Both Sarkozy and Royal were selected because of their conservative appeal. That tells a lot about the present state of mind in France.Good news. This spring, the French elections–both presidential, in late April and early May, and parliamentary, in early June–are going to be well worth watching. For the first time in decades, there are comparatively young presidential candidates, and quite independent-minded ones. The main conservative candidate is Nicolas "Sarko" Sarkozy, 52, who achieved a reputation for toughness as minister of the interior and wrested the UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) party from Jacques Chirac's men three years ago. On the left, Ségolène "Ségo" Royal, 53, governor of the Poitou-Charentes province in western France, also a contrarian in many respects, stormed the Socialist party last year in a breathtaking media coup. As for those people in the middle–the ones who, had they been American, would have voted for Reagan in the 1980s and Clinton in the 1990s–they have their own darling, François Bayrou, 55, leader of the centrist UDF (Union pour la démocratie française) party. For years, Bayrou insisted the French should have more than just two options–and looked like a crank. This time, he is taken more seriously.
Further good news: The far right agitator Jean-Marie Le Pen may not run, for the first time since 1974. In order to be a candidate for the French presidency, one needs to be endorsed by 500 elected officials. Until 2002, Le Pen had no problem achieving that. It is no secret that the Socialists had a vested interest in his running, as a man who would abscond with part of the conservative vote. This
time, new regulations requiring that the endorsers' names be made public may doom his candidacy. In addition, the left's pro-Le Pen strategy backfired in 2002: On the first ballot, he won more votes than the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, thus barring Jospin from the runoff against Chirac. It was a bitter pill and has not been forgotten.
The mechanics of French politics are such that once a new president is elected, his party is almost guaranteed to win the ensuing parliamentary ballot. More important, the president-elect can see to it that most of his party's parliamentary candidates are loyalists. In other words, Sarkozy, if elected, can count on the backing of a strong "Sarkozyist" majority at the National Assembly, and Royal, if elected, on a strong "Royalist" majority. All in all, the "dear old country" (as General de Gaulle used to call it) stands a reasonable chance, whoever wins, of rejuvenating itself a bit.
Nicolas Sarkozy entered politics early and rose quickly to the top. A lawyer by training (and not, like most others in France's political class, a graduate of the elitist ENA, the National School for Public Administration), he was elected mayor of Neuilly, the posh suburb of Paris, at the age of 28. He became a member of the National Assembly at 33, a member of the cabinet, as minister of budget, at 38, and finally, at 44, head of Jacques Chirac's Gaullist party. The key moment in his rise came in 2002, when he was appointed minister of the interior in Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's government, at the age of 47. Overnight, he became the proponent of something entirely new in French politics–a no-nonsense conservatism in the manner of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Rudolph Giuliani.
Under the Gaullist and post-Gaullist dispensation, down through Jacques Chirac, even the conservatives pretend to be (and are somewhat) liberal, as long as they are allowed to run the show. This is the ethos of managerialism with which the majority of them are indoctrinated at the ENA. Sarkozy took precisely the opposite line. Whether on crime, the economy, anti-Semitism, or the so-called clash of civilizations, he decided that conservatives should be conservative, and act accordingly. As minister of the interior, he has stood for law and order, even if it meant a high profile for police forces in the street, holding minors in custody, deporting illegal aliens, or facing ethnic riots in the suburbs. As minister of finance in 2004, and then as party leader, he supported tax cuts. As a candidate for the presidency, he has made clear that he sees France as a Judeo-Christian country, with organic links to the rest of the Judeo-Christian world, decidedly including the United States and Israel. To this day, even some of his closest aides are uneasy with his deep affection for America and the American people. But many conservative voters, especially those who were never fully on board the Gaullist and post-Gaullist bandwagon, are thrilled.
On January 14, when he was formally nominated as the candidate of the UMP, Sarkozy delivered an inspiring speech almost 90 minutes long that recalled Irving Kristol's formulation that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been "mugged by reality." Sarkozy explained that his politics were the result of what he "had learned." "I have changed," he said, "because one undergoes a deep moral change in front of devastated parents whose daughter was burned alive" in a criminal assault. "I have changed, because nobody can countenance the despair of a husband whose wife was killed by a convicted murderer." He continued: "I changed when I visited Yad Vashem," Israel's Holocaust Memorial, and entered "a large room with thousands of little lights" dedicated to "children of 2, 4, or 5, whose names were being whispered softly. . . . And when I read the last testament of the monks of Tibhirine," seven French Trappists who were kidnapped from their Algerian monastery and beheaded by Muslim fanatics in 1996.
There was maybe something else, more personal, to Sarkozy's insistence that he had "learned" from life. Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa–his name at birth–does not at all fit the classic biographical mold of would-be French presidents. A divorcé, he is married to another divorcée, Cécilia Ciganer-Albeniz. There was a serious crisis between them in 2005, when Cécilia was rumored to have left him for a New York adman. Sarkozy decided not to cover up the story but rather to admit that, like many French men and women, he was neither a saint nor a hero when it came to his private life. So far, it seems to be working with the public.
Then there is the ethnic issue. Sarkozy belongs to what sociologists call the "Neo-French"–shorthand for immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants. His Catholic father was born in prewar Hungary, fled from the Red Army to Nazi Germany–of all places–in 1944, served in the French Foreign Legion for three years, and finally moved to the United States. His mother was born into a Jewish-Salonikan family that converted to Catholicism. After his father left the family when Sarkozy was four years old, he was raised in France by his mother's father, the Salonika-born Benedict Mallah. Cécilia's background is similar, half East European Jewish, half Spanish Catholic.
Until quite recently, it was assumed that a man with such a pedigree could not compete with blue-eyed Gauls for the presidency of France. As late as 1995, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, who was born in Smyrna–now Izmir–in Turkey, was bending over backwards to hide the fact that his family was more Levantine and Armenian than French. Again, Sarkozy decided to play it straight and turn a liability into an asset. He now emphasizes that he is as neo-French as any immigrant from North Africa, black Africa, or the Far East, and that this enables him to oppose illegal immigration or any breach of the law by legal immigrants or their offspring. And again, this seems to be working.
Ségolène Royal's journey has been very different from Sarkozy's, and yet with a few strange similarities. Unlike Sarkozy, she is an ENA graduate. And it was in that capacity that in 1982, at age 28, she joined the staff of the newly elected Socialist president, François Mitterrand, as a junior assistant. For the next seven years, she was a bit overshadowed by protective males–her companion, François Hollande, also an ENA grad and then a brilliant economics aide, and Jacques Attali, the president's chief of staff, likewise an ENA alumnus. Not to mention the president himself. Mitterrand took a strong personal interest in Royal and kept her by his side at the lysée Palace until his reelection in 1988. He then secured her a safe National Assembly constituency in Poitou-Charentes, when she was 35, and a cabinet seat as minister of the environment before she turned 40. After he passed away, her political fortunes declined a bit: From 1997 to 2002, she was only a vice minister of education and then of the family in the successive Lionel Jospin cabinets. It looked as if her best asset was her civil partner, Hollande (with whom she has four children), who had risen to become leader of the Socialist party.
Ségolène's own turning point came in 2004, the year the Socialists swept 20 out of 22 regions in local elections. She was elected governor of Poitou-Charentes (or chairperson of the regional council, as the French have it) and, more important, was cast as the victory icon of the Socialists. She started to wear white jackets, which, combined with her last name of Royal, turned her into a sort of subliminal pretender to the throne. She began to entertain far-reaching ambitions, either with or without Hollande's support. It is rumored that they now lead separate lives.
On December 15, 2005, the left-wing weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, did a cover story on Ségolène, an undertaking she and her supporters undoubtedly smiled upon. The article stressed that she was a woman and thus a "different" kind of candidate, like Hillary Clinton in the United States or Angela Merkel in Germany. She was described as having been extremely close to Mitterrand. In fact, she was referred to as the heir or even "daughter" of the late president. Was this to be taken literally? Details about Mitterrand's kindness to her circulated. And people couldn't help but notice her resemblance to him. On the one hand, it seemed almost impossible that her mother, a devout Catholic and mother of eight, could have cheated on her artillery colonel father. On the other hand, her parents' marriage had collapsed quite spectacularly in the early 1970s, when she was about 20: Her father had actually kicked her mother out of the house.
At the beginning of 2006, Ségolène made her first political statement. It was about the matters she had been in charge of under Jospin: education and the family. She stood for the restoration of discipline. Men were needed in the schools to curb juvenile violence against mostly female teachers. Youngsters with criminal records were to be sent to boot camps. For about 48 hours, her colleagues in the Socialist party were indignant: Miss Royal, the colonel's daughter, was outdoing Sarkozy as a hardliner. Then the press did some polling. There was overwhelming support for her statements, even among Socialists.
This set a pattern. Ségolène started going after the sacred cows of the left. She raised doubts about the law limiting the work week to 35 hours on the crackpot theory that this creates more jobs. She said that Tony Blair was her model. While she agreed, on a Middle Eastern tour, to listen to Hezbollah officials in Lebanon, the following day in Israel she made a stunningly bold declaration about Iran: She not only characterized the mullahs' attempt to get nuclear weapons as a major danger to world peace, but expressed the view that even civilian nuclear facilities should be denied to Iran. During a visit to Beijing, she extolled the virtues of both the Chinese economy and "the swift Chinese judicial system" (based on the frequent use of the death penalty). Time and again, she would float some more left-wing views as well, like a proposal to have elected officials, including members of parliament and ministers, reviewed on a regular basis by popular juries. Still, the thrust of her campaign was, by Socialist party standards, decidedly right-wing. Some observers believe this was a clever and carefully planned operation to undercut Sarkozy's own drive to the right. Others point out that Royal's present stance is quite consistent with many of her former statements or policies as a cabinet member, especially on education and youth.
She won the Socialist party primary on November 16 with more than 60 percent of the vote, and the first nationwide polls of 2007 gave her 52 percent in the presidential race. And then, all of a sudden, things went sour. The day Sarkozy was nominated, he took the lead in the polls. Moreover, he was more popular than she among the working class (30 percent to 26 percent) and the young (35 percent to 31 percent). By February 2, he was leading her in the polls by 53 percent to 47 percent in a head-to-head race.
The apparent reason for Royal's stumbling is her mediocrity as a debater. Throughout 2006, she made few unscripted public appearances. With the actual campaign underway, she has had to talk a lot. First, she let loose with a catalogue of linguistic oddities, coining strange new words like bravitude (instead of bravoure, the correct French word for bravery) and strange new expressions like la France respirante ("the France of the breathing," apparently either the common people or grassroots activists). Then, she went beyond being merely provocative, and started to sound like a crank: Visiting Canada, she said she supported "sovereignty for Quebec," a gross interference in a foreign nation's democratic life unhappily reminiscent of De Gaulle's Vive le Québec libre! of 1967. And she made embarrassing factual blunders: One journalist asked her about the French strategic submarine force on a radio program, and she simply didn't know their actual number–she said there was only one such submarine, when in fact there are four.
It's not clear whether Royal's slide will accelerate or can still be arrested. She is mounting as many counter-attacks as she can. The Socialist party is charging Sarkozy with interfering, as minister of interior, in the electoral process and has called for his resignation from the cabinet. It brands those journalists or humorists who take note of Ségolène's blunders as "UMP activists." Royal herself is attempting to appear more down to earth. She has forsaken her white outfits for working-class black leather jackets. Politics, however, is a cruel game. As long as she was poised to win, every left-winger or liberal in the country was ready to rally around her, in spite of her surprising rightist undertones. Now that she is seen as a potential loser, support may dwindle, even if she recasts herself as a radical of the left.
The fact is that both Sarkozy and Royal were selected because of their conservative appeal. It tells a lot about the present state of mind of the French. And it is perhaps a good omen for the future of Europe.
© Michel Gurfinkiel & The Weekly Standard, 2007.
Special to The Weekly Standard, February 26, 2007.