TRAPPES, France—At the “Friz-Lys” styling salon, Jocelyne Gisquet is luxuriating in the freedom of answering emails with a laptop balanced on her knees while having her hair curled. Working where she wants, when she wants, are among the pay-offs of the 45-year-old’s bold step last year to quit a stable job as a marketing director at one of France’s largest multinationals to set up in business for herself.
That risk-taking spirit of get-up-and-go is what French presidential hopeful Benoit Hamon hopes to unleash on a national scale with his radical proposal that all French adults—rich and poor, working or unemployed—be paid a modest but regular monthly no-strings-attached salary to give them the freedom to try new things without the fear of unpaid bills.
Hamon’s campaign for “universal income” has catapulted him from obscurity on the left wing of the ruling Socialist Party to within touching distance of its presidential ticket. With 35 percent of the vote in the Socialist primary’s first round, the 49-year-old is in pole position to beat ex-Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who got 31 percent, in the decisive second-round ballot on Sunday.
But in Trappes, the blue-collar town west of Paris where he is the elected lawmaker, Hamon hasn’t won over Gisquet or her stylist, Francoise Larcher, weaving bright plastic rollers into the entrepreneur’s hair.
Where Hamon sees 750 euros ($800) per month for all liberating the French and their creative forces, and cushioning them from a predicted automated future of fewer jobs for humans, Gisquet and Larcher see just another state handout that France neither needs nor can afford.
“That’s the problem with the left. They are far too utopian,” said Gisquet. “They make promises they can’t keep. That’s intolerable.”
That opponents of his signature proposal are so vocal and easy to find even in Hamon’s district, where he vacuumed up 55 percent of votes in the primary first round last Sunday and where people warmly describe him as a salt-of-the-earth type who is generous with his time, gives a foretaste of the steep uphill battle the expected Socialist Party candidate will face in France’s presidential election in April and May.
In his favor: Quitting Francois Hollande’s government (he was education minister) in 2014 put distance between Hamon and the Socialist president whose catastrophic unpopularity killed his own hopes for a second five-year term.
