French voters tell leaders to get local and get real
By Tom Heneghan
PARIS (Reuters): Life is getting tough for French politicians. Being a buddy of the president or a big cheese in Paris no longer carries as much weight as a job well done for the voters back home.
That was the main message -- no surprise elsewhere but a bombshell in a country as centralized as France -- coming through the mixed signals that voters sent in the first round of the country's municipal elections on Sunday.
Neither conservative President Jacques Chirac nor Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin could help their parties much in the nationwide elections. Voters brutally snubbed several cabinet ministers trying to pick up a mayor's job on the side.
Whether in Paris or in the provinces, the front runners after the first round were mostly grassroots candidates with no national ambitions or incumbents who work hard for their city.
Even Francois Hollande, the Paris-based Socialist Party chairman who bucked the trend by winning in the central town of Tulle, said the vote was "a lesson in modesty for all of us".
The trend, if confirmed in next Sunday's run-off, could accelerate France's slow turn towards decentralization and undermine "accumulation", the traditional practice of combining two or three elected offices at local and national levels.
The daily Le Monde said the French had cast "a massive vote in favor of decentralization" and refused to let the Paris political elite "run off with their city halls".
French politicians have long exercised power at both the national and local levels. Ministers run for mayor saying they also want "local grounding", while provincial stars argue they need a job in Paris too to help pull strings for their towns.
Sensing voter frustration with this double dipping, Jospin forced his cabinet members to hang up their mayor's sashes when the left-wing coalition took power in 1997.
Opinion polls showed that voters appreciated the new style and hoped their mayor -- a key post in France since there are no powerful states or governors between the grass roots and Paris -- would devote more time to city hall.
Despite Jospin's misgivings, 27 of his 33 ministers decided to run for local office, several of them openly saying or hinting they would keep any second job they won.
Most of these "Paris parachutes" will not have the choice. Leading cabinet figures such as Labor Minister Elisabeth Guigou, Transport Minister Jean-Claude Gayssot, Environment Minister Dominique Voynet and European Affairs Minister Pierre Moscovici all ran sorry seconds to local right-wing incumbents.
Avignon Mayor Marie-Josee Roig taunted Guigou for thinking she could run the southern city while holding a cabinet post.
"Madame Guigou told the people of Avignon: 'Vote for me because I am a minister and, from time to time, I will come and visit you good people'," she hammered away at her rallies.
The local card played well in varied situations. Alain Juppe, who has devoted much more time to Bordeaux since his hapless stint as Chirac's first prime minister from 1995 to 1997, was re- elected mayor there easily.
The trend is visible in Paris itself. Bertrand Delanoe, the unexciting Socialist set to win city hall, is such a low-profile local politician that he was almost unknown a few months ago.
His main rival, Philippe Seguin, is a former social affairs minister, National Assembly speaker and head of Chirac's RPR party who hoped in vain that his national reputation would help him bulldoze his way to the top of Paris politics.
"He should go back where he came from" was a frequent remark about Seguin, who was also mayor of the eastern town of Epinal.
Outside the capital, the left's best hopes for big gains were in Lyon and Toulouse, two cities where they fielded local leaders with few pretensions to continuing careers in Paris.
All this should be grist for the mills of Jospin advisers who want him to take a bolder stand on decentralizing France in his campaign for the presidency next year.
His plan to grant limited autonomy to the Mediterranean island of Corsica has run into controversy but another recent reform -- one merging some cities and their suburbs into large "urban communities" -- is quietly forming new power centres.
"This was a warning to all candidates for the presidential election -- you have to be more daring about decentralization," Liberation editor-in-chief Serge July wrote.