Thanks as ever for your continuing commentary, learning fast…only ten more months!
You say that MLP as newly reconfirmed leader is on €20,000 a month…where does the funding of the parties come from… for. the left from mainly unions, and the right business and wealthy individuals as in the UK? Is there state funding?
Re Marine Le Pen’s earnings, I recently explained about her remuneration in a post, must be in the Macron vs Le Pen thread. I’ll try to dig it out but yeah she’s on about €200-250K a year, as an MP (here’s their detailed remuneration in France, the breakdown is a little complex to interpret as some of it is usable freely with much check, but I can explain, later; she was previously an MEP so it was even higher than that what with their generous allowances) and as the Rassemblement National party leader (salaries within the Rassemblement National staff are kept secret but mainly thanks to insiders’ sources – former disgruntled employees or suchlike – we know that the RN party leader, MLP then, is on at least €120,000 a year, despite the party going through serious financial hardships).
As an intro, as a brief direct answer to your questions: no, no unions or wealthy individuals involved in the funding of political parties in France, as for most things it’s a very different system to the UK’s. And yes, state/public funding is significant today, wasn’t the case at all pre-1990s, when there were no rules nor pertaining to and no public funding back.
Needless to say, the situation was pretty murky back then, and that illegality triggered major changes once it was uncovered by a mixture of investigative journalists, whistleblowers, financial police CID officers and juges d’instruction (examining/investigating judges, who in France are more like detectives with a lot of power, they work in tandem with the PJ, the Police Judiciaire, CID in the UK) who were instrumental in bringing about radical changes. These brave people found against a system involving both the Left and the Right, so it goes without saying that the transition from wide-scale corruption to transparency, accountability, relative integrity etc. was a rocky one.
A series of politico-financial scandals in the 1980s, but in particular L’Affaire Urba in 1989 and the mammoth Affaire Elf a few years later would precipitate real profound change, a gradual and still on-going process but the legwork was done in the 1990s. I’ve written here before (April I think) on these corruption scandal, esp. the Elf one, considered to be by The Guardian for instance “probably the biggest political and corporate sleaze scandal to hit a western democracy since the second world war”.
I’ve also written other posts on here on the funding of political parties in France (most of them I think are in the Macron vs Le Pen thread), so I’ll use them to concoct what will follow and which will probably contain hyperlinked references to them.
There will probably be several posts in succession so please feel free to make a comment between them (anything!) as after 3 posts in a row I’ll be barred from posting further until s.o unblocks me!
A week ago on this very thread, I wrote something on that topic in this very thread, part of the second para in my post #2 on June 29th touches on this, in the broad strokes.
In my 29th June post, I also posted this infographic:
It shows how parties will be funded in the 2017-2022 period (so from the Législatives election of June 2017 to the 2022 Législative election), as least for the “public funding” part of it (parties obviously rely on other sources – private funding – I’ll develop that in another thread if necessary, but the public funding part for most is their main source of income.
There are specific and historic reasons for this public funding, largely to do with the big corruption scandals in the 1980s and 1990s as I’ve just mentioned, which forced the powers-that-be to change the rules drastically from the early 1990s onwards. I’ve written on this about before in the Macron Vs Le Pen thread so I’ll put the links when I find them. Again, I’ll develop on these reasons as it’s interesting.
For the main parties, this public funding part fluctuates as it depends on the results obtained at the Législatives, (which quinquennially elects the National Assembly MPs, ~6 weeks after the Presidentials), but it generally accounts for between 40% to 70% of their income.
Last year, the French state spent €66 million to finance 17 political parties (in Mainland France, these ones; Overseas France not included in that table as different parties etc. details here for instance), those 17 parties which took part in the 2017 Législatives and recorded a minimum of 1% in at least 50 constituencies (out of 577).
The amount each political party receives per year for 5 years is based on these 2 metrics:
a) the number of MPs elected. Each député.e or sénateur/trice is worth €38,000 per year for the party.
b) the number of votes recorded in the 1st round of the Législatives. Each vote is worth €1.64 per year.
As you can see in the infographic for instance, as Macron’s party LREM did well in these 2017 Législatives (7.3 million votes in the 1st round and eventually 300-odd MPs elected) it went from receiving zero € a year (makes sense as it was a brand new party) to nearly €21 million/a year for the 2017-2022 period.
Conversely, the Parti Socialiste tanked in those Législatives with only 2 million 1st round votes and about 40 MPs elected, including the affiliated ones (2012: over 10m votes and 330 MPs elected), so its annual funding went from €25m/a year in 2012-2017 to €7m/yr in 2017-2022 (that’s why as I explained in another thread, the PS suddenly had to lay off 60 permanent employees so most of its workforce, they had to sell their its plush Parisian HQs in 2018 – for €46m –, etc.).
Likewise, Les Républicains did badly as they lost 4 million votes and only had ~100 national assembly MPs elected (vs 200+ in 2012) so they’ve lost nearly €6 million a year in funding, although their loss was mitigated by the fact that they’re well represented at the Senate (a third of the Senate is LR) so they can still rely financially on their 100+ senators (out of 348, it’s a much smaller House than the National Assembly, smaller and decisionally less important, it’s technically more geared towards representing the “collectivités territoriales”, i.e the regions, departments & communes , as befits its remit which is enshrined in the Constitution, eg this on the Sénat site: Le Sénat assure la représentation des collectivités territoriales de la République (Article 24 de la Constitution).
Macron’s LREM party is new so it has a weak local ancrage and therefore its Senate group is small, only 23 senators, so unlike the more traditional political parties (even the beleaguered Socialists have 65 senators, which is twice as many as their député.es ) LREM can’t cash in on those.
As for the “private funding” part of political parties, it accounted for €100 million in 2019, see pic below.
I’ll develop but this private funding has 3 distinct components:
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donations, very strictly regulated in France since the early 1990s and capped at €7,500 per year per private person. Only a private person can donate to a political party, as since 1995 companies/lobbies/associations etc. are not allowed to donate at all. Capped at €15,000 per fiscal household. In Présidentielles-Législatives election year, it’s possible for a private person to donate a max. additional €4,600 to finance the electoral campaign of one or more candidates (it’s €4,600 regardless of the number of candidates).
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the party membership yearly fee for ordinary members (cotisation annuelle d’adhérent.e), they vary greatly, some are free, eg Macron’s LREM party and about €30/yr at Les Républicains for the over-35.
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the cotisation de parti d’élu.e (party fee paid by an elected official). In most parties, elected officials have to give back to their party a small % of their wage (or a small fixed sum). It varies greatly, from about €300 a month for a Les Républicains MP (also mayors etc. LR collects over €3m a year from their elected officials that way), to much more for Parti Communiste MPs (there are 31 in the current législature), who contractually have to give back to the PC the difference between their former wage (before their election) and their current MPs’ one, so it could be in the € thousands a month. There are exception etc. but that’s roughly it, the rationale behind it being that MPs for the Parti Communiste should not gain any personal financial benefits from it. In 2016, these payments from their MPs amounted to €7m a year, nearly a third of the party’s total income. Libération has the lowdown.
Donations and fees are partly tax-deductible.
Besides, as I’ve written before on here, presidential campaign expenses are reimbursed up to 100% (but it rarely gets to 100%), roughly speaking to parties registering at least 5% in the first round, but the sub-5% parties can also apply for a partial reimbursement, capped at €800,000.
There is a ceiling of course, it was €17 million for those competing in the 1st round, and €22.5m for the two second-round candidates, so Le Pen and Macron last time.
The CNCCFP deals with all that (it’s the independent body in charge inter alia of auditing campaign accounts).
For instance in the 2017 Presidentials, Macron’s campaign was the highest in terms of expenses at nearly €17m, but well within the €22.5m ceiling for 2nd round candidates. He was reimbursed €10.6 million (see this table).
Second was Marine Le Pen at €11.5m, she was reimbursed €10.7m.
By contrast, Jacques Cheminade, the crackpot LaRouchian libertarian whose platform included colonising the moon (he recorded 0,18%), spent only €406,000 and was reimbursed €337,000. Such “original” candidates usually manage to get the obligatory 500 endorsements from officials (not easily but they do!), as many there are plenty of mayors of tiny places (usually “SE” ones, sans étiquette, no party affiliation) who take the view that anyone in a democracy should be able to run for president, regardless of their views. Oh well, fair enough, it’s entertaining to have these people.
Ditto Jean Lassalle, pic below (who recorded 1.2%), he spent €241,000 and was reimbursed €228,000.
Lassalle is the the eccentric Pyrénées shepherd-rugby player turned MP who likes to sing the Occitan anthem Se Canto, Aqueras Montanhas in Béarnais patois during National Assembly sessions either to protest against the French state abandoning rural areas or to defend the Gilets Jaunes, who in 2006 went on a 40-day hunger strike over a threatened Japonese factory closure in his Vallée d’Aspe constituency (he lost 17 kilos and had to be hospitalised but won that battle) and who as an MP spent the best part of 2013 walking around France (a 6,000 kms little flânerie) to meet “ordinary rural people”/ In terms of commitment, Lassalle takes some beating! He’ll be running again in 2022.
(See this table for the other candidates in 2017 re campaign expenses and reimbursements).
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Thanks for the continuing flow of information…lots of reading
Will be an enormous thread by next April !
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Thanks John.
Following on from my two posts on July 6th on how political parties are funded in France, let’s move on to the key back story behind the reasons for this public funding of political parties in France, the first legal step being taken in 1988 and then by the beefier Loi Rocard in 1990, named after the then prime minister and prominent Socialist Michel Rocard, who was a cut above the rest in terms of probity (that said, the bar was low as there was no specific legislation governing the funding of parties and the system effectively turned a blind eye to skulduggery and corruption):
Encadrement du financement des partis : Rocard, ce pionnier
Before that, parties were only funded by membership fees and donations, with no specific encadrement (regulation, legal framework) whatsoever on those. It doesn’t take a genius to see how some companies, lobbies, groups of people, rich individuals etc. could influence governmental policies in all sorts of ways. In fact, it went further than that: political parties themselves were actively involved in corruption, not least the Parti Socialiste, even taking the lead in a venal headlong rush to accumulate and dominate.
The background is particularly interesting as it explains why suddenly, in the late 1980s, that revolution occurred in France and overnight strict laws governing public funding of parties & electoral campaigns, and more generally laws on transparency in politics, were adopted.
To succinctly grasp the enormous magnitude of the changes between the “before” and “after” in the French political landscape, the drastic transformation could be likened to what happened in British football with stadiums. It took a major tragedy, Hillsborough, the umpteenth one (Bradford’s Valley Parade had only happened 4 yrs before), for the authorities to set in motion the wheels of radical change. It took Hillsborough, the Taylor report – the 9th such report since the Ibrox tragedy in 1902 to tackle safety in British stadiums as little had been done, chairmen blissfully ignoring the weak legislation and recommendations in total impunity – and the attendant strict legislation around safety standards + of course the creation of the Premier League in that wake to force clubs to sort out their shit stadium-wise.
Well, what happened in France re political parties and their illegal funding is similar: it took massive politico-financial scandals in the 1980s and 1990s to spark major legislative and structural reforms as well as the adequate powers and bodies to deal with the issue.
1986-1990 is the pivotal period here, as two major scandals in quick succession (and then the Elf scandal from 1994) had immediate repercussions.
First the Affaire Luchaire, uncovered in 1986 by the Presse de la Manche regional daily (big cargos from the Luchaire armament group often left France from the Cherbourg port). A first law on transparency to give a legal framework to funding parties and electoral campaigns would be voted in March 1988.
28 Feb. 1986: the Presse de la Manche drops a bombshell, which will reveal that the Parti Socialiste is strongly suspected of having benefited from illegal arms sales to Iran leaving from Cherbourg. The investigations from national newspapers and official investigators will also quickly reveal the existence of slush funds linked to the Parti Socialiste. The story, as told by Presse de la Manche journalists.
Then, within a few years, two bigger scandals broke out, and would further precipitate drastic changes.
The Affaire Urba first, aka “le financement occulte du Parti Socialiste” (the illegal funding of the Parti Socialiste between 1973 and 1989), which broke out in April 1989 and lasted throughout the 1990s.
The Urba scandal was followed by the mammoth protracted Affaire Elf (1994-2000s), deemed by the media and wiki “probably the biggest political and corporate sleaze scandal to hit a western democracy since the second world war”.
Officially, the Elf shenanigans generated illegal payments, bribes, gifts etc. of about €300 million (that’s what the investigators could ascertain) but the figure is reckoned to top the €1 billion mark.
These two scandals were the trigger for seismic changes, even if lampistes (fall guys, minions) largely copped the flak instead of the real culprits higher up. The 1990 Rocard Law was very welcome but unfortunately the Socialists, then in charge, made damn sure that it also contained an amnesty clause…
The first piece of legislation towards setting out rules governing the funding of parties or/and of electoral campaigns was adopted in 1988 but the first real significant law to that effect was the so-called Loi Rocard adopted in 1990, nine months after the Urba scandal broke out:
15 janvier 1990, une loi pour assainir le financement des partis
It would be the first one of many laws and measures to that effect. It is an ongoing process of course, regularly new laws are adopted to improve things, such as in 2017 with a series of tougher laws on “moralisation and transparency in public life”, with in particular a tougher stance taken on conflicts of interest.
As we speak for instance, the Justice Minister and hitherto star lawyer Éric Dupont-Moretti, nicknamed “Acquittator” (he’s notched up 150 acquittals) is currently in serious bother for that. Last week the financial police searched the Justice ministry and Dupont-Moretti’s office for 15 hours (from 9am to midnight) as they suspect him of conflict of interest.
The outspoken leftwing “star du barreau”, who entered politics last summer via the cabinet reshuffle (the popular Édouard Philippe was replaced by Jean Castex) as Macron likes to pepper his cabinets with household names whatever their political persuasion, has been summoned to appear before the relevant jurisdiction on July 16th.
And according to Mediapart, following an investigation by the Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique (HATVP), an organisation created in 2013 in the wake of the big Cahuzac scandal, to further inject transparency and honesty into French politics (they take a particularly tough approach in the vetting of cabinet members, MPs etc.), Dupond-Moretti has “forgotten” to declare €300,000 to the French Inland Revenue in 2019 when he was a criminal lawyer at the top of his game but also a successful one-man-show performer (these 300K are droits d’auteur, copyright royalties for a show he created). He’s blaming his accountant…
Éric Dupond-Moretti, dans la tourmente…
Whatever happened, for s.o like Justice minister Dupond-Moretti banging on about honesty it’s piss poor and if indeed he is found guilty of conflict of interest, surely Macron will have no other choice but to sack him.
This could reflect badly on Macron and his fixette for PR stunts in appointing celebrities in the cabinet, eg Nicolas Hulot in 2017 – “One of Macron’s biggest coups was the appointment of the environmentalist and former TV personality Nicolas Hulot” – although it probably won’t as it could also be interpreted as evidence of the president/gvt not interfering with the judiciary and it demonstrates the effectiveness of, inter alia, the pro-transparency HATVP organisation, the Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique.
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I’ve actually written on here, in this April post in particular, about the Elf scandal and also, to a lesser extent, about the Urba scandal. Elf was much bigger but it was Urba that triggered it all, as it happened about 5 years before.
The nuts and bolts of the Urba scandal, in a nutshell…
in 1971 the nascent Parti Socialiste, created on the ashes of Jean Jaurès’s SFIO and recently taken over by François Mitterrand who set about resurrecting it through uniting all the leftwing parties (the so-called “Programme Commun”), set up a company called Urba, whose initial job was to collect funds to finance this fledgling Parti Socialiste.
However, Urba soon decided to go beyond just collecting and managing money. It needed serious dosh to create a war machine to oppose the Right so it “branched out” to do “consultancy” work, vetting tenders, choosing architects & project managers etc. This was perfectly legal as there was no laws then pertaining to financing political parties (leaving the latter to find “imaginative” way to raise funds, seeing that membership fees were never be enough to finance the PS). But while the premise was above board, the Urba methods soon become seriously illegal.
Before long, Urba was mimicking the mafia: they racketeered companies in exchange for public contracts in local authorities & communes controlled by the Parti Socialiste and/or affiliated.
Urba would take about about 5% of the total cost and the money was shared out roughly equally between Urba (mainly to cover the running costs), the Parti Socialiste and the bent local politicians of all stripes – mayors, councillors etc. – who’d procured the contracts (so, certainly not necessarily all Socialists), with company directors being occasionally arrosés too (slang for greasing s.o’s palm).
In order to appear legit and complexify things should investigators or the taxman poke their noses, those companies sent real invoices for bogus work to third-party companies or subcontractors, in other words they’d created a classic double or treble accountancy system. Local Urba offices were also set up feeding a host of sociétés bidons (bogus companies) to funnel that money to the Parti Socialiste via circuitous ways.
It was a well-oiled system which thrived for 17 years, until the Marseille financial police (see this potted history of the saga) discovered paperwork at the local Urba offices establishing illegal funding of the Parti Socialiste. Then little by little, insiders started to talk and explain how the fraudulent operation worked.
That money financed the Parti Socialiste and its electoral campaigns up to 1989 but a number of the politicians involved in the scam were rightwing local officials too. Anyone who fancied being on the take could be involved, regardless of their political persuasion. Involving politicians and elected officials of all hues also ensured a sort of omertà across the board. This particular involvement of rightwing politicians and other local ramifications, when initially it was thought that only the PS benefited from that system, were uncovered in particular by the financial police officer & lawyer and general whistleblower Antoine Gaudino who has written extensively on this case, books and so on.
As Gaudino wrote (see this), there was a “consensus total entre la droite et la gauche pour que la corruption s’organise selon les vœux de chacun avec la méthode qui était déjà établie. La Droite savait quelle était la méthode de la Gauche et vice-versa”.
There were also lesser scandals in the 2000s and even recently, it’s an on-going process, eg under Sarkozy of course – I mean, where to start with him… But the Teflonic bastard is an expert in covering his tracks and/or making sure minions take the rap (Le Monde 4 months ago published a welcome recap on his on-going legal marathon and the 12 prosecutions agst him: Le point sur les douze affaires affaires de N. Sarkozy). Well, except for the “Sarkozy aka Paul Bismuth” case that is, recently brought before the courts (BBC article), it’s gone to the Appeal Court on Sarko’s lawyers’ request.
And more recently under Hollande, the Affaire Cahuzac under François Hollande (first uncovered by Mediapart) springs to mind as it marked a turning point too.
Thanks to the bent Jérôme Cahuzac, the Hollande gvt set up an anti-corruption agency (the HATVP I wrote about in my previous post) and a national office to prosecute financial crimes, the Parquet national financier. Cahuzac, who before entering the first (Ayrault) government under François Hollande, was député-maire of Villeneuve-sur-Lot in Dpt 47 where he’s from (regionally speaking) and where he made his political name (a pariah since the scandal, he now lives as a relative recluse in Corsica. Aged 69 today, he recently managed to get some part-time work as a doctor at the Bonifacio hospital while wearing an electronic tag, the Ordre des Médecins having eventually reinstalled him).
The wealthy cosmetic & hair transplant surgeon-turned-politician Jérôme Cahuzac is one of the biggest barefaced liars in recent French politics and has become a byword for egregious political “do as I say but not as I do” cynical hypocrisy.
Appointed by François Hollande as Budget minister in 2012 with a strong brief to tackle tax evasion via “redressement fiscal” so much so that prior to his downfall he was nicknamed “the Fiscal Tsar” or similar, Cahuzac repeatedly (for 4 months) lied in front of parliament, the media, various commissions etc., about undeclared bank accounts he’d had for 20 yrs in Switzerland and Singapore containing millions of €. His infamous cynical riposte (« C’est moi qui dis la vérité. Les yeux dans les yeux, je vous le dis : je n’ai pas, je n’ai jamais eu de compte en Suisse, à aucun moment. ») to the RMC pitbull-type interviewer Jean-Jacques Bourdin on BFMTV is held as the gold standard in hypocrisy:
Although you could argue that Cahuzac was more about transparency and one rotten apple as it were than systemic corruption linked to political party funding like we saw in the late 1980s and 1990s, but in the general public’s “tous pourris” mind these things are generally conflated).
The Urba and Elf scandals revealed and/or dealt with by investigative media, courageous whistleblowers, pugnacious financial police CID investigators and no-nonsense “juges d’instruction” (investigating/examining judges) who, in France, are more like detectives with a lot of power (some of these CID people and judges, who as you can imagine had to fight against a cloak of secrecy and in general agst a whole corrupt system who accused them of being part of anti-governmental conspiracy so it was tough for them, especially as the first big scandal, Urba, was directed against the Socialists who were in charge then – I can still visualise François Mitterrand’s faux outrage on TV when the HQs of the Socialist Party were searched in January 1992, see this Le Monde archives article – some of them became famous and bywords for anti-corruption and incorruptibility, such as Renaud Van Ruymbecke and Eva Joly who are household names in France after lengthy and difficult investigations on the main “affaires”, i.e the Affaire Urba and the Affaire Elf.).
The problem before these laws & measures were implemented is that there was no legislation whatsoever so it was a free-for-all, for all parties, they were all at it as there were no rules. Compliance of the judiciary authorities (“le Législatif”) towards the “Exécutif” (the politicians in charge) was a real problem too, so even when a scandal was revealed and successfully investigated not much happened. This combo of an absence of clear specific rules and the of influential politicians on justice ensured that bent politicians got off scot-free.
The protracted Elf scandal was the more spectacular and high-profile as it had it all (wide-ranging corruption, famous politicians & companies involved, improbable characters, sex, juicy details, ridiculously lavish lifestyles, staggering sums involved, international ramifications in Asia, Germany etc. – the CDU of Helmut Kohl may have been on the take, see this – , trials a-plenty, counter trials etc.) but the Urba scandal is the seminal and pivotal one really, the one that set root-and-branch changes in motion, changes at all levels, which gradually spawned the following – non exhaustive list –: creation of a specific legislation, real powers given to the judiciary, setting up of organisations to audit and check transparency in politics & parties’ accounts, strict regulation around the financing of political parties & electoral campaigns etc. as summarised here in this France Inter summary of a radio programme on the Urba saga:
[Urba et orbi : Le financement occulte du Parti Socialiste
[…]
Oui, il y a bien financement occulte du parti socialiste, mais voilà, tous les autres partis font la même chose, parce qu’ils n’ont pas le choix. […] Il faudra l’abnégation de la presse, de certains enquêteurs et de plusieurs juges d’instructions pour qu’éclate le scandale Urba et que soit mise en lumière le système trouble du financement des partis politiques. Une affaire Urba qui est aussi celle des grandes premières : elle provoque le vote de deux lois, une d’amnistie et une autre sur le financement des partis politiques. Et pour la première fois, un parti politique est condamné pour financement occulte, et un Président de l’Assemblée Nationale jugé pour ces faits](Urba et orbi Le financement occulte du Parti Socialiste).
For further reading on the funding of political parties in France, see this informative article from the vie-publique.fr site: https://www.vie-publique.fr/fiches/24004-comment-les-partis-politiques-sont-ils-finances
Xavier Bertrand is digging his heels to eschew the “Primaire de la droite et du centre” but all other rightwing/Les Républicains candidates are now in favour of a primary after, only a few weeks ago, the LR boss C. Jacob explaining that they’d choose their candidate through two national polls in the autumn (see my post on that upthread).
Looks like they’ve changed their minds and will organise a primary sometime in October-November (last time was end of November). Bertrand could have won that one (being picked through polls) but winning a two-round primary is trickier.
As I’ve written before, Bertrand left Les Républicains a few years ago so he can in theory do what he jolly wants but he still intends to use LR for his campaign (logistics, contacts, financial support etc.) so he is in a tight spot here.
He could of course do “a Macron”, i.e create a new party, recruit thousands of volunteers, rent HQ premises, rally round the centrist ground (by nicking helpers and supporters from the Left and the Right, as Macron did, before progressively leaning to the Right once elected) and raise €10-15m via small donators, as Macron did in 2016-17 (99,361 of them to be precise, 1,004 of them being UK-based, the average amount of UK donations was just over €1,000, the donation ceiling for one private person as I wrote a few days ago in this thread being, in electoral years, just over €11,000. The expense ceiling for a presidential campaign is about €23 million, what any candidate is allowed to spend. Most of it is reimbursed by the State if they record > 5 %), or borrow the money or a combo of the two.
But then he would certainly not make it to the 2nd round as you’d have 3 major centre-left or mainstream candidates competing (Macron, Bertrand and the LR candidate) thus cancelling each other as it’s doubtful any of them would reach the necessary % to reach the 2nd round. It worked for Macron last time as there was only him and Fillon in that electoral bracket, enabling Macron to register 24% and make it to the 2nd round run-off vs Le Pen.
A few LR heavyweights can smell blood and are sharpening their knives, they’ll do their damnedest to thwart Bertrand, such as the hardliner Nadine Morano (below left).
They don’t like him (too centrist, not hostile towards the Rassemblement National and their electorate, they don’t like the fact he left the LR party two years ago etc.) and they’ll be gagging to settle scores. You know what they say about enemies in politics: more often that not they’re in your own camp.
Bertrand is out on a limb and up against it… Something will have to give though if the Right want to dégager Macron and make space on the right (it’s crowded in that segment!), so it’s also possible that they [LR] come to an agreement with Bertrand, if the latter persists in going it alone.
“La droite à couteaux tirés” (at loggerheads, at daggers drawn) headlined Le Parisien a couple of days ago. Just like the Left then…
Wow…a lot to digest and many links to publications.
You sometimes have to say as I’ve also written other posts on here in reply to a comment…its because your posts are so detailed it’s easy to overlook a previous one!
It would be interesting to have a short/brief run down of the political publications in France and their political slant of their articles…ie radical left, left of C, right wing etc.
Am I correct in thinking for example that Le Figaro is right of center as is Le Point, le Monde center (aka@The Times) and Liberarion is left like Marianne and le Canard bit like Private Eye?
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The political alignment is roughly what it says in the respective Wiki pages, give or take a few tweakings.
Some of the descriptions need updating though, owners change, as do editors-in-chief and therefore so does the ligne éditoriale.
This poster infography from the excellent Monde Diplo (which sometimes publishes in English) tells you who owns/controls what (media-wise) in France as of Dec. 2020, so it roughly indicates the ligne éditoriale. Quite handy really, you can zoom in on the inserted infography:
A non-exhaustive panorama of French dailies and mags:
Canard enchaîné: Le Canard enchaîné - Wikipedia
Yes, I suppose it’s similar in to Private Eye in its history and general outlook.
Not sure the Canard can be pigeonholed that easily though, I don’t know if the Canard really is unique in the Western world but there can’t be many like it. Traditionally leftwing but they certainly don’t discriminate.
Some rightwing people say that the Canard has it in for rightwing politicians but it’s a procès d’intention. They expose financial scandals across the board and lay into all parties, whether in office or not. It just so happens that the Right or Centre-Right have been in power much more than the Left since the beginning of the Fifth Republic, so the Canard, in volume, are more critical of the Right, makes sense as more often than not they are at the helm.
The French satirical weekly with no ads and no online articles
Advertising-free ‘Canard enchaîné’ sells 400,000 copies and has €100 million banked
The scourge of vain, hypocritical and corrupt politicians, the Canard celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2016. It sells 400,000 copies, including 70,000 to subscription readers. At a time of crisis in print media, it had a profit of €2.4 million in 2015, on a turnover of €24 million. Reserves totalling €100 million ensure it could weather virtually any crisis.
The Canard does all this without advertising or shareholders. Its only internet presence is an image of its front page.
‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’
(another source):
When a political scandal explodes in France, there’s a good chance it’s Wednesday. That’s the day satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchainé hits newsstands.
The fiercely independent weekly, known for its incisive and derisive reporting and more than its share of scoops and bombshells, turns 100 this year.
Despite the economic downturn, changing media landscape and a print press crisis, Le Canard Enchainé continues to do well. Remarkably, it takes no advertising and has only a bare-bones webpage that often just summarizes what’s on the print front page. Yet it turns a profit on the 400,000 copies it sells each week.
La Croix : La Croix - Wikipedia
Les Échos: Les Echos (France) - Wikipedia
L’Express: L'Express - Wikipedia
Le Figaro (little wiki tweaking needed, it’s solidly mainstream Right): Le Figaro - Wikipedia
L’Humanité: L'Humanité - Wikipedia
Libération: Libération - Wikipedia
(more solidly Left that the Wiki “centre Left” description. Went through torrid times about 8-12 yrs ago, hugely in the red, laid off a lot of personnel, not sure how it’s doing now. Its old HQs in “NoMa” as Americans say, the North Marais (or, in French, the “Haut Marais”), had a fabulous rooftop terrace, I can see why the staff were pissed off to have to sell up and move!)
Marianne: Marianne (magazine) - Wikipedia
Marianne is a bit of a strange (inclassable) one and difficult to pigeonhole as it’s changed in the last few years. Wiki is wrong IMO here, they need to update their disque dur as the French say. Marianne not that leftwing now, it was leftwing/centre-Left when run by Jean-François Kahn, a stalwart of French journalism, in his 80s now, but now that the editor-in-chief is Natacha Polony, since 2018, it’s more centre/centre-Right IMO.
Polony describes herself as “réac de gauche et anarchiste de droite”, which is vague and a bit of a cop-out. She was a “Chevènementiste” 20 yrs ago, so leftwing but then drifted to the Right, she voted for centre-Right Bayrou in 2007 and admitted voting for that Alt-right nutter Dupont-Aignan in 2012, which is quite an ideological grand écart. She recently said that she might have voted for Mélenchon hadn’t he been so pro-Cuba or something similar. So, to recap: she started on the Left, then veered to the centre-Right, then only a few yrs later voted basically for a Far-Right presidential candidate then nearly pro-Mélenchon in 2017. In other words, she is all over the place and could well be a bit of an opportunist more preoccupied with feathering her own journalistic nest at all cost than anything else. I still think Marianne is far less leftwing than it was a few yrs ago under Khan when most of their journalists were solidly leftwing. I’d say that it’s centre/centre-right now. Anyway, whether centre-right or centre-Left, Marianne is fiercely Republican and lay into all parties and are critical of all governments whatever their orientation. They’ve always refused to position themselves ideologically and/or politically.
Mediapart: Mediapart - Wikipedia (solid Left/Hard Left for Mediapart, undoubtedly a success story).
Le Monde: Le Monde - Wikipedia
(they recently opened stonking new HQs in Paris near the Austerlitz railway station, stunning; centre-Left now that billionaire Xavier Niel, the founder of free who first made his money with the legendary “Minitel rose”, owns most of it. I think that it’s designed to be more open to the public, with a café, a media library etc.)
(photo above from Dec. 2019)
L’Obs: L'Obs - Wikipedia
Le Parisien: Le Parisien - Wikipedia
Le Point: Le Point - Wikipedia
Valeurs Actuelles: Valeurs actuelles - Wikipedia
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Thanks, a very interesting summary.
What is striking is how the French media is still quite strong in hard print, and that some survive on cover cost and subs’ a business model not sustainable in the UK.
What also strikes me is the strength of the regional press here again unlike the UK where most local papers have either closed or merely reproduce press releases/agency output interspersed with ads.
Eg Yorkshire Post, Stockton and Darlington Gazette, The Press (York) and Northern Echo being examples I’m familiar with.
We have Ouest France, regionally, and very locally Le Télégramme and Le Trégor, all of which remain true newspapers with traditional reports by journalists, but of course also have online output.
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We’re steadily working through this thread and finding it very interesting so thank you very much @Fred1 We’re late arrivals to it and jumped in at the middle as a post there explained to my partner the judges he’s come across in documentaries etc who seemed to be acting as detectives - not something that exists at all in the UK so it’s interesting to see how that works.
I’d also like to confirm @strudball 's comment about newspapers here - I know they have political slants but they are much more detailed and informative than most of the UK ones (which I have largely abandoned) so must still have serious hournalists on their staff? Like John, I love Ouest France - a paper giving me international, national, regional and local village news is absolutely marvellous!
Sorry about going off piste a bit there but I wanted to make sure that @Fred1 knew his informative posts are appreciated, even if we are reserving them mainly for when we have an apero in hand… 
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I’ll try to develop another day but yeah, maybe, depends how you count (circulation data), what you include etc. General news & current issues mags and the regional press may be a bit weak in the UK in circulation terms but tabloids are in rude health, selling many millions of copies a day (cheap and full of ads as you will know).
One thing that is different in France compared to the UK (and probably many other countries), I don’t know if you’re aware of it, is that the French press & media sector in general (TV channels, radio stations etc. but it’s mostly the press) receive substantial help from the State: nearly €1 billion every year (they got an extra €485m last year because of the pandemic).
That help comes in a wide variety of ways: preferential postal rates, reduced fares for a few things such as VAT and distribution costs, tax rebates, direct subsidies, investment help, investment / modernisation / digitalisation grants etc.
For instance, your regional and local papers, so in your case, Ouest France, Le Télégramme and Le Trégor will all receive subsidies, tax rebates, postal subsidies (preferential postal fares) etc. The postal & distribution subsidy for the press (€500 million a year) in particular is instrumental in keeping all these newspapers alive as otherwise it’d be tricky for many, esp. the small ones of course, France being very rural transportation & acheminement costs would just be that bit too high for many to survive and develop.
This site and this one for instance inform us that in 2015 Ouest France received over €4 million in direct subsidies, Le Télégramme €1.3 million and Le Trégor about €15,000. Newspapers also sometimes receive (smaller) subsidies from the municipality or/and the department, it’s rare but it happens.
This system of state aids for the French press goes back to the French Revolution. It was set up in 1796 and gradually developed. First, it was solely focused on giving newspapers preferential postal tariffs. In the mid-1790s for instance, Paris alone had over 100 newspapers. Many had a low circulation as the printing technology was costly and basic but some sold in the thousands. Every single day then 100,000 copies would leave Paris for the province – read mostly by the bourgeoisie/the local elite as newspapers/gazettes etc. were expensive, literacy rates were low and French wasn’t widely spoken & read throughout the country, as there were over 400 regional languages & dialects – via a subscription service, and that’s where the postal subsidies came in, to make it affordable otherwise only a handful of people could have afforded them. Gradually, newspapers became more affordable thanks to those subsidies.
That subsidy system was first set up to ensure plurality in the press, the authorities (The Directoire, then) were keen to offer as wide a choice as possible. However, the post-revolution era was not a linear process and throughout the 1800s and up until the creation of the Third Republic (1870-1940) – the era which, in a nutshell, laid the markers of democracy in France – censorship would be rife as the monarchy was restored until 1848, followed by 22 years of the autocratic regime of Napoléon III. In 1881, with France a parliamentary republic since 1870 and the demise of Napoléon III following the Franco-Prussian War, the seminal law on freedom of the press was passed).
Over 400 newspapers and mags benefited from state help last year (for a total cost of €840 million, + extra help because of the pandemic as I wrote).
But while these subsidies are mainly welcomed by the general public for regional & local papers, there are roughly two issues here. First, it hacks off some people that notoriously unprofitable newspapers, such as the Communist daily L’Humanité for instance, are artificially propped up by the tax-payer. And secondly,
it rankles with many people that big groups also benefit from state help, such as the many national papers & mags that belong to billionaires or massive groups, that’s where these subsidies become more debatable and controversial.
For instance, publications such as Le Monde , Le Point , Le Figaro, L’Équipe, L’Express etc. receive state help and are all owned by billionaires or massive conglomerates (such as the LVHM luxury group, which own Les Échos & Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France , its CEO is the “centibilionaire” Bernard Arnault).
See this table below for instance, a “who’s who of who owns what” (it’s 4 year old though so a few things are incorrect – both Olivier Dassault and Serge Dassault are dead for instance although the Dassault Group still owns Le Figaro; Drahi doesn’t own Libération anymore etc. but you get the gist: it highlights why the subventions for a chunk of the national press are seen as controversial).
Thanks and that’s good, “tu t’ les mets sous le coude pour une mise en bouche ultérieure” we could say (roughly: you’re keeping my posts aside for a later consumption).
@AngelaR
Me too, with the exception of Prospect Magazine, quite liberal but not heavily left, and the FT.
It is very good online and it’s my extravagance as I manage my own pension, and its much more than just a financial daily, rather has great international news and comment.
Thanks Fred for this very informative thread.
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Dupond-Moretti “mis en examen” (charged) earlier today.
Difficult indeed, no idea who I’ll vote for.
That’s if I vote at all I mean, I didn’t vote last time as my nearest polling station was… 250 kms away in Leeds (!), as the *&@#~ French state it its great effing wisdom, to all intents and purposes got rid of the Newcastle honorary consulate - all staff (3 people) were volunteers, locals and interns from L’ENA etc. - just to save pennies (doesn’t actually save anything as more staff are needed at the General Consulate in London to cope with massive work increase) meaning that there was no polling station there.
Said local French consulate on Tyneside still exists and fair dos to the bloke (a local French businessman) who tries to keep it alive on a volunteer basis, but it survives purely notionally, on a skeleton basis, it’s only open a few hrs a week. I think it just delivers Carnets de Famille these days, no provision for voting last time. Only 7-10 yrs ago it was thriving, for want of a better term, but just to save 2 bobs it’s been severely downgraded and totally bereft of its core raison d’être, what most people used it for, i.e issuing of passport/ID card.
Maybe I’ll vote for that LaRouchian crank (Jacques Cheminade) if he runs again, he advocates colonising the moon and Mars, maybe he’s got it right after all and we should all try to bugger off there…
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Is it not possible for French nationals to have a postal vote ?