Alf Young: No quick fix for Europe’s politicians

WE’VE been in the Languedoc for the past week as France voted, first time round, for its next president. On Sunday morning, in the nearest town, St Chinian, the twice-weekly market was all abustle. The old woman, selling oysters, had had a makeover. That and a few absent food stalls aside, it seemed like commercial business as usual.

Across the road in the Mairie, where the votes were being cast, the atmosphere seemed altogether more subdued. No canvassers or party functionaries in sight. No posters, except for those plastered on the officially sanctioned bill-boards. Even their messages were obscured by the rows of white vans, encircling the market stalls.

From time to time, small groups of people would stroll across the gravel drive to exercise their democratic choice. There was no sense that, right across mainland France and in its overseas territories, this trickle of participation would lead to flood, a near-80 per cent turnout. Or that just under a third of all votes cast would go to the candidates of the far right and left, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon.

But France, like much of the European continent, is still living through deeply troubled economic times. Synchronised austerity is hurting. Unemployment is up again, at a 12-year high of nearly 10 per cent. Next door, in Spain, the jobless now account for one in four of the entire working-age population. In Madrid, the price of servicing the national debt is rocketing again and another government seems on its last legs.

The French reputation for still making lots of things is under increasing pressure. Some 355,000 manufacturing jobs have gone in Nicolas Sarkozy’s first five-year term alone. The spectre of national de-industrialisation hangs heavily over this election. It seems it will take a miracle for this incumbent, like so many other political casualties of this crash, to come from behind and win.

Even under Sarkozy, the French have already tried one of the political remedies most widely touted across Europe, not least by our own SNP government in Edinburgh. The fruits of infrastructure-led stimulus programmes, in the spirit of Francois Mitterand’s Grands Projets, designed to create jobs and rebuild hope, are everywhere.

The roads we drove on, even to remote hilltop villages, were seamless carpets of recently laid tarmac, complete with rebuilt stone parapets and log-pole crash barriers. Rusting railway bridges have been repainted. Small towns boast exquisitely landscaped roundabouts on arrival and stylish street furniture within. The ancient fortified tower, on a rocky outcrop above the village we were staying in, has been refurbished and illuminated at night.

If investing now in shovel-ready public works was the complete answer to all our current economic ills, France would now be looking back on a job well done and giving Sarkozy a second term, not bracing itself to send Francois Hollande to the Elysee Palace in eight days’ time – only the second socialist to become president since the Fifth Republic began in 1958, under Charles De Gaulle.

While we were away, it was confirmed the UK economy is now back in recession. National output has slipped into negative territory for two three-month periods in a row. Of course, these few decimal points, either side of zero, could eventually be smoothed away by government statisticians revising the data. It will, however, prove much harder to erase the underlying message, the dawning realisation that our economy, like many across Europe, is simply going nowhere fast.

That’s the grimmer prospect. A protracted period of slump across a whole continent that will be counted in lost jobs, squeezed living standards, public services struggling to cope and faltering expectations for the quality of life for generations to come. If our politicians, whatever labels they bear, fail to address these challenges, they too could be caught up in the resultant turmoil.

The longer the pain goes on, with no resolution in sight, the more fickle and volatile voters will become. Precisely how they will respond is becoming harder to read, as both the Bradford East by-election here and the French presidential contest have already demonstrated. But if Hollande beats Sarkozy on 6 May, as the latest polls say he daecisively will, the central dynamic in Europe will be tested to destruction yet again.

German chancellor Angela Merkel faces an uncomfortable dilemma. She wants to maintain the fiscal compact signed by 25 of the 27 EU member states at the beginning of March. But a new President Hollande, with a fresh mandate, will demand action to promote growth, too. That risks destabilising the main axis in the eurozone. But Hollande knows Merkel is vulnerable, because she too faces re-election by the autumn of next year. We could end up with the bulk of the EU deciding to supplement austerity with a real plan for growth. Quite where that would leave the Westminster coalition, already adrift on a sea of troubles, not least what it did or didn’t do to help Rupert Murdoch take full control of Sky, is anyone’s guess.

In different circumstances, all this might have been unalloyed good news for Alex Salmond. He could align himself with a new pro-group dynamic in mainland Europe. But the SNP government in Edinburgh has already decided an independent Scotland would retain sterling as its currency and has no plans to join the euro this side of 2025. If the dynamic in the eurozone changes again, he couldn’t change his mind yet again on both counts, could he?

And then there’s Murdoch. Back at the beginning of March, just days after our First Minister had had Rupert Murdoch round to Bute House for what we were told at the time was “tea and Tunnocks”, I wrote in this space that “no other political leader on these islands would have been seen in the same building as Rupert Murdoch” after what the Met’s Sue Akers had told the Leveson Inquiry about a network of corrupted officials and a culture of illegal payments that fed News International a steady stream of salacious gossip.

I went on to observe that “Mr Salmond has no way of knowing what more the millions of e-mails in the Met’s hands might reveal”. Well the First Minister certainly knows now. He knows it includes all those damaging e-mails from someone else who was at what we now know was a full-blown lunch at Bute House that day, NI’s Frederic Michel, about Mr Salmond standing ready to lobby Westminster ministers about Murdoch being allowed to take control of Sky.

Our First Minister says it was all about preserving jobs and investment here in Scotland. But Murdoch isn’t going to control Sky.He may even be judged not to be a fit and proper person to hold the Sky shares he already controls. It was really about judgment, First Minister. And on this occasion your judgment was deeply, deeply flawed.