The other presidential contest

‘ARNAUD! ARNAUD!” comes the chant from the crowd of 800 supporters, their red-and-white flags swaying as if in sync with the booming music that heralds their man’s arrival on stage. From the throng steps Arnaud Montebourg, a tall, svelte 48-year-old with a sharp grey suit and an earnest smile. He waits for the applause to abate, soaking up the hall’s energy.

Over the next hour, Montebourg delivers the rousing campaign speech that has made him one of the revelations of the French Socialist Party’s primary season. He paints a bleak portrait of France as seen by the “victims of globalisation” – a place where factory workers live in fear of their employer moving to Asia, of supermarket cashiers who work alongside self-scanning machines that will soon take their jobs, of farmers struggling to make ends meet while watching the government reward the “new aristocracy” who run profligate banks. Schools are losing teachers, young people cannot find work.

He evokes with pride the generation that lifted France from its knees after the second World War. “They knew why they were working. They knew that for their children, it would be better than it had been for them. Today, people are making the effort, but they know it will be worse for their children than it was for them,” he says to more applause. “The march of progress has been interrupted.”

When polls open tomorrow in the first round of the Socialist Party’s presidential primary, voters will have a choice of six candidates who span the ideological spectrum of the main opposition party.

Montebourg is the most left-wing. He calls for “deglobalisation”, wants to ban banks speculating and favours “European protectionism” to help French manufacturers. His rallying call is for the creation of a sixth French republic that would make state institutions more transparent and accountable to citizens.

“He is the youngest candidate, and what he is saying about the financial crisis resonates for me. He is someone new on the political landscape of the left,” says Anthony Amato, a 26-year-old law student, as the crowd files out after the rally at the Espace Reuilly in Paris.

“People are painting a caricature of deglobalisation,” says Kadija Zaine, a 24-year-old student who, like Amato, is not a party member. “He is intelligent enough to know we can’t live in autarky in France. What he is proposing is to protect, to put in place a minimum of rules so that we can advance in a new way.”

Until a few weeks ago, Montebourg was one of the least known of the candidates. He is trailing in fourth place in the opinion polls and is unlikely to win. And yet his raucous campaign helps explain why the socialists are on a high going into tomorrow’s vote.

In recent weeks, as the six candidates have travelled across the country, big crowds have turned out to hear them set out their stalls. Their three television debates have each attracted up to five million viewers, helping the party set the news agenda. To general surprise and their own relief, the socialists have given up their habit of tearing each other apart in public. Instead, their debates have been civil and constructive.

A straight battle between three party elders – François Hollande, Martine Aubry and Ségolène Royal – has been refreshed by the presence of Montebourg and another relatively young contender, 49-year-old Manuel Valls, who represents the opposite ideological side of the party. Valls has cultivated an image as a hard-nosed, Blair-style realist who will act as “the guarantor of security”.

Then there’s the novelty of France’s first “citizens’ primary”. Anyone who pays €1 and signs a “charter of left-wing and republican values” is entitled to vote, giving the contest greater democratic legitimacy but also making it more unpredictable than previous ones, when only party members had a say. A turnout anywhere over a million would be considered a success for a party of about 100,000 members; Zaki Laïdi, a professor of politics at Sciences Po, the Institute of Political Studies, in Paris, believes it could be four times higher. “If it works well and there is no fraud, it would be an enormous achievement,” Laïdi says.

Hollande, having had a makeover and cultivated a solemn, presidential air, has annexed the centre ground vacated by the one-time front runner Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He has pitched himself as an “ordinary president” (in contrast to the flashy Sarkozy) and focuses on education and jobs for youths and older people.

Hollande holds a commanding 14-point lead over Aubry in the latest opinion polls, but she has grabbed attention with some eye-catching ideas in the closing days of the campaign. One was the announcement that she would scrap nuclear power – the source of 75 per cent of France’s electricity – altogether if she were president.

Having lost to Sarkozy in the 2007 election, Royal is looking for a second chance. Her strongest support is in urban working-class areas – half of all her canvassing has been done in the banlieues – but the fact that some of her signature ideas (including a national investment bank and a rule to make companies that outsource jobs pay back state aid) have been absorbed in the party manifesto makes her look less of an iconoclast.

AS ALWAYS INthe public psychodrama of Socialist Party politics, plots and subplots abound. Endless airtime has been filled scrutinising the awkward body language between Royal and Hollande, who have four children together but barely speak any more. "Can anyone point to anything he has achieved in his career?" Royal asked recently of the man who, unlike her, has never been a minister.

Clear policy differences separate the six candidates, but the contest has been striking for the general consensus on the major economic questions – not least the need to reduce France’s huge deficit – and how the candidates have clustered around the centre ground. Listen closely even to Arnaud Montebourg and his revolutionary rhetoric is tempered by lines such as: “Don’t be afraid. Enter history with me . . . We are capable, in a methodical, moderate, measured and thoughtful way, of pursuing a new path.”

“What happened was the financial crisis,” Laïdi remarks of the trend towards the centre. “That has shaped the debate in a new way. The traditional discrepancy between discourse and practice has been reduced because of the situation. The margin for manoeuvre is limited, but what is new is that the politicians know the people know they don’t have a lot of margin for manoeuvre. So the idea that we are going to dismantle market tyranny and things like that doesn’t work.”

The electoral calendar has keen kind to the Socialist Party. Last week, the left won a majority in the senate for the first time since 1958, wresting control of the upper house from Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party and completing an electoral clean sweep that has included huge wins at regional and municipal level since 2007. The government is mired in scandals, unemployment is chronically high and the president has struggled for two years to lift his approval ratings much beyond 30 per cent. Even a majority of his own party’s voters believe he will lose the 2012 election, a survey found this week.

And yet the Socialist Party’s candidate will meet huge obstacles in trying to become only the second left-wing president in the history of the current republic. Sarkozy is a formidable incumbent, one of the best campaigners of his generation. Right-wing parties have a majority, so if he can rally that support around – a big challenge, admittedly – he will win. And who is to say what the eurozone crisis will have done to his – and France’s – fortunes by next May? The opposition will also be alert to the danger of placing too much faith in opinion polls. Only twice in the past 50 years has the presidential candidate who led in the autumn ended up in the Élysée Palace in the spring.

The candidates

François Hollande

Whereas Nicolas Sarkozy is flashy, and friendly with millionaires, Hollande, who is 57, embraces his down-to-earth image and says he would be the “ordinary president” the French crave. Hollande, whose political base is rural Corrèze, says he will reduce the deficit more quickly than anyone else.

Martine Aubry

The mayor of Lille is running second to Hollande in the polls. As labour minister, Aubry, who is 60, played a leading role in the introduction of the 35-hour working week and oversaw a reduction in unemployment. Her father is Jacques Delors, the former president of the European Commission and a hero in the party. Aubry’s great passion is for the arts; she has helped turn Lille into an artistic hub and has pledged to double the culture ministry’s budget.

Ségolène Royal

Defeated by Nicolas Sarkozy for the presidency in 2007 and by Aubry for the party leadership, Royal, who is 57, is unpopular among senior colleagues but has a committed grassroots following and thrives as an insurgent. She champions green causes and open democracy, and cites successes on both issues as head of the western Poitou-Charentes region.

Manuel Valls

A naturalised French citizen (he was born in Spain) and the mayor of the Paris suburb of Evry, Valls, who is 49, is considered to be on the party’s right. His signature issues are crime and security. He says reducing the deficit would be his priority, and he generally seems to relish taking on the party’s sacred cows.

Arnaud Montebourg

Like Valls, Montebourg is relatively young, at 48. Unlike Valls, he is on the party’s far-left side. A deputy from eastern France, he wants “deglobalisation”, “new-wave protectionism” and a ban on banks speculating with customers’ money.

Jean-Michel Baylet

Leader of the small centrist Parti Radical de Gauche, the ebullient Baylet is a former government minister. The only non-Socialist lags far behind the others in the polls.