France's François Fillon and America's Donald Trump Have a Lot in Common

The former French prime minister who upended the conservative primary season by beating his two rivals came from behind in a ten-day rise in the polls that nobody believed. François Fillon finished with 44% of the votes of the 4.5 million French "Républicains" the name newly given to the Gaullist conservative French party by Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president who was intent on making his political comeback after being beaten by François Hollande, the current French president, in 2012. Alain Juppé, mayor of Bordeaux and protégé of former French president Jacques Chirac, placed second with 28%. It was a humiliation for Juppé, who led in the polls by 12 to 20 points until the last few days and who everyone expected to sail into the nomination. An even greater humiliation befell Sarkozy, who got just under 22% of the vote on Sunday. • • • Why does the first round of a French primary election matter? Because François Fillon is promising to turn France on its ear. He has been called a French thatcherite and his stern message to the French conservatives coalesced the right side of his party. Juppé was finally seen as too centrist and soft. Sarkozy was a strange mix of hardline very 'right' promises meant more to combat Marine Le Pen in the general election than to convince his own party to give him another mandate. And, often, the "been there done that" attitude that made one wonder if Sarkozy really wanted to go back to being president must have had an effect on his fellow French conservatives. • • • In an interesting side story, one of the many that make French presidential politics so fascinating, Fillon was President Sarkozy's only prime minister, lasting the entire 5 years from 2007 to 2012, and they are political friends. Sarkozy said in his concession speech Sunday night that he wants all his supporters to vote for Fillon in the second round of the primary next Sunday. Round 2 will pit Fillon against Juppé. With a 15% advantage, it looks like an easy victory for Fillon. But, Fillon and his staff are being cautious, because the French are tricky voters -- often voting against their preferred candidate in the first round to send a coded message to the candidate they eventually elect that he needs to alter his course a bit. So, while François Fillon looks like the winner of the Républicain nomination -- and also to become president in the general election next Spring, since the French Socialists under Hollande have ahd a miserable 10% favorability rating in polls for the entire past year, don't bet the house on Fillon just yet. • • • There is another reason that François Fillon should be interesting to Americans especially. His program sounds a lot like the one that won Donald Trump the election. Some in France are callling it a rally to shrink the government and free the French from the socialist state's grip. Here are the key planks in the Fillon platform -- and try not to be too disbelieving because the French have a system that is so tied up in government and powerful unions that it often seems a miracle that the country survives. • EMPLOYMENT. Fillon wants private companies to be able to fire employees. He also wants to end the 35-hour government and private company employee work week and let employers and employees negotiate the length of the work week, not to exceed 48 hours per week, and most of the other terms and conditions in the workplace. And, he wants to reduce corporate tax to a maximum of 25 %. • RETIREMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT. Fillon wants to reduce the over-12% jobless rate by reducing unemployment benefits on a sliding scale the longer the person is unemployed, saying this will bring people back into the workforce by making it harder for them to refuse job offers. He also wants to raise the retirement age to 65 by 2022. • GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES. Fillon wants to eliminate 500,000 government employees within 5 years and reduce special benefits that government employees but not private ones receive. • RELIGION. France is very strongly secular, with separation of church and state, but Moslems have recently received favored treatment. Fillon wants to enact a law to prohibit the wearing of a burkini (the Moslem full-body swimsuit that appeared on French beaches last summer and caused a huge dispute everywhere in France because police and mayors saw it as religious favoritism and also as being unsafe. • MARRIAGE. While Fillon says he will not overturn the same-sex marriage law passed by the Socialists, he wants to prohibit same-sex couples from adopting children. He also promises more government support in the form of subsidies to help families. • EDUCATION. Fillon wants to break the stranglehold that ideologues have on school curricula and go back to teaching fundamentals and republican (i.e., democratic) principles. • EUROPEAN UNION AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS. Fillon wants the EU to respect the "sovereignty of France." He also wants the EU to allow its member countries to expel immigrants who break the criminal law, to give countries a voice in regulations relating to the Euro currency, and to cooperate with Russia to resolve the Syria civil war. • • • It all sounds a lot like Donald Trump, French style. And, perhaps he tends toward Anglo-Saxon principles of government because he has been married for 35 years to his wife, Penelope, who was born in Wales. Penny, as she is known to her friends, was the first British wife of a French prime minister. Penny is very attached to their home village of 1500 inhabitants in the Sarthe and did not live full-time in the prime minister's residence in Paris during her husband's tenure. • • • Dear readers, it will be interesting to see how fierce the fight of the Socialist left in France will be to prevent his program from being enacted if François Fillon is elected president in May. That is surely another similarity between François Fillon and Donald Trump. But, like Trump, Fillon will undoubtedly have the support of ordinary French people, who are fed up with a government that doesn't work, except to pass taxes and force job-killing and anti-Christian regulations on a France already on its knees economically and socially.