François Fillon, a long-time political insider, has secured the French centre-right presidential nomination. He won a resounding 67 per cent of the vote in the primary contest on November 27, beating his more centrist rival Alain Juppé, the former prime minister and current mayor of Bordeaux.
Some 4.5 million people turned out to pick up the Republican nominee for next year’s presidential election. All registered voters were allowed to take part in France’s first-ever Republican primary, provided they paid 2 euro and signed a charter stating that they agreed with centre-right values.
Mr Fillon unexpectedly won the first round of the centre-right primary on November 20, pushing Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president, into third place and out of the contest.
After almost five years in power, the Socialist party is weak and in disarray, with President François Hollande’s approval rating at just 4 per cent in one recent poll. No candidate on the left is expected to gather enough support to make it to the presidential run-off in May. Mr Fillon will almost certainly enter the second round of voting against Marine Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigration, anti-EU National Front (FN) party, who wants to hold a referendum on leaving the EU. The Republican nominee is widely expected to win the presidency with the support of mainstream voters from the left and the right.
Mr Fillon advocates pro-business policies and traditional views on social issues. His platform resonates with socially conservative voters, who judged Mr Juppé too lenient towards immigrants and too moderate in his views on issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion. Mr Fillon has promised to shrink France’s public spending bill, which consumes 57 per cent of GDP, by 100 billion euro and cut 500,000 civil-service jobs over his five-year term, scrap the 35-hour standard working week as early as next year, gradually increase the retirement age to 65, and rewrite the country’s 3,000-page labour code. He proposes 40 billion euro in corporate tax breaks and wants to end to the unpopular wealth tax. Mr Juppé criticised his opponent’s plan of public spending cuts as unfair to more vulnerable people.
Mr Fillon is willing to negotiate with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and favours lifting economic sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia for the 2014 annexation of Crimea and its role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. His calls for a crackdown on immigration and a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin’s Russia as well as his tough stance on Islam could win back a large portion of voters, who have flocked to the far-right FN in protest. With his market-friendly program, however, he is unlikely to convince lower earning blue-collar workers from declining industrial areas to rally behind him against Ms Le Pen.
France’s successive presidents on the left and the right have failed to revive the eurozone’s second-largest economy and curb unemployment, which remains at double digits, above the EU average. GDP expanded 0.2 per cent in the third quarter after shrinking in the previous three-month period, according to the national statistics office Insee. Consumer spending was flat for the second straight quarter. Trade subtracted 0.5 percentage points from overall growth. The third-quarter GDP figures will make it more difficult for the Socialist government to achieve its 2016 growth target of 1.5 per cent.
photo: Fondapol – Fondation pour l’innovation politique
