PARIS LETTER:With the French feeling frugal, aspirant leaders are vying to show how much they are down there with the people, writes RUADHÁN MAC CORMAIC
DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-Kahn’s supporters once worried that money was his Achilles’ heel. At a briefing with journalists around this time last year, the then head of the IMF listed it as one of three things (the others were “women” and “my Jewishness”) opponents would use against him in the French presidential election he was widely expected to contest.
The idea that his monied lifestyle could damage his chances seemed to be borne out in early May, when Strauss-Kahn and his wife were photographed stepping out of a €120,000 black Porsche near their luxury apartment in Paris.
The picture quickly made it onto the front pages and generated such a stir – playing as it did to critics’ claims that the socialist’s leftist credentials were suspect – that even his allies chastised him publicly for making such a blunder. Less than two weeks later, Strauss-Kahn was arrested on sexual assault charges in New York and his political career was over.
The episode of the black Porsche has receded from public memory, but it came to mind recently while listening to the debate provoked by a pledge from the socialist presidential candidate François Hollande to introduce a 75 per cent tax on incomes over €1 million. The tax is less about economics than symbolism.
It would affect just a few thousand people and make a relatively small contribution to the public accounts, but for Hollande it lays down a marker to show he is attuned to public anger over income disparity and bankers’ bonuses.
More importantly, it was designed as a political stratagem in the socialist’s duel with President Nicolas Sarkozy. It spoke to one of Sarkozy’s biggest vulnerabilities, which is the widespread perception that he is “the president of the rich”, a friend of millionaires whose government introduced tax breaks for the wealthy.
Every time Sarkozy argues against Hollande’s tax, he unwittingly reinforces the left’s depiction of his presidency. The result? In the week after the announcement, Hollande halted Sarkozy’s steady rise in the polls and a poll showed 61 per cent of voters agreed with his plan.
Politicians’ attitudes to money has become a theme of the campaign. Sarkozy is dogged by public opprobrium over how he celebrated his election win in 2007 by throwing a party for celebrity friends in Fouquet’s, an expensive restaurant on the Champs-Élysées, before taking a holiday aboard a yacht belonging to Vincent Bolloré, a wealthy businessman and friend.
For a candidate who claims he best grasps the concerns of ordinary people, this is a problem. Sarkozy has been aggressively fighting back, pointing out that Hollande also has wealthy backers – among them Pierre Bergé, who owns a stake in Le Monde– and announcing plans to raise taxes on company profits if he wins re-election. "We're modest people," the president's wife, Carla Bruni, protested last week.
For its part, the Socialist Party (PS) takes every opportunity to stress Hollande’s frugal lifestyle. He drives a scooter and has little interest in money, we are told.
“I don’t like the rich,” has gone down as one of Hollande’s best-known lines.
The reason for all of this is not hard to see. The equality principle has always run deep, but the economic crisis – bringing rising unemployment and a sense of diminishing purchasing power – has made voters ultra-sensitive to reminders of how remote their elite can be. French people are careful with their money. The country has some of the lowest rates of personal indebtedness in the developed world.
Any increase in gas prices is automatically the first item on the evening news. There’s not much money sitting around either: the average net salary is €19,270, and the wage gap has been increasing in recent years.
The left has gained from the tax debate, but in many ways its position is the most awkward. The leaders of the Socialist Party, like Sarkozy’s UMP party, are drawn largely from the ranks of a middle-class technocracy with urban, elite education backgrounds. The party lacks a trade union base.
The PS long ago reconciled itself with the logic of market capitalism; its leaders and senior officials move easily between highly paid jobs in the public and private sectors. Asceticism may be good politics, but Strauss-Kahn is far from being the only senior socialist with a lavish lifestyle. “On the left, we hide it; on the right, they flaunt it,” remarked Jean-Christophe Cambadélis of the PS.
Some extravagances are more damaging than others, however. In the hierarchy of provocation, owning a big, expensive car is deemed worse than having a palatial home, which is partly why luxury cars account for just 4 per cent of sales in France, compared to 8 per cent in Germany.
Auto-Journalrecently asked its readers which car each of the presidential candidates brought to mind. Hollande was a Renault Scénic – practical, consensual and not that original, the magazine commented. But Sarkozy would have had mixed feelings about the findings as well. He was a Porsche.