Economic patriot

Arnaud Montebourg, the firebrand champion of French industry.

It is a peculiar curse of French politics that some of its practitioners read a little too much history and fancy themselves to be ‘providential’ men.

Refusing to be held back by petty constraints like European Union treaties or the inability to print money, these politicians – armed with ‘voluntarism’, élan and always with audacity – will defend old jobs and create new ones at home while leaving the French model essentially unchanged and steering the EU in the direction of Colbertian state intervention. Five years ago, it was Nicolas Sarkozy who went back on his predecessor’s fiscal commitments, advocated “Community preference” and tried to link carmakers’ subsidies to domestic production. Today, it is the turn of a man of the left to learn that even Charles de Gaulle would have been constrained by the single market and the single currency.

Arnaud Montebourg, France’s minister responsible for industrial revival, is a man with a vision. Aged 50, he is a self-declared “economic patriot” who campaigned against the EU’s constitutional treaty in 2005. Montebourg graced a magazine cover in a Breton marinière as part of his ‘Made in France’ campaign and regularly pops a tricolour pocket square into his jacket for factory visits. Inspired by Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a left-wing minister for industry under President François Mitterrand, Montebourg’s goal is to stop France turning into a “vast ski resort for the rich, or a luxury spa hotel” by re-conquering the labour-intensive heavy manufacturing it has lost.

Montebourg’s high-profile attack on ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker, was meant to be a pivotal moment in this campaign. On learning that the company intended to close two already mothballed blast furnaces at Florange in Lorraine while continuing to operate part of the facility, Montebourg declared in late November that “we no longer want Mittal in France because they do not respect France” and threatened transitional nationalisation of the whole plant while an unnamed buyer prepared his offer. His target was made to measure: an old heavy industry in a depressed region owned by an absentee transnational capitalist in the form of Lakshmi Mittal, an ostentatious Indian billionaire who is resident in that magnet for French tax dodgers, London.

But Montebourg had, as so often, acted alone. While his bosses, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, could support transitional nationalisation in principle, it was a last resort. They and Labour Minister Michel Sapin, a long-time ally of President François Hollande, were aghast at Montebourg’s threat to Mittal, which employs 20,000 in France. The media war over 629 jobs was also undermining their newly agreed policy focused on restoring competitiveness through cost reduction. To the unions’ fury, a deal was quickly struck that sidelined Montebourg and kept the two furnaces closed.

A humiliated Montebourg is a dangerous prospect for Hollande and the right wing of the Parti Socialiste, which is why Hollande spent last weekend talking his junior minister out of resigning. Montebourg’s style has always been that of a provocateur, part real and part a lawyer’s trick. Meetings and interviews often begin with accusations and threats to wrong-foot his opponents and interlocutors. But Montebourg is not a typical junior minister with negotiating skills, but a man with a following. Hollande may have won the party’s presidential primaries in 2011, but it was Montebourg who won the headlines with his surprising 17% of the vote – well ahead of his nearest rivals, Ségolène Royal and Manuel Valls, now the government’s most popular minister.

Realising his primary campaign was stalling on a vague message of “renovation”, Montebourg found his inner Chevènement and became the tribune of “deglobalisation”. He bagged nearly half a million votes, tapping into a current on the left (typified by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s 11% vote in the presidential elections) that believes it possible to roll back more than two decades of change since the creation of the single market and the globalisation-enhanced rise of China.

He will not care that a poll shows that only 38% approve of his actions in the Mittal affair. For a start, he will be delighted to be noticed for his politics rather than his love life, after his recent split with a former news anchor, Audrey Pulvar. Much more importantly for him, the poll also found that, among left-wing voters, 70% agreed with his approach and 91% supported nationalisation.

Fact File

CV

1962: Born in Nièvre, Burgundy

1990: Becomes an advocate at the Paris bar

1997-: Deputy for the Parti Socialiste (PS) for Saône-et-Loire

2003: Member of the PS’s national bureau

2005: Campaign against the EU’s constitutional treaty

2006: Spokesman for Ségolène Royal’s elec tion campaign

2008: President of the general council of Saône-et-Loire

2011: Comes third in the PS’s presidential primaries

2012-: Minister for industrial revival

The only child of a tax-inspector father and a Spanish-language teacher whose father was Algerian, Montebourg was born and raised in Nièvre in Burgundy – Mitterrand’s electoral fiefdom – and studied law in Dijon, before finishing at Sciences-Po in Paris.

As a young lawyer in Paris, his debating skills won him the post of first secretary of the Conférence du Stage, an élite group of new attorneys. It also helped him acquire high-profile legal work, such as the defence of the killer of René Bousquet, a Mitterrand confidant who had served in the wartime Vichy regime.

Montebourg had been active in student and socialist politics from the age of 18, but early on showed his loathing of party organisation and discipline by quitting the Objectifs 89 current within the PS. Nevertheless, he entered the national assembly in 1997 as the member for the sixth district of Saône-et-Loire, a department in Burgundy. He quickly developed a reputation as a political loner and moralist by making allegations of corruption on both sides of the political divide.

Dismayed with the ‘social liberalism’ of Lionel Jospin’s 1997-2002 socialist government, Montebourg decided to align himself with near-contemporaries on the left, Vincent Peillon and Benoît Hamon, in forming the Nouveau Parti Socialiste (NPS) within the PS. Again, however, he quit in 2005 over differences on policy and discipline.

Though on his own again and though a parliamentarian for just nine years, Montebourg was already in 2006 toying with the idea of running for the presidency. As it became clear that Royal was the best roadblock to the social democratic ambitions of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Montebourg aligned with her and became her campaign spokesman until, of course, his verbal indiscipline got the better of him. Describing Royal, Montebourg said she had “only one fault: her partner”. At the time – as far as the public knew anyway – this was Hollande.

In the wake of his 2011 first-round showing, Montebourg repaired the damage with Hollande sufficiently to guarantee himself a place in the new president’s first government. He will be hard to shift without causing major headaches for the government in the National Assembly and on television. Montebourg is highly ambitious and does not lack self-belief. Given the opportunity, he will put both characteristics to the service of his vision of an EU ‘Made in France’.

 

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