French PM's credibility may be first casualty

A chaotic fraternity of hauliers, farmers, taxi and ambulance drivers blockading French oil facilities has all but paralysed the world's fourth economic power. But the first casualty of the protests against high fuel prices is likely to be the credibility of the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin.

In the midst of the social crisis, a political revolt by the long-suffering Greens - an integral part of Mr Jospin's "plural left" coalition - nearly finished off the Jospin premiership. The 43-year-old minister for the environment and Greens party leader Dominique Voynet almost resigned after accusing the government of destroying three years of environmental policy in one night.

Although Ms Voynet decided to stay in the coalition, she has put her boss Mr Jospin on probation.

For days, Mr Jospin chose to lie low, making no public statements and entrusting negotiations to his agriculture and transport ministers. When he finally emerged from the Matignon Palace it was to deliver a hollow-sounding ultimatum: the government would go no further; it would not negotiate any more.

The declaration would have been more convincing had the government not already made huge concessions to the fishermen and a generous - but rejected - offer to the hauliers. And after refusing to return a few telephone calls, Mr Jospin's ministers were engaged in more overnight sessions 24 hours later.

Three years in power seem to have worn Mr Jospin down. When faced with his first lorry drivers' strike in November 1997, the prime minister set up a "crisis cell" at Matignon, which he directed himself, sending riot police to critical road junctions so they could not be blockaded. This time, Mr Jospin is weary.

Political commentators have begun to speak of the "Juppe syndrome", after Mr Jospin's predecessor Alain Juppe, who never recovered politically from protracted transport and public sector strikes in 1995 and 1996. But there is one important difference between Jospin and Juppe. Mr Juppe governed during a recession, when joblessness was over 12 per cent. It was his attempt to impose austerity measures and reform the French social security and retirement systems that did for him.

Mr Jospin, on the other hand, has been the beneficiary of falling unemployment and an economic recovery that enabled his finance minister to announce Ffr120 billion in tax reductions on August 31st. It takes particular ineptitude to make a mess of such good fortune.

But over the past 10 months, Mr Jospin has accumulated a string of mishaps, most due to his poor grasp of public relations. He has lost three close friends as cabinet ministers. His government at first tried to keep news of the cagnotte or windfall budget surpluses secret in late 1999, then presented it as if it were a problem. On a visit to Israel last winter, Mr Jospin gave the impression of infringing on President Chirac's foreign policy preserve and angered France's Arab allies by calling the Lebanese Hizbullah "terrorists". He was forced to reshuffle his cabinet and scupper a tax reform after tax inspectors went on strike. Last month, Mr Jospin's ill-explained autonomy plan for Corsica led to the resignation of his interior minister and turned a significant percentage of the electorate against him.

Then he got hit with the fishermen's blockade, followed by this week's everybody-on-the-bandwagon fuel protests. Ironically, Mr Jospin on Wednesday became a de facto ally of Ernest-Antoine Seilliere, the aristocratic president of the business management association MEDEF. Mr Seilliere echoed Mr Jospin's tough-sounding talk of the previous evening, saying the protests were seriously damaging the French economy and that the fuel blockades had to stop.

At the same time, the harshest criticism came from within Mr Jospin's own camp. The left-wing dailies Le Monde and Liberation excoriated his "fireman" approach to the crisis and said the tax give-back and fishermen's settlement of the previous week merely whetted the appetites of the hauliers, farmers, taxi-drivers and others.

That point of view was shared by Mr Jospin's two cabinet ministers from the Greens party. The Greens' leader Ms Voynet, a medical doctor by training, had swallowed her pride and bit her tongue the previous week when the finance minister did away with the auto registration sticker - all measures that discourage the use of cars are supported by the Greens - and suspended the "Voynet tax" increase for the year 2001.

The "Voynet tax" has been a major grievance for the hauliers. When Mr Jospin came to power in 1997, he promised to enact "ecological taxation" that would promote a shift from lorry traffic to the railways, explore alternative energy sources and discourage the use of the most polluting fuels, especially diesel.

In 1998, Ms Voynet obtained a seven centime per litre annual increase in the tax on diesel, which was intended to bring the cost of diesel in line with that of less polluting petrol and diesel prices elsewhere in Europe.

Ms Voynet has been burned in effigy by French hunters. Rampaging farmers were never punished for sacking her ministerial office. She has bravely and publicly clashed with fellow ministers over issues including immigration, the building of highways and genetically-modified food.

But nothing had enraged the French environment minister as much as the live news broadcast she watched in her office in the early hours of Wednesday. Rene Petit, the president of the FNTR hauliers' federation, came out of the transport ministry to announce a tentative (and later failed) accord. For the previous 24 hours, Ms Voynet's staff had telephoned Matignon and the transport ministry, trying to find out what was going on. Their offers of advice on the consequences of lowering fuel taxes were shunned and they were given contradictory information.

Then Mr Petit emerged, bleary-eyed after 12 hours of haggling to say lorry drivers would be permanently exempted from the "Voynet tax" on diesel. One of the Greens' chief achievements in government was "null and void", the hauliers' representative said.

Ms Voynet had not even been consulted. She convened the Greens' other minister and five parliamentary deputies for dinner at the environment ministry the following evening to discuss her resignation. If the Greens slammed the door, French commentators predicted, the Jospin government could not survive long. The Greens decided to stay, prompting one snide cabinet minister to repeat Roosevelt's quote about US Supreme Court judges: "They never resign and they rarely die."

But the ecologists' party is determined to make the prime minister pay for relenting on fuel taxes. Ms Voynet published an opinion piece in Le Monde in which she lambasted the government's "schizophrenic" energy policy. She drafted a long letter to Mr Jospin, demanding a meeting and listing her pet causes: shutting down the nuclear reprocessing plant at La Hague, developing renewable sources of energy, taxing sources of pollution, the moratorium on GMOs and banning a third Paris airport.

Ms Voynet and Mr Jospin are to attend a meeting on the greenhouse effect in Lyon together on Monday, where Ms Voynet says the prime minister's performance "promises to be delicate". She feels vindicated by the present crisis. "When fuel was cheap," she wrote in Le Monde, "we constantly explained that because of the foreseeable rarity of the resource, rising demand due to economic growth . . . and the interests of oil-producing countries . . . the increase in the price of fossil fuels was inevitable . . . The exception is not the barrel of oil at $30 - it's the $10 barrel."

But the energy crisis is likely to create another dilemma for Ms Voynet. Eighty per cent of France's electricity comes from nuclear power. This saves France 100 million tonnes of oil each year - the equivalent of Kuwait's annual production. Thanks to nuclear power, rising fuel costs have not affected French electricity bills. One of the Greens' main victories was obtaining the shutdown of the Superphenix breeder reactor in 1997. With oil at $34 per barrel, Ms Voynet will find it hard to fight the nuclear lobby.