The Economist UK - 14.03.2020

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+

2