France/ Beware of the Red Mailman

ARTICLE   Category : English Defined tags for this entry: action directe, ahmadinejad, autain, besancenot, bove, castro, chavez, chevrier, cohn-bendit, communist, cuba, guevara, hulot, KGB, krivine, NPA, rouillan, sarkozy, terrorists, trotskyite Related entries by tags: Will Scandals Drown Democracy in France ? Europe/ And now, a French Spring... France/ Subliminal BHL French Jews/ No Future France/ Scènes de rue sous Hollande TOOLS   Comments (12) Trackbacks (0)  Send by e-mail

Nicolas Sarkozy's greatest stroke of luck so far in his brief tenure as president of France has been the disintegration of his principal opposition, the Socialist party.

In last year's election, Sarkozy defeated a charismatic, if somewhat eccentric, Socialist, Ségolène Royal, who took 47 percent of the vote. The week after the election, François Hollande, the Socialist party leader and the father of Royal's four children, separated from her--both personally and politically--and made it clear that he intended to be the party's next presidential candidate.

Royal wasn't having it. Not only would she run again, she insisted, but she would wrest the party apparatus away from Hollande. Bertrand Delanoë, the popular mayor of Paris, meanwhile declared his own candidacy (he describes himself as "socialiste et libéral," loosely translatable as "libertarian socialist"). Younger Socialist comers, like Pierre Moscovici, a former minister for European affairs, and Julien Dray, Royal's former éminence grise, stepped into the fray. Not to mention Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille, who, as minister for social affairs 10 years ago, masterminded the statute that makes it illegal in France to work more than 35 hours a week. While the Socialists can still win local elections--they creamed Sarkozy's party in municipal elections in March--they currently have no national leaders capable of prevailing in national elections, whether for president or parliament.

But what if another party of the left were to replace the Socialists, or even just give them some competition? Until recently, this would have seemed far-fetched. Not any more.
Meet Olivier Besancenot, the 34-year-old mailman and spokesman for the small Trotskyite Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) who has just emerged as the founder and leader of the New Anticapitalist party (le Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, NPA).

According to a recent OpinionWay/Le Figaro/LCI poll, 17 percent of the French are considering supporting him. Bertrand Delanoë gets only 13 percent, Ségolène Royal 9 percent. Among Socialist and other left-wing voters, Besancenot's rise is even more dramatic: Twenty-six percent already see him as the "best opposition leader," whereas Delanoë gets 19 percent, Socialist chairman François Hollande 10 percent, and Royal 9 percent. Moreover, 65 percent of all respondents say they have a "very positive" opinion of him.

The chief reason for Besancenot's popularity is that, like Barack Obama (to quote Michelle Obama), "he's cute." With his boyish face, broad smile, and big eyes, Besancenot appeals to his generational peers, women, and even older people, who tend to see him as their virtual son. This has not escaped the talk show hosts, who are eager to have him on the air as often as possible, as if he were a rock star or supermodel. (Incidentally, the same holds true on the right: Rama Yade, a lovely young woman of Senegalese descent, is one of the most popular and media-friendly ministers in the Sarkozy government.)

Another reason for Besancenot's popularity is that he is supposedly working class. He got a job with the French postal service in 1997, when he was 23. Technically, he still qualifies as a mailman and earns less than 1,200 euros a month. That allows him to dress casually when he's on TV, use down to earth language, and dismiss other guests as "members of the elite." In fact, though the public doesn't know it, this is largely a fraud.

Besancenot's popularity has already borne fruit: the transformation of the tiny LCR into the suddenly chic New Anticapitalist party. Pollsters say the NPA may draw from 10 to 20 percent of the vote. That would secure it a voice in local and regional assemblies and seats in the European parliament, though not necessarily a breakthrough to the French National Assembly, given the complexities of French electoral law. Much will depend on the NPA's long-term relationship with the Socialists.

For most of the 20th century, the French left was split between the Socialists, who remained committed to democracy and the rule of law, and the Communists (PC), who called for the dictatorship of the proletariat. After 1945, the Socialists supported NATO and European integration, whereas the Communists aligned themselves with the Soviet Union and resisted European unification as an "American capitalist plot."
The last great Socialist leader, François Mitterrand, although himself a moderate, if not a closet conservative, determined in the 1960s that the Socialists would have to enter a coalition with the Communists in order to win elections. The strategy worked beautifully in 1981, when Mitterrand was elected president and the Socialists secured a majority in the National Assembly.

But there was an unintended consequence: The Communist party, the junior partner in the government, started to erode. (It turns out you can't be a revolutionary party and a governing party at the same time.) The PC fell from 20 percent of the national vote to less than 5 percent today. Marie-George Buffet, the secretary general of the party, gets about 1 percent in the polls. Some former Communists have joined the Socialist party, but most true believers have opted for an array of far left groups: no less than three Trotskyite mini-parties, a chaotic Green party, and some other cult-like splinter organizations.

Clearly, Besancenot's aim is to reunite the former Communists and restore their political weight. He is getting support from all sides. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French-German icon of the 1968 student revolution in France and a leader of the German Green party, backs him. So does, apparently, Nicolas Hulot, the French Al Gore (a TV anchorman who launched a big "nonpolitical ecology awareness" movement two years ago). José Bové, the self-styled "organic farmer" who made his name attacking McDonald's, jumped on board too. Even more important, Clémentine Autain, once the great hope of the moribund Communist party and a feminist activist, has signed up with the NPA. And as for the recently paroled Jean-Marc Rouillan, the former head of Action Directe, a terrorist group responsible for several murders in the 1970s, Besancenot let it be known that the two had lunch together recently.

Politics being what it is, Besancenot's rise is seen for the moment as a plus by the Sarkozy camp. The president himself is reported to have described the New Anticapitalist party as "our own National Front trick." The reference is to the far-right National Front, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, which exerted undue influence in French politics from 1983 to 2007. While ostensibly anti-Socialist, the party actually helped the Socialists win elections by dividing and weakening the French right. It is widely believed that Mitterrand himself (who maintained ties with the far right throughout his career) engineered the whole thing, seeing to it that the National Front received help of many kinds and encouraging the media to cover it. What Sarkozy seems to be saying is that Besancenot's New Anticapitalists in turn will divide and weaken the French left, and thus help the right win the crucial 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections.

But Le Pen was never Mitterrand's poodle. Likewise, Besancenot is not going to be a Sarkozy man in partibus.Consider his actual, unauthorized biography.

First, he has no working class background at all. His parents were solidly middle class (his father was a high school teacher and his mother a school psychologist). He went to college--Nanterre University in Greater Paris--and earned an M.A. in contemporary history. He is first and foremost a Revolutionary Communist League apparatchik who joined the working class at the party's request, first as a supermarket warehouse worker and then as a mailman, in order to acquire the politically necessary proletarian credentials. Tellingly, he was co-opted to the LCR's Central Committee in 1996, before he went to work for the postal service.

Besancenot, moreover, never actually worked much as a mailman. Under French law, workers are entitled to long leaves, on full salary, if they serve as officers of unions or political parties. Besancenot is both. And he knows how to make the most of it. He has been on leave almost continuously, either as a union activist or as an LCR figure--assistant to an LCR member of the European Parliament, party spokesman, or presidential candidate. This was his real job, and it was much better paid than his nominal job at the postal service. As a European Parliament assistant, he apparently made 5,000 euros a month.

Besancenot's private life is even more intriguing. His early rise within the LCR was due in large measure to the fact that he was living with a daughter of Alain Krivine, the group's founder and head, who himself ran for president as a Trotskyite in 1969 and 1974. Besancenot later separated from her, but remained Krivine's protégé. Then he met his current companion, Stéphanie Chevrier. A radical activist, Chevrier, 38, is also a top editor at the publishing house Flammarion and reportedly makes 10,000 euros a month with numerous perks. She owns an apartment in Paris on the exclusive Left Bank, where she lives with Besancenot. Her contacts in the French media have apparently been crucial in her common-law husband's meteoric rise.

To whom--one may ask, then--do Krivine, Chevrier, and Besancenot ultimately answer?

From its very inception in the 1960s, Krivine's Revolutionary Communist League was closely tied to the Castro regime in Cuba. Today, Besancenot describes Cuba as a "truly progressive" society. He coauthored a book in praise of Che Guevara in 2007. Last spring, shortly before launching the NPA, he visited his "friends" in Havana, where he "met with various militants." On May 6, in an interview with Rouge, the LCR magazine, he praised the "internationalist" dimension of the Cuban Revolution.

Chevrier, too, has connections with the Cuban regime. After majoring in literary studies at the Sorbonne, she lived and traveled extensively in Latin America. Upon her return to France in the late 1990s, she continued to maintain close ties with Castroite intellectuals in Cuba, Latin America, and Europe and was actively involved with the Fondation Copernic, an anti-globalist think tank that paved the way for the NPA.

The Castro regime, of course, was a Soviet proxy for some 30 years, from the early 1960s to 1991. In the beginning, its main task was to help the KGB infiltrate New Left groups, including Trotskyite parties, both in Western countries and in the Third World, and to make sure they aligned themselves with the Soviet Union, not China. Later on, Cuba was assigned an even more ambitious mission: to supervise and coordinate guerrilla and terrorist networks, including Islamic networks, under KGB guidance.

The Soviet empire disintegrated in 1991. The KGB networks, however, have continued to operate, both inside and outside Russia. And Havana continues to serve as a capital in exile for many of them. This accounts for both the spread of Castroite regimes in Latin America in recent years and the consolidation of a global anti-Western alliance, from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. It may also explain the current attempts to resurrect hard left parties in Europe, whether Die Linke in Germany or the NPA in France. In any event, commenting on the recession in France last month, Besancenot expressed confidence that things were ripe once more for "good old revolution."

© Michel Gurfinkiel & The Weekly Standard, 2008