In France, desperately seeking Tsipras

By Nicholas Vinocur

Radical politicians in France hope to reproduce the Greek prime minister's success in a 2017 presidential race.

PARIS — Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is casting a long shadow over France’s 2017 presidential election.

While French cheerleading for Tsipras’ act of rebellion against the EU has tapered off since he signed a concession-laden bailout deal, politicians of all stripes in France are still looking at what they can learn from his nearly seven months in power.

For radicals across the political spectrum — from far-left former economy minister Arnaud Montebourg to far-right National Front chief Marine Le Pen — Tsipras’ story offers the hope of a breakthrough performance in France’s election. Greek party Syriza’s rise on a swell of youth-driven rage at Europe’s austerity policies shows it is possible to seize power by attacking the system from the fringes.
That’s a powerful lesson in France, where two monolithic parties have passed power back and forth for the past 30 years, and where an “upstart” presidential candidate is someone under 50 years of age who has not held a senior government post.
Tsipras’ French disciples differ radically from each other in their views of how he handled talks with the EU. Le Pen turned her back, while Montebourg cozied up to ex-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.
Those views will define how they plan to campaign for the presidency, facing admittedly very steep odds. France is no Greece, and the political elites still have a strong hold on power.
But left-wingers like Guillaume Balas, a Socialist member of the European Parliament, say President François Hollande’s dismal approval ratings (at 22 percent, according to an Ifop poll for the Journal du Dimanche) and widespread frustration with his politics (an Ifop poll in June showed that 46 percent of the French consider the government to be insufficiently left-wing) could bring about a change of guard.
“What did the whole Syriza affair mean for Europe?” Balas said to POLITICO. “Today we have no leaders capable of giving a sense of meaning… Young people [in France] find no outlet in today’s politics. They are looking for something else.”
Here is a look at some of the French politicians hoping to capture some of the Tsipras vibe in the run-up to the 2017 election.

Marine Le Pen — The turncoat

France’s foremost far-right politician was a die-hard Tsipras fan, until she turned against him.
The change was brutal. At a press conference called the day after Tsipras signed his bailout deal with Europe, Le Pen accused the Greek prime minister of surrendering to Brussels and betraying voters who had clearly rejected austerity in a referendum.
“Maybe his shoulders weren’t broad enough, or he lacked the courage” to break fully with the EU and withdraw from the eurozone, she said of Tsipras.
Le Pen, who opinion polls show reaching the runoff stage of a two-round presidential election, said that if she were in Tsipras’ place she would have taken the result of the referendum as an explicit call to exit the euro.
If Le Pen rejected Tsipras so harshly, it’s largely because of her political closeness to Syriza — a party that is in many ways a mirror image of the National Front she has redefined since taking over its leadership from her father in 2011. Both rail constantly against austerity and the EU; both draw their strongest support from young voters enraged by a chronic lack of jobs and prospects (France’s youth unemployment rate is close to 25 percent, versus 52.3 percent in Greece); both are fans of welfare, social protections and a big state.
Le Pen wants to tap into the same popular rage that hoisted Tsipras to power in Greece. But if elected, she would go further than Tsipras, calling a referendum on France’s eurozone membership within six months of reaching power, and considering full withdrawal from the EU.
The question is: would voters follow? As in Greece, polls in France show that a majority do not have the stomach for eurozone withdrawal. No matter. Le Pen is charging ahead and will test-drive her Syriza-like policies from the fall during a regional election campaign in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a bleak former mining region in northern France.
According to early polls, she’s on course to win. A victory would build momentum for her presidential campaign, already well under way with national polls showing her gathering up to 30 percent of the vote in the first of a two-round contest.

Arnaud Montebourg: The shmoozer

France’s former economy minister offers a mix of anti-austerity, patriotic policies that could be summed up as “Syriza in a suit.”
A lawyer and anti-globalist who redefined himself as an entrepreneur after leaving President Hollande’s cabinet in 2014, Montebourg is a longtime sympathizer of the Greek leftist movement. Unlike Le Pen, he did not turn his back after Tsipras signed the bailout deal but chose instead to embrace his most defiant ally, Varoufakis, with whom he sees eye-to-eye on austerity, Germany and the role of finance in European politics.
Ten days after the controversial former Greek finance minister quit his post saying he could not stand by creditors’ demands on Greece, Montebourg invited him to his “Fête de la Rose” in late August — a wine-fueled political gathering styled as a leftist counterpoint to the Socialist party’s traditional June congress.

Varoufakis’ presence among Montebourg’s rosé-sipping pals this year will send a clear signal to Hollande: Radical leftists are waiting in the wings.

It’s a signature act of rebellion from Montebourg, who crashed into Hollande’s government in 2012, infuriated foreign investors during his two-year term as industry then economy minister, and was finally ousted from the cabinet last summer after openly challenging his boss in a speech at last year’s Fête.
Varoufakis’ presence among Montebourg’s rosé-sipping pals this year will send a clear signal to Hollande: Radical leftists are waiting in the wings, ready to seize power if given the chance.
For now Montebourg, still a member of the Socialist party and currently vice president of the Habitat furniture company, poses only a theoretical threat to Hollande, who is widely expected to run for re-election in 2017. In order to stage a left-flank attack on the presidency, he needs to win a nomination, so Montebourg is pushing for an open left-wing primary round in 2016, and some analysts think he has strong legal arguments to impose it.
In the meantime, Montebourg is sniping at the government in opinion columns co-signed by his punk-rock-loving investment banker friend, Matthieu Pigasse. “Europe is heading into a wall,” the pals wrote in their latest piece, calling for a Syriza-moment writ large.
Montebourg is still far from the presidency. But if the primary happens, he could end up a lot closer.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon: The hardliner

A snarling, brutally effective speaker from the old school of French leftism, Mélenchon is Tsipras’ ideological double in France.
The two met repeatedly in Paris before the Greek PM’s election and Mélenchon gave Tsipras, whom he once called his “example,” the warmest embrace of all when the latter gave a speech at the European Parliament on July 8.
Mélenchon has repeatedly called for a “Syriza moment” in France, and used his popular blog to cheerlead for “our” Tsipras and Varoufakis throughout months of tense negotiations with the Eurogroup. However, the one-time Socialist changed his tune when the bailout deal was signed, telling Le Parisien newspaper that Tsipras should have pledged to resign if the Eurogroup did not accept the lessons of Greece’s “no” vote in a referendum on bailout terms.
Indeed Mélenchon, who won 11 percent of the vote in 2012 placing third behind Hollande and ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, is like Le Pen in thinking that Tsipras didn’t go far enough.
Known for his inflammatory anti-German rhetoric, Mélenchon advocates nothing short of an open clash between Paris and Berlin. In April, he published a short book titled “Bismarck’s Herring — or the German Poison,” in which he accused Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel of “killing Europe” and called for France to break out of its unequal partnership. He also wants France to withdraw from NATO and reheat its ties with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
In 2012, Mélenchon helped Hollande win by instructing his supporters to vote for the Socialist candidate. This time around, the advocate of a French Syriza is unlikely to be so magnanimous with the president, whom he accuses of doing a worse job than Sarkozy.
Announcing his candidacy on July 5, Mélenchon said he would be running in order to “flip over the table” in French politics. That could mean siphoning off huge numbers of votes from the left and then telling voters not to back the Socialist candidate — a move that could sink Hollande.
In that case, France’s Syriza moment could well carry a right-wing candidate to power.

Cécile Duflot: The Green Tsipras

A former housing minister under Hollande, Duflot crashed out of the government in early 2014 in a disagreement over its environmental policies.
Ever since, she has sniped at her former Socialist allies and strengthened her ties with the far left, notably Mélenchon. The two attended a rally together in January calling for Syriza’s victory in Greece, but have since parted ways. Duflot took issue with Mélenchon’s book on Germany, which she called a “grave mistake.”
Duflot has said several times that she feels ready to run for president, but has not yet formally announced her candidacy. If she does run, however, the policy mix she is likely to offer voters is Syriza with a splash of Green: less austerity, but also less nuclear power and more sharing.
In 2012, the Greens gathered a total of 2.3 percent of the vote. Duflot will have to do better if her ideas are to get any traction.

Pouria Amirshahi: The Black Sheep

Born in Iran, this 43-year-old is the most rebellious Socialist deputy in a group of about 40 dissenters in Hollande’s camp, and a staunch supporter of Tsipras.
Inspired by Syriza and Podemos in Spain, Amirshahi is criss-crossing France to build support for the “Common Movement,” a grassroots initiative to build an alternative to the Socialist party drawing support from civil society.
“It’s painstaking work,” he told POLITICO. Amirshahi has the support of several left-wing rebels in the Socialist party, but so far none has jumped ship.
“I exclude nothing,” he added, asked if he would leave the Socialists to launch a presidential campaign. “It’s all about the dynamic at a given moment.”

Denis Payre: The anti-Tsipras

An entrepreneur turned politician, Payre launched the “Citizen Movement” in 2013, drawing support from civil society. Since then it has succeeded in getting some 50 local officials elected on a platform that is distinctly un-Syriza: pro-business, pro-structural reform and anti-red tape.
Payre is betting that his fledgling movement, which has yet to designate a presidential candidate, could take advantage of a major economic crisis to seize power.
“Everything can change very quickly,” he told POLITICO. “If there is a new debt crisis and interest rates go up, the government will have to raise taxes and that could spark a rebellion.”