France’s comeback kid
France
European Voice Staff
WHICH ever way you look at it, it was a remarkable comeback.
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POLITICO
French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s decision to appoint as his new finance minister a man who was not only his political nemesis but was also at the centre of one of the worst public health scandals France has ever seen raised eyebrows across Europe.

Jospin took a considerable risk when he chose Laurent Fabius to head a ministry which had been drifting rudderless ever since his brilliant lieutenant Dominique Strauss-Kahn was forced to quit last year amid allegations over his role in a financial scandal at one of France’s largest student organisations.

When his successor Christian Sautter resigned after a row with Jospin, the French premier began casting around for a replacement. He gambled that by choosing a political heavyweight to take up the reins at the huge finance ministry building on the banks of the Seine at Bercy, he would convince both a domestic and a European audience that he is serious about introducing much-needed economic reforms.

Fabius was not, however, Jospin’s first choice to take over at Bercy. He had hoped that Martine Aubry – the current labour minister and daughter of former European Commission President Jacques Delors – would fill the post. But Aubry wanted the freedom to stand for election as the mayor of Lille in France’s forthcoming municipal polls and said she would not be prepared to stay at the finance ministry until the current government’s term of office ends in 2002.

With Aubry out of the running, Jospin reasoned that Fabius was the only really ‘meaty’ candidate at his disposal.

Between 1984 and 1986, Fabius was the fifth republic’s youngest ever prime minister and he was regarded as one of the most brilliant members of any of the governments appointed by the late French President François Mitterrand.

He is also seen as the nearest thing France has to the sort of ‘third way’ market-friendly Socialism championed by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Fabius is openly in favour of tax cuts, has hinted that he may consider selling off more of the state’s shares in national enterprises such as France Télécom and has been markedly less hostile than most of his Socialist counterparts to allowing companies to reward employees with stock-options.

“I am a man of the left, everybody knows that,” he said recently. “However, I think the left has no reason to mistrust the market.”

One of the things Jospin hopes Fabius will be able to do is complete a series of reforms of the country’s tax-collection system aimed at introducing a ‘one-stop-shop’ system for people dealing with the tax authorities.

Initial efforts to introduce the changes were put on hold after Sautter sparked a nationwide wave of strikes because, critics argued, he failed to consult adequately with France’s powerful trade unions over the reforms.

On the European stage, Jospin is looking to Fabius to bring France’s economy into line with the wide-ranging economic reforms called for at last month’s special EU summit in Lisbon. As the influential French magazine Le Point put it recently, Fabius “only needs to read the conclusions of the Lisbon European Council” to see what his new boss expects of him.

At Lisbon, Union governments pledged to speed up structural reforms to encourage competitiveness and innovation, fully liberalise the telecoms sector by the end of 2001 and reduce bureaucratic and financial burdens on businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises.

Fabius has already made it clear that he wants to see taxes reduced in France as soon as possible and made his views on the issue very clear in a newspaper interview published last year. “The left faces no great risk of being beaten by the right, but it could be beaten by taxes and social charges,” he warned.

Faced with such obviously pro-market rhetoric, the business community’s initial response to Fabius’ arrival at Bercy has been unsurprisingly positive. “It is good news because he wants to liberalise the economy and he has a very good understanding of what the market economy is about,” said Eric Chaney, an economist with Morgan Stanley shortly after Fabius’ appointment was announced. “The balance had swung back dramatically to the traditional left. This could move France back towards greater balance.”

Other analysts were similarly upbeat. “This is in line with what happened in Lisbon,” said Crédit Lyonnais economist Hervé Goulletquer.

But while Fabius’ supporters see the new finance minister as the great hope for the French government, there is no getting away from the fact that in the eyes of the general public, he is severely tainted.

To begin with, the simple fact that he is so closely associated with Mitterrand does him no favours. Since his death, the former president’s self-created image as one of France’s great statesman has been seriously questioned. Several books and newspaper articles have highlighted the fact that Mitterrand worked for the collaborationist Vichy government during the last war and that he remained close to convicted war criminal Maurice Papon for most of his life. In addition, Mitterrand has been widely criticised post-humously for the fact that he kept the extent of the illness which eventually killed him – prostate cancer – secret for most of his time in office, even going so far as to falsify the regular medical bulletins he presented to the French press.

But the new finance minister’s greatest weak point is, without any shadow of a doubt, his role in France’s infamous contaminated blood scandal which, during Fabius’ time as prime minister, saw more than 600 haemophiliacs die after receiving transfusions contaminated with the AIDS virus.

When the scandal broke, critics argued that the Fabius government did not act quickly enough on the information made available to it about the danger of the contaminated blood stocks. Fabius and two of his former ministers faced criminal proceedings over the scandal and, although the former premier was finally acquitted last year of the manslaughter charges brought against him, he will be forever associated with the sordid episode.

But Fabius’ connection with the haemophilia scandal is not the only bad blood which could cause problems for the new Jospin team. Despite the strenuous efforts made by both Fabius and Jospin to persuade the public that they are eager to work together, the reality is that – rather like UK Prime Minister Tony Brown and his economics supremo Gordon Brown – the two men cannot stand each other.

The animosity between them, which certain commentators still refer to as “mutual hatred”, can be traced back to a particularly fractious meeting of the French Socialist Party which took place in the Breton capital of Rennes in 1990.

At the now-infamous ‘Rennes Congress’, both men stood for election to the party leadership and Jospin won – his victory based on a pledge to distance the party from a wave of scandals which had engulfed it during Mitterrand’s presidency.

Fabius was furious with the result as it effectively prevented him from becoming the Socialists’ chosen candidate for the 1995 presidential elections, and he never forgave Jospin for what he saw as the latter’s treachery.

He made the depth of his hatred clear in the original draft of his 1995 book The Wounds of Truth. “It will end when one of us is dead,” he wrote of his feud with the future prime minister.

Although this somewhat melodramatic statement was toned down when the book was finally published, it remains to be seen how supportive the new finance minister will be when Jospin announces his own bid for the presidency in 2002.

BIO

20 August 1946: Born in Paris