France’s President Francois Hollande makes a televised statement at the Elysee Palace in Paris. REUTERS/TF1
President François Hollande found himself dealing with yet another scandal on Monday, though this one centered on America’s national security state extending its reach onto French soil rather than one of his own ministers or officials. As reported by Le Monde, the U.S. National Security Agency recorded tens of millions of digital communications, including phone calls, made in France late in 2012 and early 2013. The revelations are the latest to emerge from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who remains holed up in Russia. And though the legacy of state spying is not quite as emotionally resonant in France as it is in, say, Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government briefly faltered under the duress of public outrage when Snowden revealed similar spying in that country, French skepticism of American foreign policy and its national security state in general means this will not be an easy fix for Hollande or his already-troubled Socialist Party.
Hollande has already been dealing with skepticism on the far-left for his unwillingness to more directly confront Berlin on the austerity policies that have dominated European Union policymaking since 2008. And recent weeks have seen the center-left base of his party increasingly frustrated with Hollande’s attempts to please everyone on issues like the deportation of Roma and a divisive primary vote in Marseille. The last thing he needed, then, was a fresh story that makes his regime appear unwilling or unable to prevent American violations of citizens’ privacy, adding to the sense of dysfunction and dithering that has followed him almost from the moment he took power in the spring of 2012.
So far, Hollande has avoided directly addressing the allegations, instead leaving his Interior Minister Manuel Valls to condemn the news on the radio and Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to dress down U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry behind closed doors. Unlike Merkel, who seemed to calculate the need to feign outrage at reports of U.S. spying in Germany, Hollande has no election on the horizon to color his administration’s response, but the furious reaction speaks to anxiety about how this will play out on the ideological extremes of a volatile domestic political scene. Years remain until Hollande will actually face voters and have to defend his administration, but it’s easy to envision a moment like this one reinforcing already-widespread perceptions that he is a bumbling bureaucrat rather than an able manager. Perhaps more frustrating for Hollande is that foreign policy had been one of his few strong suits, French troops having engineered a remarkable turnaround in Mali’s security situation and paving the way for successful elections there in July. Now we can add national security to the list of blights on his record.
