percent of the vote in the run-off, and some have given him as much as 60 percent.
Nicolas Sarkozy is a formidable campaigner, but this is a gap that is almost impossible to close in the time that remains. France is going to have a Socialist president for only the second time in the history of the Fifth Republic.
23 January 2012
Sucking Up To Armenians
By Gwynne Dyer
I go to France quite often, but after this article is published, I may be liable to arrest if I set foot in the country.
The French parliament has just passed a bill, proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, that will make it a crime to question whether the Armenian massacres in eastern Turkey in 1915 qualified as a genocide. Sarkozy will doubtless sign it into law next month, just in time for the presidential elections.
It won’t just be a crime in France to deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians, perhaps as many as a million, were killed in eastern Anatolia in 1915, and that it was the responsibility of the Turkish state. That is a historical fact, and only fools, knaves and Turkish ultra-nationalists deny it. It will also be a crime, punishable by one year in prison and a fine of up to 45,000 euros ($58,000), even to question the use of the word “genocide.”
“Genocide” doesn’t just mean killing a lot of people, even a lot of civilians. If it did, then the United States would be guilty of genocide because of Hiroshima. Genocide is a deliberate attempt to wipe out much or all of a specific ethnic, linguistic or religious group.
Words matter. The descendants of the Armenians who were killed in 1915, most of whom now live in Lebanon, France, or the United States, desperately want what happened to their great-grandparents to be defined as a genocide and not just a calamity of war. They have even been accused of “Holocaust envy”: the belief that they are being short-changed if the Armenian tragedy is not given the same status as the Nazi genocide of the European Jews.
The state of Israel, interestingly, has never been comfortable with this claim, and avoids the word “genocide” when discussing the massacre of the Armenians in 1915.
Of course, this might just be a Jewish desire to ensure that no other group’s tragedy is seen as comparable to that of the European Jews. But there are concrete reasons for the Israeli unease with the simple equation: Jewish holocaust = Armenian genocide.
About half of the Jewish population of Europe in 1939 was dead by 1945; about half of the Armenians living in eastern Turkey in 1914 were dead by 1918. But what distinguishes the Holocaust from most other atrocities is not the number of deaths, or even the proportion of the population that was killed. It is the motivation behind the killings.
The European Jews were killed as an act of deliberate German policy: a peaceful civilian population was rounded up and transported to camps where they were systematically murdered. What happened to the Armenians of Turkey was less systematic, and probably unplanned.
There is no equivalent in Turkish history to the Wannsee conference of January, 1942 at which the Nazis planned the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” The mass deportation of Armenians in the First World War, during which hundreds of thousands of them died, took place as Russian troops invaded eastern Anatolia and Armenian revolutionary groups staged uprisings in support of them.
The Armenian uprisings of 1915 were tiny and ineffectual, but the Dashnak and Hnchak revolutionaries had indeed been conspiring with both the Russians and the British to support planned invasions of eastern Anatolia. The British attack was switched west to the Dardanelles quite late in the planning process, but the Russian offensive actually happened.
The Turkish government was panicked by the uprisings behind the front and ordered the mass deportation of the civilian Armenian population to Syria. Regular Turkish troops could not be spared from the fighting, so most of the job of “guarding” the columns of Armenian deportees marching through the mountains to Syria was given to Kurdish tribesmen, who proceeded to rob, rape and murder them in huge numbers.
But Armenian civilians living in the cities of western Turkey were not massacred or deported in 1915. Many Armenians in eastern Turkey who were rich enough to buy train tickets to Syria only had to walk where the tracks had not yet been laid. Most of the Armenians who made it to Syria alive were held in camps there, but they were not murdered and burned in ovens. It was horrible, but does it qualify as a case of genocide?
Successive Turkish governments have undermined their own case by insisting that it didn’t happen at all. That is dishonest and stupid. There were certainly horrendous massacres, though the exact numbers of dead cannot be known. However, the use of the word “genocide” remains open to question – but it will soon be a criminal offence in France to say so.
Have the French politicians gone mad? Not at all. It’s election time, and there are half a million voters of Armenian descent in France.
The Armenian massacres were officially recognised as a genocide in France just before the 2001 elections. A law criminalising any questioning of that definition was passed by the National Assembly just before the 2007 elections, but narrowly rejected by the Senate. This time it made it through the Senate, too. So if you’re in France, watch what you say.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6, 7 and 9. (“The state…genocide”; and “The European…unplanned”)
3 October 2011
The Heritage of the Monsters
By Gwynne Dyer
They didn’t invite the city fathers of Ferrol, the birthplace of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the bloody tyrant who ruled Spain from 1938 to 1973, so the conference can’t just have been about fascist dictators. They didn’t invite the mayor of Tokyo, home-town of General Hideki Tojo, who led Japan into the Second World War, so it wasn’t just about bad men who were leaders in that war. So what WAS it about?
According to Johannes Waidbacher, mayor of the Austrian city of Braunau that hosted the “Contemporary History Days” conference, it has always been about how to deal with the legacy of living in the city where Adolf Hitler was born and grew up. This is the twentieth year that Braunau has held the conference, and they still don’t have a good answer. But this year, at least, they came up with a different way of asking the question.
In addition to academics reading papers like “From the burden to the place of learning: Dachau and contemporary history,” they invited notables to represent the home towns of Mussolini and Stalin: Mayor Giorgio Frassinetti of the central Italian town of Predappio and Dr. Lasha Bakradze, Head of the Literature Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia. The idea was that they could all commiserate about the moral burden of living in a town that nurtured a tyrant.
By the way, if you are about to protest that the only Lasha Bakradze you’ve ever heard of is a Georgian actor known for such fine films as “The Aviatrix of Kazbek” (2010), don’t come to me for help. Maybe there are two of them. It doesn’t matter. The point is that neither the Lasha Bakradze we all know and love nor Dr Lasha Bakradze, head of the Literature Museum in Tbilisi, actually comes from Gori, where Stalin grew up.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t get any official from Gori to come. The good burghers of Braunau may writhe with guilt about their city’s heritage – “If, like me, you live in a town which is synonymous with Hitler, it becomes unbearable,” said local historian Florian Kotanko – but the citizens of Gori are not in the least embarrassed about having unleashed Stalin (born Ioseb Jughashvili) on the world. In fact, they’re proud of it.
The Stalin Museum on the centre of town is the main tourist attraction, and until last year a very large statue of the Soviet dictator and mass murderer stood in front of the City Hall. (It has now been moved to the museum.) You can visit Stalin’s armoured railway carriage, see the wooden hut where he was born, spend hours immersed in Stalin memorabilia. Stalin is doing more for the city in death than he ever did in life.
As for Predappio, the left-wing mayor of that town did go to Braunau, declaring that places where dictators were born should be “on the front line of democracy,” but most of his fellow-citizens don’t seem to agree. In fact they have turned Predappio into an open-air memorial to Benito Mussolini.
There are shops selling “cute little trinkets and souvenirs such as Nazi flags, white-power wine, Hitler snow globes, or Mussolini batons with which to hit people,” as a tourist blog puts it. The highlight of the tour is a visit to Mussolini’s private residence, built after the Italian dictator seized control of the whole country in 1922. Italian fascists go to Predappio each year to commemorate the “March on Rome” that brought him to power.
So full marks to Braunau for trying, but the Austrians (and the Germans) really are the exceptions. Even more Russians than Georgians think that Stalin was a great man, despite the tens of millions of deaths he caused. Most Italians don’t feel apologetic about Mussolini. Napoleon, who was just as murderously thuggish, is positively venerated by the French. And one of the most popular boys’ names in Turkish is Cengiz (as in Genghis Khan).
It would be nice if people remembered what the killers and tyrants in their national past were really like, but they don’t. The English know all about Henry VIII’s wife-killing habits, but he is not regularly condemned as a merciless tyrant. As for Mao, the greatest killer since Genghis Khan, the Communist Party says he was “three parts bad, seven parts good,” and most Chinese accept that judgement.
Relax. It’s not worth getting excited about. Nobody in Russia is sending millions to their deaths today. France is not ruled by a dictator, and neither is Italy (although it is currently ruled by a crook who is also a fool). The Turks are not racing across the steppes on horseback massacring captured cities as they go, and Queen Elizabeth II has shown great forbearance in not murdering her spouse.
It’s not how people see their history that matters. The particular horrors of the Holocaust have forced the Germans and Austrians to face up to their recent past more honestly, but most people, most of the time, prefer the sugar-coated version. And yet they do care about democracy, and they really don’t think that mass killing is okay.
Most countries have a delusional relationship with their national history, but the world really is more democratic than it has ever been. And less violent, too, though you’d never know it from watching the news.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 4 and 12. (“By the way…grew up”; and “It’s…okay”)