The Economist UK - 14.03.2020

(Frankie) #1
The EconomistMarch 14th 2020 Europe 31

from the second-floor window of a shut-
tered town-house. “The bourgeois are of-
ten against us,” shrugs the general, march-
ing off to the next door.
The campaign in southern France sug-
gests three points with wider political reso-
nance. The first is what the French call the
“banalisation” of the rn vote. Mr de la
Chesnais refuses to be labelled “Ms Le Pen’s
candidate”. Yet he posed unapologetically
for a campaign photo with her, and has
splashed her party’s label on his official
poster, alongside that of other right-wing
fringe parties. The rnis not expected to do
well in big cities. But in small and mid-
sized towns it could build on its successes.
Many are in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur,
the surrounding region. At the first round
of the presidential election in 2017, Ms Le
Pen came top in Carpentras.
This near-normalisation has led to a
“porosity” between the right-wing and far-
right vote in the region, says Christèle Mar-
chand-Lagier, a political scientist at the
University of Avignon. Carpentras was
where Marion Maréchal, Ms Le Pen’s niece
and a champion of Catholic right-wing pol-
itics, was once elected deputy. Thierry Mar-
iani, another former deputy from the re-
gion and ex-Republican government
minister, last year defected to the rn. So
far, both locally and nationally, the Repub-
licans have refused to contemplate alli-
ances of any sort with Ms Le Pen. But the
search for second-round backing in three-
way contests could strain such principles.
A second feature is the local resilience
of mainstream parties, despite Mr Mac-
ron’s crushing of them at the national level
at a parliamentary election in 2017. French
mayors have a strong link to voters, incum-
bency helps, and parochial issues prevail.
In the nearby walled city of Avignon, home
to 14th-century popes and 21st-century
yoga studios, the talk at the Green party of-
fice is all about making public transport
free and contesting the construction of a
new motorway link. In 2014 Jean-Pierre
Cervantes, the Green candidate, who wears
a pea-green scarf knotted around his neck,
was on the victorious Socialist list. Today,
going it alone, he hopes the “green awaken-
ing” will make Avignon one of the Greens’
national successes.
The third point is the chronic local
weakness of President Emmanuel Mac-
ron’s La République en Marche (lrem). The
party he founded in 2016 did not exist at the
previous local elections, and has struggled
to put down roots. Across France, Ms Le Pen
is running more party lists than Mr Mac-
ron. In Carpentras, in line with lrem’s poli-
cy of supporting friendly incumbents in
many places, it does not have its own can-
didate. Frédéric Tacchino, the lremcandi-
date in Avignon, says that, unlike him,
many of his fellow candidates in the region
have not even put Mr Macron’s party name

on their flyers. At Paris headquarters, the
party says it will ask its candidates who
come third in the first round to stand
down, or merge with either the left or the
right, in order to keep thernout.
Focused on managing the coronavirus
crisis, Mr Macron insists that this election
is a local matter, not a referendum on him.
Up to a point this may be true. Yet the dis-
mal results that even his own party now ex-
pects will nonetheless be seen as further
evidence of his lack of personal popularity,
as well as the failure of his party to build up
countrywide the sort of local networks it
needs if it is ever to become a lasting force
in French politics. 7

“R


evolutionary” is not a word that of-
ten escapes Angela Merkel’s lips. Yet
on March 8th, international women’s day,
that was how Germany’s chancellor de-
scribed the change she had observed in
men’s attitudes to balancing work and fam-
ily. This matters in a country that can still
deride Rabenmütter (“Raven mothers”),
women who supposedly neglect children
for career. But on another measure of
equality—pay—Germany is lagging.
The median hourly wage for German
women is €17.09 ($19.31), 21% less than

men’s €21.60. In the European Union, only
Estonia has a wider gap. But the raw num-
bers can mislead. Adjust for sector, skills,
age and other factors, and the gap plum-
mets to 6-7%. Women are likelier than men
to work in badly paid service jobs; two-
thirds of shop assistants are female. Al-
most half of working women are part-time
(compared with 9% of men) and so tend not
to climb the career ladder as fast. Katharina
Wrohlich at the German Institute for Eco-
nomic Research notes that some countries
with lower pay gaps, such as Italy, have far
fewer women working. Women who earn
low wages drag down the average; those
who earn nothing are not counted.
Yet the adjusted figures leave some-
thing out, too. Which career to follow, and
whether to work part-time, are individual
choices. Yet they are influenced by tax and
benefit rules, education and child-care
policy, and social norms. Ensuring equal
pay for equal work would not, in itself,
make Germany’s boardrooms less male, or
get more women into well-paid sectors.
In the former East Germany, the unad-
justed pay gap between men and women is
minuscule. In some areas, women earn
more. This is partly explained by the lack of
industrial giants in the east. Germany’s pay
gap yawns widest in the humming south-
ern states of Bavaria and Baden-Württem-
berg, where men dominate lucrative tech-
nical and manufacturing jobs. In the east
the public sector, where women do better,
employs more people. History counts, too.
The old communist regime cajoled women
to work outside the home, and started a tra-
dition of state-backed child care that per-
sists. East German women have long been
more likely to work than westerners, al-
though the figures are converging.
The pay gap has almost vanished for
full-time workers under 30, the average age
for new mothers, but for those over 40 it
has barely budged for three decades. The
motherhood wage penalty is higher in Ger-
many than in many rich countries; ten
years after giving birth the average German
mother earns almost two-thirds less than
before, a far more precipitous drop than in
countries with better child-care provision,
such as Sweden or France. Tax rules and
education practices, including schools that
can close as early as noon, nudge large
numbers of women into part-time work.
Germany is changing. Since 2013 the
state has guaranteed day care for children
over 12 months (though finding a spot can
be nightmarish). The minimum wage,
which was introduced in 2015, dispropor-
tionally helped women. New transparency
rules oblige big firms to explain pay deci-
sions to curious staff. But much remains to
be done, including chivvying men to take
on more of the duties of parenting; just
36% of German fathers take paternity leave.
The revolution is incomplete. 7

BERLIN
Women are more likely to work
part-time—especially in the west

Women and work

Why Germany’s


pay gap is so large


Source: IAB

The deindustrialised east
Germany, difference between men’s and
women’s gross monthly pay as % of men’s, 2014

Mecklenburg-
West Pomerania

Saxony-Anhalt Brandenburg

Thuringia

Saxony

Schleswig-
Holstein

North Rhine-
Westphalia

Hesse

Saarland

Baden-
Württemberg

Rhineland-
Palatinate

Bavaria

Lower Saxony

Bremen Hamburg
Berlin

-5 to 0 0 to 4 5 to 10 10 to 15 15+

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