Why Delors never became French president
Jacques Delors, who died this week at the age of 98, has been hailed as “the best president France never had”. He fully earned that title.
To have a shot at the highest office, you have to have strong convictions or burning ambition — and preferably both. Delors had neither.
He began his political career in the early 1970s as adviser to Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a moderate Gaullist PM, before moving to the centre-left. The socialists were then allied with France’s fossilised Communist Party (Italian-style “Eurocommunism” never crossed the Alps). Any criticism of Moscow was verboten among Parisian progressives.
Delors fully endorsed the fatwa. In a 1976 episode of Apostrophes, a must-see chat show then, Delors rounded on Jean-François Revel, a rare left-wing writer who argued that communism was the enemy of socialism. Under the satisfied stare of the editor of L’Humanité, France’s answer to Pravda, Delors said he was “shocked” by Revel’s “crude criticism of communist countries”.
After François Mitterrand won the May 1981 presidential election, Delors became finance minister. By now the socialists had broken with the French Communist Party — a key reason for Mitterrand’s victory, as voters had been turning from the Stalinist PCF for years.
But Mitterrand had not ditched the statist manifesto inherited from his earlier failed bid for power made under the banner of “union de la gauche”. The question was: would he patch up that alliance with the communists or convert to social democracy, as practised by other European centre-left parties?
The nomination of Delors suggested the latter course. His words also pointed that way. The new finance minister praised the spending restraint and “brave” economic stewardship of his conservative predecessor (I’m not 100% sure of the quote, but the phrase I remember is “gestion économique courageuse”).
The direction of travel became clear after legislative elections in June 1981. The socialists triumphed and the communists slid further. But despite this resounding endorsement of social democracy by voters, Mitterrand stood by his PCF-inspired economic manifesto. Overnight Delors became a believer in eat-the-rich, tax-and-spend, regulate-and-nationalise policies.
It was a perfect illustration of Revel’s view that the communist tail was wagging the socialist dog.
Two years later, faced with the predictable results — mass unemployment, stagnation, inflation, impending exit from Europe’s monetary system — Mitterrand abandonned his attempt to create a command economy. Delors implemented the kind of austerity he had defended in an earlier life, and must have known was right all along.
In 1985 he left French politics to become European Commission boss. He did a decent job. But he still didn’t call the shots: ultimately Europe was always run by member states, not from Brussels. When he had a chance to make a difference, in 1995, Delors declined to run for president. France got an equally unprincipled but more nationalistic leader for the next 12 years.
Jacques Delors was a competent administrator and a good European. He did not hesitate to oppose his country to defend the EU consensus, notably on trade liberalisation. His achievements were real — e.g. the Single European Act and Economic and Monetary Union — but they originated in other people’s ideas (Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand respectively). He was just not cut out to be a leader.
