How to Save the French Socialist Party?

As the French Socialist Party rejected any alliance with the centrist MoDem for the second ballot of the legislative election on Sunday June 17, many people are wondering about its future and propose solutions. For example, on Rue89.com Etienne Wasmer says that the PS should hold its next congress not in France but in Germany, in Bad Godesberg to be specific, so as to finally proceed to an ideological aggiornamento as the German PSD did in 1959. On his blog, former special adviser to President Mitterrand Jacques Attali proposes a tabula rasa: the leadership of the PS should resign and the party should reinvent itself, not only its program but also, if necessary, its name.

An aggiornamento, or at least a political clarification, is indeed necessary. But who will lead it and to get where? I share Attali’s frustration but I think that his solution is naive. Who will replace the current PS leadership? A young militant in his/her thirties? Segolène Royal’s network organized around her Désir d’avenir association? Let’s be serious! During the campaign, everyone complained that Royal lacked the required experience to run the country and now Attali is suggesting to rule out one of the PS’s basic assets, a team of experienced politicians who were in office several times and sometimes proved effective at running the country.

The renewal of the PS requires not a tabula rasa but a recombination of its assets. It needs to use its legacy in a creative way and reinvest its resources according to a new strategy rather than pretend to free itself from its past. Perhaps the current leadership won’t be able to carry this shift, but it won’t be a novice either. As for Royal, she doesn’t seem to know where she’s heading, which is a problem when you aspire to leadership.

Finally, there’s the question of direction: an aggiornamento to get where? Simply saying that the PS should accept the market is not enough and too vague. Socialist leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn recently published a column about a potential direction in the Nouvel Obs. French economist Daniel Cohen, close to the PS, also provided interesting leads (also available in French):

[The French left] needs a new deal for addressing the challenges that it faces. The issue is not to reconcile the Left with the market: that was done long ago. It is to favour active programmes towards persons rather than trying to regulate the way firms operate. It is to decouple public policies and the public sector. Simple things, it would seem, but critical ones that could enable the French Left to become “modern”.

Harvard economist Dani Rodrik agrees and even suggests that Cohen’s point is relevant beyond the French case. Are American liberals looking at France to get ideas?

UPDATE: Former Socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard published a column in Libération today (June 14), calling for the transformation of the PS into a social-democratic party that accepts the market and engages with the private sector. Although I sympathize with this option, Rocard, as many of the proponents of such an idea, downplays the extent to which Scandinavian social democracy relies on strong, representative trade unions. With the lowest union density among advanced industrial countries (about 8%), France is very far from such scenario.