Civil war, French-style, in the US, Patrice de Beer

pdebeer — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:43:36 +0000

The bitter contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has finally come to an end. Will the Democratic Party avoid following the example of France's Parti Socialiste and grow beyond its wounds?

Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination yesterday, bringing to an end a bitter contest that has pulled at the heartstrings of the Democratic Party. Civil wars are usually more bitter and bloodier than ordinary wars. This is just as true in politics: divisions can run deep and linger on for long. Just remember the fury of pro-Clinton demonstrators when the party ruled to split delegates from Michigan and Florida among the two candidates: "Nobama" they screamed! Days before, a Roman Catholic priest had vilified Hillary Clinton in a most unchristian way from the pulpit of Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ, prompting the senator from Illinois to break with his church. Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde.

To think of this contest as a "civil war" is not to exaggerate. Clinton went as far as to compare her rivalry with Obama to the Bush-Gore battle over Florida's "hanging chads" in 2000 or, even worse, to Morgan Tsvangirai's election fight against Mugabe's goon squads in Zimbabwe. Obama voters threatened to stay home in November if their candidate was not selected, while many Clintonians now threaten to vote for the Republican "enemy" John McCain rather than for someone accused of not representing working "whites". Scars might take time to heal and weaken the Democratic campaign as words often bite harder than blades. In a sense, victory in November depends more on the self-inflicted wounds of the other side than on your own capacity to mobilise voters.

Yet nothing is new under the sun and, despite what pundits can say, history does repeat itself, both in the US and in France, where Hillary had been the favourite - remember, we all loved Bill Clinton - till Obama rode into the picture on his white horse. Obama has captured the imagination of the country, even when metropolitan France returned only one non-white MP out of 577 last year (and very few women) and would not dream of having a black presidential candidate.

In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy, who had openly campaigned against President Jacques Chirac while he was serving under him as cabinet minister for five years, defeated his socialist rival Ségolène Royal. Democratically selected by party members, she was stabbed in the back during the campaign by Parti Socialiste (PS) "elephants". Then other socialists - like Sarko's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner - defected to the first openly right wing government France has known for decades.

Today, the PS rivalry - a war of egos, waged between moderate reformists "Ségo" and Bertrand Delanoë (just re-elected Mayor of Paris) and factions that have just banded together behind Martine Aubry to protect their own ambitions against these two ("marrying the carp and the rabbit," as we say in French) - is baffling a disorientated electorate. Rather than offering an attractive alternative to an unpopular president, socialists are spending their energy sniping at each other, putting personal ambitions ahead of political unity and strategy.

As a foreign correspondent in the US during the 2000 elections, I had been appalled by Al Gore's catastrophic campaign, the worse I thought I had ever witnessed till ... 2002, when I followed French socialist premier Lionel Jospin's even more appalling presidential campaign.

Now, the Barack-Hillary civil war is finding an echo on our side of the Channel. Strangely enough, this welcome opening up of candidacies to better represent society - a woman against a black candidate in the US, and in France, a president whose father was an immigrant against two women and a gay man in the PS - has not been followed by a new kind of politics: internecine rivalries remain paramount and destroying your party "friends" more crucial than fighting the opposition. Change is never a one way street. For once in a world too often driven by American examples, I can now wonder who is outdoing the other between the French and the Americans!

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Civil war, French-style, in the US, Patrice de Beer