Rue89 compares the gay marriage bill to the 35-hour working week as an example of a key socialist reform that the right wing will probably not dare to repeal, whoever leads the divided UMP into the next election.
Photo: François Fillon and Xavier Bertrand in the National Assembly, December 4th 2012 (WITT/SIPA)
Article source: “Après les 35 heures, le mariage homosexuel : une nouvelle loi-boulet pour la droite”, François Krug, Rue89, 23/01/2013.
The UMP is split on gay marriage. Its members do agree on one thing though: they will have a hard time repealing the law once they get back in power.
One day the right wing will be back in power. And on that day it will scrap “le mariage pour tous”. Or maybe not: learning from their failure to repeal the 35-hour working week, the UMP leadership has prefered to give the subject a wide berth.
A new generation of UMP politicians has marked itself out on this issue. After Franck Riester, it was the turn of Benoist Apparu to announce (in an interview with Le Parisien) that he will vote in favour of the government bill.
What really grabs the attention, however, is the answer given by the former housing minister to the following simple question: if the right wing gets back into power in 2017, will the law be repealed?
“I don’t think so, and I hope not. There’s no going back. By 2017, gay couples will already have been married. If we’re elected, we won’t be able to annul those marriages – and that’s just as well!”
Xavier Bertrand, on the other hand, cannot claim to exemplify the new blood regenerating the right wing. The former General Secretary of the UMP presents himself as a solution to the party’s problems: he has already declared as a candidate for the presidential election in 2017.
He has therefore kept a low profile during the perilous debate about gay marriage. But a statement made in passing during an interview given to L’Express in November, has slipped by unnoticed:
“Are there many social reforms on which we’ve gone back?”
The 35-hour working week
The former work minister certainly knows what he is talking about. Perhaps he was being realistic (or fatalistic), recalling the imposition of the 35-hour working week (under the government of socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin [ed.]), another law that the right wing never dared to repeal.
Xavier Bertrand can allow himself such an ambiguous position, but not so the two main leadership candidates Jean-François Copé and François Fillon: activists have expected them to establish clear positions. It was surprising to see which one of the two proved to be the more radical.
Jean-François Copé may have called for demonstrations against the gay marriage bill, but he remains very cautious when asked about a potential repeal, as this quote from an interview with L’Express last week demonstrates:
“The current goal is to prevent the bill passing in its present form. We do not know what the final text will be like. It changes every ten minutes. You only have to look at all the incomprehensible toing and froing on the question of ART.”
François Fillon, on the other hand, is not in the habit of attending protests. And yet it is the former prime minister who has declared himself most clearly in favour of repealing the law.
In late October, during a televised debate with Jean-François Copé, the former prime minister said he believed that a repeal was possible and necessary. At least this is how his convoluted turn of phrase has been understood:
“I will start by saying that this is not a law on which I think we should not go back when there is a change in power.”
Now that it’s over, François Fillon would rather forget about his forced shift to the right during the UMP leadership campaign, and is doing everything he can not to get bogged down in the debate on “le mariage pour tous”: like all the other leading lights in the UMP, he knows that this law could become a millstone around his neck, and that it is probably here to stay.
Translation: Alexandra Bilthauer and Perrine Jégou
Editing: Sam Trainor