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Surprise duo in France’s rightwing primary runoff

Former prime minister Francois Fillon's stunning upset in France's rightwing primary set up a run-off duel with another ex-premier, Alain Juppe, that is widely expected to decide the country's next leader.

Published: 21 November 2016 08:14 CET
Surprise duo in France's rightwing primary runoff
Juppe, left, and Fillon. Photo: AFP
By leap-frogging to first place in the first round of the primary, Fillon caused the elimination from the nominating contest of his former boss, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy.
   
Following are profiles of the two men who will contest next Sunday's runoff:
 
Francois Fillon 
 
The pro-business, reform-minded Fillon, 62, has campaigned as a compromise candidate, with more bite than the moderate Juppé but less punch than the pugnacious Sarkozy.
   
As premier under Sarkozy from 2007 to 2012, Fillon's unflappable demeanourmade him an antidote to his frenetic former boss.
   
He is best remembered for having warned about the dangers of running a big budget deficit a year before the 2008 eurozone debt crisis.
   
The eurozone's second-biggest economy was “bankrupt”, he declared — remarks he pointed to in campaigning as proof that he was a politician who pulls no punches.
   
Fillon, who became the youngest member of the French parliament at age 27 in 1981, went on to hold several ministerial portfolios under Jacques Chirac.
 
Fillon and Juppé knock out Sarkozy in French primary
   
Fillon has promised far-reaching reforms to kickstart the moribund economy.
 
He has pledged to cut 600,000 civil service jobs and increase the working week from 35 to 39 hours.
   
On social issues, the father of five who is married to a Welsh woman tacked to the right of both Sarkozy and Juppé, vowing to amend a 2013 law on gay marriage to prevent adoptions by same-sex couples.
   
He has also announced plans to reduce immigration to a “strict minimum”.
 
Alain Juppé 
 
Juppé, 71, has campaigned as a moderate and a sage who will unify a country divided by a deep economic malaise and a wave of jihadist attacks.
   
The man with the longest CV in French politics had stints as foreign and defence minister under his vanquished arch-rival Sarkozy.
 
Painting Sarkozy as a “prophet of doom”, Juppé has said he wants to be a “prophet of happiness”, risking ridicule in a country renowned for its pessimism.
   
“The French people need more than ever to unite to turn the page on a disastrous five years (under Socialist President Francois Hollande) … and to create a bulwark against” the far right National Front of Marine Le Pen, Juppé said after securing his second-place finish.
 
 
One of France's most popular politicians, the longtime mayor of Bordeaux was the frontrunner for the centre-right's nomination until a late surge by Fillon.
   
Tall, balding and considered a bit stiff by many, Juppé has reached out to the vast majority of Muslims who embrace France's secular values.
   
His messages have been aimed at the virtually rudderless left as well as the centre.
   
Juppé was the budget minister for two years in 1996-98 and foreign minister for the first time from 1993 to 1995, during France's involvement in wars in the former Yugoslavia.
   
He spent several years in the political wilderness after a party funding scandal in 2004, in which he was seen as the fall guy for his mentor Chirac.
   
Juppé was convicted and given a suspended jail sentence that forced him out of office for two years.
   
Resigning his posts as parliamentary deputy and Bordeaux mayor, Juppé handed the leadership of the centre-right UMP party — now the Republicans — to Sarkozy, who used it as his springboard for the presidency.
   
Juppé went to teach in Canada before returning to be re-elected mayor of Bordeaux in October 2006.
   
He has sought to shrug off a reputation as a detached technocrat two decades after his 1995 reform agenda sparked the largest protest movement France had seen since May 1968.
   
Juppé says he is a “changed” man and now more open to dialogue.
 
By the AFP's Adam Plowrights and Clare Byrne

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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: Macron’s attempts to tame world leaders shows he’s more a thinker than a diplomat

French President Emmanuel Macron's flawed efforts to charm the world's autocratic and populist leaders have previously ended in failure or even humiliation. Taking the Chinese president to the Pyrenees won't change that record, writes John Lichfield.

Published: 7 May 2024 12:06 CEST
OPINION: Macron's attempts to tame world leaders shows he's more a thinker than a diplomat

Emmanuel Macron used to fancy himself as a lion-tamer.

There wasn’t a murderous dictator or mendacious populist that the French President would not try to charm: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayip Erdogan, Victor Orban.

The results, overall, have been poor. Sometimes Macron has been eaten, diplomatically-speaking. Years of trying to smooth-talk Vladimir Putin – with invitations to Versailles and the presidential retreat at Fort Brégancon and the long-table talks in the Kremlin – ended in disillusion and humiliation.

Macron’s attempts to create a blokeish friendship with Boris Johnson ended in cross-Channel exchanges of insults and accusations. His mission to find a core, reasonable Donald Trump ended in the discovery that there was no reasonable Donald Trump, just a self-obsessed, shallow deal-maker or deal-breaker.

And now President Xi Jinping of China. The two presidents and their wives are on an away-day to the French Pyrenees (Tuesday), visiting a region dear to Macron since his childhood.

The first day of Xi’s French state visit in Paris yesterday seems to have produced very little. The Chinese president promised to send no arms to Russia but that is a long-standing promise that he has, technically-speaking, kept.

Xi is reported to have promised to restrict sales to Moscow of “secondary materials” which can be used to make arms. We will see.

The Chinese leader also agreed to support Macron’s call for an “Olympic truce” in Ukraine and elsewhere for the duration of the Paris games in late July and August. Good luck with that.

On the gathering menace of a trade war between the EU and China, no progress was made. As a minimal concession to his French hosts, Xi promised to drop threatened dumping duties on French Cognac and Armagnac sales to China.

Otherwise, Xi said that he could not see a problem. Cheap Chinese-built electric cars and solar panels and steel are swamping the EU market? All the better for the European fight against inflation and global warming.

READ MORE: How ‘Battery Valley’ is changing northern France

Maybe more will be achieved in shirt-sleeves in the Pyrenees today. The Chinese leadership is said to approve of Macron or at least believe that he is useful to them.

Beijing likes the French President’s arguments, renewed in a speech last month, that the EU should become a “strategic” commercial and military power in its own right and not a “vassal” of the United States. The Chinese leadership evidently has no fear of the EU becoming a rival power. It sees Macron’s ideas for a “Europe puissance” as a useful way of dividing the West and weakening the strength of Washington, the dollar and “western values”.

Macron has sometimes encouraged this way of thinking, perhaps accidentally. After his state visit to China last year, he gave a rambling media interview in which he seemed to say that the EU had no interest in being “followers of the US” or defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression. He had to amend his words later.

That was Macron at his worst, an ad-lib, stand-up diplomat who ignores advice from the professionals in the Quai d’Orsay. I would argue, however, that the wider Macron argument – the EU must become more powerful or die – is the French President at his best.

Few other politicians in the world think ahead so much as Macron does. Democratic politics is mired in short-termism. Only autocrats like Xi or Putin can afford to think in terms of decades or centuries.

Macron likes to look around corners. He is often a better thinker than he is a diplomat or practical, daily politician.

His core argument – made in his Sorbonne speech last month and an interview with The Economist – is that Europe faces an unprecedented triple threat to its values, its security and its future prosperity.  

The rise of intolerant populist-nationalism threatens the values and institutions implanted in Europe after World War Two. The aggression of Russia and the detachment of the US (not just Donald Trump) threatens Europe’s security. The abandonment of global rules on fair trade – by Joe Biden’s US as well as Xi’s China – threatens to destroy European industry and sources of prosperity.

READ MORE: OPINION – Macron must earn the role of ’21st-century Churchill’

Civilisations, like people, are mortal, Macron says. Unless the EU and the wider democratic Europe (yes, you post-Brexit Britain) address these problems there is a danger that European civilisation (not just the EU experiment) could die.

Exaggerated? Maybe. But the problems are all real. Macron’s solutions are a powerful European defence alliance within Nato and targeted European protectionism and investment for the industries of the future.

The chances of those things being agreed by in time to make a difference are non-existent to small. In France, as elsewhere, these big “strategic” questions scarcely figure in popular concerns in the European election campaign.

Emmanuel Macron has now been president for seven years. His remaining three years in office will be something between disjointed and paralysed.

It is too early to write his political obituary but the Xi visit and the Sorbonne speech offer the likely main components. Macron will, I fear, be remembered as a visionary thinker and flawed diplomat/politician.

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