FRANCE : EN ROUTE TO A FIGHT / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENTARY & ANALYSIS ( A MUST READ )

France: En route to a fight

By Peggy Hollinger

Published: May 4 2011 22:14

Window on the world: Nicholas Sarkozy and his Italian-born wife, Carla, arrive in the south of France last August for a three week holiday. A president born to a Hugarian immigrant father is now seeking to tighten Europe’s treaty on borderless travel ............

Nicolas Sarkozy once blamed his low ratings in the opinion polls on jealousy. “People think I have a beautiful wife, a good job, so I have to be given a hard time,” the French president told guests at a private function a few months ago.

Now he may be set for an even harder time just as he begins the countdown to the next presidential election, a year away. Paris is abuzz with talk that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the supermodel turned pop musician whom he married after a whirlwind and very public romance in 2008, may be three months pregnant.

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But far from prompting cries of delight, this potential paternal bliss at a time of economic hardship is raising alarm bells in some parts of Mr Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party. “He has so publicised his private life that people may suspect any baby has been timed on purpose,” says one senior party member. “People do not want the president to flaunt his shining happiness. They want him to suffer like they do.”

On Friday, the 56-year-old Mr Sarkozy marks the fourth anniversary of an election win in which he promised “rupture” – a break with the elitist practices of the past and a platform of radical reforms to reshape France for the 21st century. In that time he has indeed delivered “rupture” – but the break has been with the public rather than with the bad old ways of the past. Never has a president of the Fifth Republic been so unpopular in the polls just a year away from the next election.

The result is reflected in the polls. Survey after survey shows that not just the opposition Socialists but even the extreme right National Front could overtake Mr Sarkozy in the race for the presidency next year. The campaign, already under way, is having repercussions beyond France as Paris, along with Rome, demands changes to the Schengen treaty that allows free movement across Europe’s borders. At the same time, France has been in dispute with Italy over the arrival of illegal immigrants from north Africa – which might have been a less strident affair if the National Front had not been threatening to draw votes away from Mr Sarkozy’s party.

The outcome will be vital for a Europe whose leaders have to battle to put behind them sovereign debt crises, shore up confidence in the 17-nation euro and ensure unity among the 27 member states of the European Union at a time of rising nationalism and an uncertain economic outlook. A decisive, yet accommodating, France will be all the more important from mid-2012 as Germany, its traditional main ally in shaping the EU, becomes preoccupied by its own federal election due the following year.

Like many leaders across Europe, Mr Sarkozy may be paying the price of the anxiety provoked by the global economic crisis. Voters accuse the president of not keeping promises on jobs or purchasing power. But the barrel-chested lawyer from the bourgeois suburbs of Paris is also being punished for his highly personalised approach to power – a style seen as clannish, self-serving, impulsive and short-termist. In short, not presidential.

UMP rank-and-file members are now even thinking the unthinkable. Can Mr Sarkozy be trusted to win the next election? “There are real questions at the heart of the majority,” says Jean-Louis Christ, a UMP parliamentary deputy from Haut-Rhin in the Alsace region. “His image has really deteriorated.”

Ever since his star-studded election night party on the Champs Elysées, Mr Sarkozy has been unable to shake off the image of the soap opera president whose Dallas-style taste for money, power and celebrity has shocked a conservative electorate. In spite of efforts over the past year to change his image – staying out of the media limelight and interfering less in the day-to-day running of government – dislike of the man himself remains intense. So even when he takes action widely supported by public opinion – such as launching military intervention in Libya or Ivory Coast – there is no payback in the polls.

“We have rarely seen a power so reviled, less for its policies than for its leader,” writes Franz-Olivier Giesbert, political commentator and director at Le Point, a news magazine, in Monsieur le President, his review of Mr Sarkozy’s exercise of power.

In spite of having implemented some of the most radical reforms seen in France for more than a decade – raising the pension age and making cuts to the civil service, for example – and rallying Europe to the rescue of the euro in last year’s sovereign debt crisis, Mr Sarkozy remains vilified by the media as the “hyperpresident” and a sore disappointment to those who voted for him in 2007.

“Everyone acknowledges that he has courage, that he has done reforms that his predecessors never did,” says Jean-François Peumeury, the mayor of Roquencourt, a well-heeled village on the outskirts of Versailles where more than 80 per cent cast their 2007 votes for Mr Sarkozy. “But they don’t like his style of living, his behaviour. People find his style too showy. He is too nervous, too impulsive.”

“There is a real hatred of the person,” says the senior UMP member, citing the scars left by scandals over nepotism and political cronyism during Mr Sarkozy’s first three years in office. “Never has an outgoing president taken on an election with so much antipathy. The whole majority is very worried.”

Business leaders, too, have been disappointed by a frenzy of scattered reforms – earning him the nickname the “surfer president” – while the core problems of high social charges and burdensome labour regulations remain. “His record is still one of the best of the last few presidents we have had,” says the boss of one blue-chip company. “But we need action that is more consistent and more focused ... he does not concentrate on giving a vision, on saying ‘here are the five great things I will do’.”

Grassroots party members say Mr Sarkozy’s chances of re-election are threatened by confusion over his fast-paced and sometimes contradictory initiatives. “There is a need to put things back into perspective,” says Frédéric Valletoux, mayor of the Sarkozy stronghold of Fontainebleau, outside Paris. “People have been destabilised by the direction, which has not always been clear.”

Presidential credibility has also been weakened by divisions within the UMP over the tactics he has employed to deal with one of the party’s most pressing concerns – the surprisingly rapid rise of the National Front under its new and less openly provocative leader, Marine Le Pen.

The government has cranked up the volume on the emotive themes traditionally used by the far right, talking tough on crime and immigration, launching debates on national identity and Islam, and even suggesting that French people no longer feel “at home” in the presence of a growing Muslim population.

The abrupt swerve to the right has discomfited many in the loose coalition that is the 10-year-old UMP and has raised questions over whether Mr Sarkozy’s policies have been dictated by conviction or mere populism. “People are not stupid,” says one UMP parliamentarian. “They have the impression that the government is brandishing scarecrows to hide the real state of France. It creates anxiety and has not benefited the party.”

Centrists, who were largely excluded in Mr Sarkozy’s last ministerial reshuffle, are threatening to quit the party. They could even present their own presidential candidate in 2012 in the form of Jean-Louis Borloo, the well-liked former environment minister.

The threat of a split has had some speculating that France could face a nightmare rerun of April 2002, when bickering and complacency on the left helped Ms Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie into the second-round electoral final against the centre-right’s Jacques Chirac. This time, however, it could be Mr Sarkozy and the right, rather than the Socialists, who are left in the cold.

Uneasy as the mood is on the centre-right, few yet dare openly to call for a different candidate to take on the 2012 election. “No one can say that someone else [in his own party] would be sure to win,” says Christophe Barbier, editor of l’Express magazine. “That protects the president.”

Moreover, crisis brings the street fighter out in the president – and he is a famously effective campaigner. “Sarkozy’s psychology is that he fights to the end. He needs to be in a difficult situation to react,” says Mr Giesbert. “When everything is going well he is detestable, arrogant, egocentric. But when things are not going so well he is not so bad. He is alone and that inspires sympathy.”

Part of the problem is that his main adversary has not yet been identified. Polls consistently show that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Socialist head of the International Monetary Fund, would romp to victory if the left chose him to lead it in the election after primaries to be held this summer.

A respected economist whose international reputation has been burnished by his time at the IMF, Mr Strauss-Kahn has an appeal that could stretch beyond his Socialist heartland into Mr Sarkozy’s strongholds. “DSK could attract a town like Fontainebleau,” says Mr Valletoux. Voters tend to be from “a centre-right that is open and European – he could be a dangerous adversary”.


But Mr Strauss-Kahn faces his own challenges. His stint at the IMF has only reinforced suspicions within the Socialist party about the strength of his leftwing credentials. Some suspect he could be forced to make his own tactical shift, perhaps further to the left, to win nomination, which could fatally damage his broader appeal.

Mr Sarkozy coyly insists he has not yet decided whether to run. But with visits to the provinces twice a week and a game plan to focus on education, social issues and bringing down the budget deficit, his campaign is well under way. The task first and foremost will be to deal with the perception that he has not kept his campaign pledge to be “the president of purchasing power”.

That is not easy at a time when there is no room for manoeuvre on overstretched public finances. “If he is going to be elected now, he will have to satisfy the more socially minded branch of the UMP,” says Mr Christ. “A feeling of injustice is gaining ground.”

The president will also have to cut deals to neutralise rivals who could keep him out of the second round – the tousle-haired Mr Borloo in particular. Finally, he will have to prove he knows what it means to be president. “In their souls the French still like a monarchical president,” says Roquencourt’s Mr Peumeury. “People don’t like the way [Mr Sarkozy] speaks and the way he wants to speak about everything. A monarch does not express himself in this way.”

Once that is done, all that remains is to prepare for the happy day – whether that be a new arrival in the Elysée this autumn or the return of an old one next spring. Either way, Mr Sarkozy will have to be careful not to flaunt his good fortune too openly, says the veteran UMP member. “The more he shows off the pleasure he gets, the more people will make him pay for it.”.....

THE FRONT  IS BACK

“We are not ashamed to say we vote for the National Front any more,” says Daniel, owner of a small restaurant in a genteel neighbourhood of Nice on the south coast of France. “Now it really is a party like any other.”


France’s party of the extreme right is making a comeback under Marine Le Pen, its new leader – and President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP is running scared.

The 42-year-old lawyer is gradually reshaping the party once defined by the provocative statements of her father, Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, on Jews, the Holocaust and immigrants. In an attempt to normalise the party, Ms Le Pen has distanced herself from his anti-Semitic comments and developed policies on the economy and social welfare. However, she continues to play on fears of Islam and defend a “French first” policy for welfare and jobs.


The strategy appears to be working. A survey last month showed 36 per cent of blue-collar workers would vote for Ms Le Pen as president against just 15 per cent for Mr Sarkozy, down from 50 per cent four years ago. The National Front has also made gains in regional and local elections, taking seats from a UMP deemed to have been too soft on law and order.
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INTERNATIONAL ROLE
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Statesmanlike success on the world stage fails to win credit at home

When Nicolas Sarkozy came to power in 2007 he pledged to restore France’s influence on the world stage. “The mark of a statesman is to change the course of events, not simply to describe or explain them,” he said in one of his first foreign policy speeches.


On that basis, he has surely earned statesman status. In Ivory Coast, French forces helped to bring down Laurent Gbagbo, who led a bloody four-month battle to hang on to power following defeat in last year’s presidential election.


In Tripoli, Paris and London rallied the international community for military intervention against the forces of Muammer Gaddafi, even convincing a wavering US to take part.


Finally, at the height of the sovereign debt crisis, Mr Sarkozy’s energy and drive helped to wrench agreement for a European rescue fund from a reluctant Germany. “We have been through the worst crisis, and if the euro is still there it is because of Nicolas Sarkozy,” says one European banker. “We needed instinct, strength and speed of action, and he had all that.”


Yet such successes have done little to boost Mr Sarkozy’s popularity at home. Though two-thirds of French surveyed approved the Libyan action, his ratings in opinion polls fell to a record low within a month.

“It should have been a positive point for the president. He succeeded in mobilising the international community, and if he hadn’t people would have been massacred,” says Jean-Louis Christ, a UMP deputy. “But he has not drawn a single positive point.”


Voters are preoccupied with day-to-day concerns, say elected officials. “The fact that France is present in the hotspots of the world is almost to his credit. It adds to the grandeur of France,” says Frédéric Valletoux, mayor of Fontainebleau. “But these are not questions in the local debate.”


In spite of strong public support for France’s military adventures, Mr Sarkozy’s actions have not gone wholly unchallenged. In many ways, they have reinforced concerns over his impulsive behaviour, not least after he ignored his own diplomats to heed the advice of Bernard-Henri Lévy, the celebrity philosopher, in unilaterally recognising Libyan rebels.


The media condemned the act as little more than “doorstep diplomacy”. In his party, there was outrage at this disregard for the institutions of state – and for foreign minister Alain Juppé. “It was the worst thing I ever saw in my life,” says one veteran UMP member. “It was totally unprepared, short term, and we did not warn others.”
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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.