Who would have thought it? France’s new Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, dismissed two months ago as an aloof, unelected and often incomprehensible aristocrat, began his brief summer holiday on Tuesday with his popularity soaring and newspaper editorials singing his praises.
As he unpacks his bags in a small Brittany seaside resort this morning, De Villepin will be savouring the latest polls. They show his personal approval rating has surged 10 points since his appointment in the wake of France’s shock ‘Non’ to the EU Constitution — a much better performance than his mentor and boss, the now deeply unpopular President Jacques Chirac.
He will enjoy even more that exceptional event, a laudatory editorial in Le Monde. ”He was said to be a political nonentity,” the paper raved on Tuesday, ”but week after week, he is climbing in the polls and gaining authority over the ruling party. He was said to be a haughty technocrat, but he has adopted simple, direct and pragmatic speech.
”He was said to scorn universal suffrage, to be more at home in front of the UN than amongst the French, but every Friday he goes off to meet the people and displays, they say, a real capacity to listen. He was said to know nothing about economics, but in the space of two months he has devised a new economic policy mixing the old recipes of the nanny state with new, liberal-inspired doctrines.”
Rare praise indeed. But, the paper and many analysts point out, De Villepin’s first proper test will come at the end of the summer, when the nation returns from its holidays and France’s powerful trade unions take on the prime minister over his flagship plans to slash the country’s stubborn 10% unemployment rate.
Union organisers are already drawing up plans for a memorable ”rentrée chaude”, or tumultuous September, threatening widespread strike and protest action over the most controversial part of the prime minister’s pro-jobs legislation, pushed through this week by decree.
The so-called ”new employee contract”, hailed by businessmen for introducing a degree of desperately-needed flexibility into France’s rigid and over-regulated labour market, will allow — for the first time in France — companies to fire new employees without justification at any time within their first two years.
The move is a veritable revolution in France, where redundancy procedures are so complex and expensive that they discourage many companies from taking on new staff at all. The unions, however, are dead set against it.
But, for the next month or so, the August cessation of hostilities has encouraged the French media to speculate that De Villepin could be a potential presidential runner in 2007, and a rival for the ambitious and hugely popular interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
Commentators say that, against all expectations, the prime minister has managed to distinguish and distance himself from both Chirac and from the thrusting Sarkozy, who is nonetheless still seen by every opinion poll as the man most likely to take over at the Elysée palace in two years’ time.
(Chirac, who has now been president for 10 years, is suffering from a seemingly irreversible wave of popular disillusionment: France’s voters seem finally to have woken up to the fact that, despite his affable personality and impassioned speeches, he has accomplished virtually nothing during his presidency.)
Having successfully reined in his more flowery and lyrical tendencies in favour of a more direct style, De Villepin — a published poet — has, by contrast, announced a string of concrete measures to create new jobs and is gradually coming to be seen as a man of action.
At the same time, he presents a somewhat calmer face than the bustling Sarkozy, who, by comparison, can appear aggressive and at times excessive in his never-ending drive to shake up a country he perceives as backward-looking and in need of urgent social and economic reform.
”Compared with the excesses of Sarkozy, Villepin is perceived as moderate and balanced,” one political analyst, Mariette Sineau, told Reuters. ”Villepin is perceived as someone more consensual, who is able to calm the waves. And the public likes that.”
It is likely, however, to be only a brief honeymoon. As Le Monde concluded, ”The unexpected command demonstrated by the prime minister by no means guarantees him a peaceful September. For as soon as they come back from their holidays, a great many French people are going to discover the reality: having presented himself as a man of balance, between the market and the state, in practice, De Villepin much prefers the former to the latter.” – Guardian Unlimited Â