The following stories on the leading French presidential candidates were posted on CONTENTIONS, COMMENTARY’s blog, from April 4 to April 20, just ahead of the first ballot on April 22.
April 16. ENTER SARKOZY, THE NEO-FRENCH BIDDER. Nicolas Sarkozy is the candidate for the presidency of France best known in America—and the most popular, since he is as pro-American and as knowledgeable in all things American as a French political leader can be. A short, thin man with an angular face, ribbed eyebrows, and big dark blue eyes, he looks a bit like a character in an El Greco painting. French cartoonists, however, tend to portray him as a turbulent, devilish little figure. In spite of being born and raised in the affluent West End of Paris, he speaks with a hoarse, almost working-class, accent. But his command of the French language and his talent as a debater are truly astounding: he was trained as a lawyer and graduated at the Paris Institute for Political Science. No less astounding is his meteoric political career: mayor of Neuilly, a posh suburb of Paris and one of the wealthiest townships of France, at twenty-eight; member of the National Assembly at thirty-three; budget minister at thirty-eight. Before the age of forty, he had achieved membership in the charmed circle of French political leaders thought to have un destin national—a real shot at the presidency, in American English.
But the closer he came to the inner core of French politics, the stranger he appeared. Sarkozy is best described, perhaps, as a neo-Frenchman: he is the son and the grandson of immigrants. His father, Pàl Sàrközy de Nagybocsa, was for years depicted as a Hungarian grandee, the “scion,” according to a Wikipedia profile probably written under his own supervision, “of an aristocratic family who owned lands and a castle in Alattyàn and a domain with 200 peasants.” In reality, he seems to have been a poor relation of the Alattyàn lords who somehow, after a number of unexplained vicissitudes, ended up after World War II in the French Foreign Legion. Honorably discharged in 1948, he soon married Andrée Mallah, a French girl of Salonikan-Jewish descent. Nicolas, born in 1955, was “baptized and confirmed as a Catholic.”
This is a rather convoluted pedigree, a far cry from what was until very recently the unwritten, unspoken, and yet inescapable prerequisite of a bid for the presidency: being connected from time immemorial with a French Christian family, or, at the very least, being the heir of some long-settled Christian or Jewish immigrant dynasty. As a matter of fact, Sarkozy’s swift ascent among French conservatives in the 1980’s and the 1990’s—he became the Gaullist party’s top boss in 1999—elicited many xenophobic and anti-Semitic reactions.
Then, in 2002, after Jacques Chirac’s reelection, the landscape suddenly changed. The Right’s dissatisfaction with Chirac—who was busy recasting himself, after his duel with Le Pen, as a left-of-center liberal—burgeoned explosively. Chirac loyalists countered by forming the UMP, the Union for a Progressive Majority. But their would-be champion, Alain Juppé, was indicted for minor financial crimes committed as Chirac’s former deputy in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, and barred from politics for three years. In the ensuing vaccum Sarkozy took Juppé’s putative place as the UMP’s favorite politician (having meanwhile secured for himself the long-coveted ministry of the interior). He became immensely popular, and immensely controversial, for his abandonment of politically correct rhetoric and for his handling of the riots in the Paris suburbs in 2005.
Although Sarkozy is seen in France as a rightist, his politics are—by American standards—only mildly conservative, with occasional liberal outbursts: somewhere between Britain’s Tony Blair and California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. He stands for law and order, an important concern in a crime-ridden country. He intends to curb illegal emigration and defend France’s “national identity” while at the same time favoring affirmative action for ethnic or racial minorities and providing French Muslims adequate mosques and other facilities. These are not just words: as minister of the interior, he promoted Muslim prefects (state commissioners) and organized a National Council of the Muslim Religion (since taken over by radical groups). Sarkozy also stands for lower taxes and a dismantling of the welfare state’s most rigid and costly provisions, although he dares not advocate, at least in public, outright elimination of the 35-hour work week. In international affairs, he opposes Turkey’s accession to the EU but would grant it the status of a “special partner.” To the dismay of many of his advisers, he quite openly supports the United States and Israel, his only concession being to state that Chirac was right to oppose the Iraq war.
For the past three years, Chirac loyalists have done their utmost to block Sarkozy’s rise. In 2005, they nearly succeeded: A new prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, suddenly overtook Sarkozy in approval ratings. In 2006, however, Villepin disintegrated almost overnight, because of an ill-conceived reform bill on juvenile employment and the “Clearstream affair,” an attempt to bring Sarkozy down through the publication of forged documents purporting to incriminate him in shady financial dealings (the matter is still awaiting judicial determination). All to no avail: on January 14 of this year, the UMP unanimously endorsed Sarkozy for president. The entire conservative camp had suddenly realized that it had to unite against a major threat: the socialist Ségolène Royal.
April 18. FRANCE'S ROYAL SOCIALIST. Ségolène Royal is the first woman ever credibly to bid for the French presidency. There have been some female candidates over the last decades, including the Trotskyite “red virgin” Arlette Laguiller, who has been running regularly since 1974. But Royal is the first woman ever nominated by a major political party and the first to stand some chance of being elected.
This is a very real asset: France today is as enamored of gender equality as any Western nation and has even passed regulations requiring equal numbers of men and women in many elected bodies. In addition, Royal is quite a womanly woman—exceedingly beautiful at 20, if one is to judge from photographs released to the press, and still a very attractive brunette who looks much younger than her 53 years.
Her background could hardly be more different from that of her chief rival, Nicolas Sarkozy. Both Royal’s paternal and maternal ancestors come from the Lorraine, a deeply Catholic and deeply patriotic province on the German border. Her paternal grandfather, Florian Royal, the son of a farmer, joined the army, became a commissioned officer during World War I, and finally reached the rank of general. Her father, Jacques Royal, was a colonel in the artillery. On her mother’s side, she descends from a wealthy bourgeois family from Nancy, Lorraine’s provincial capital.
Royal’s history differs sharply from Sarkozy’s in another, far more important, respect: she has never held a single important cabinet position. Her main political achievement to date has been her defeat of the conservative former prime minister Jean-Claude Raffarin in the contest for chairmanship of the regional council of Poitou-Charentes in 2004. (Not exactly a ringing triumph: the socialists swept twenty regions out of twenty-two in that election.) But just as the Right would later rally around Sarkozy simply in order to stop Royal, the Left started to consider her as a potential candidate for the presidency in 2004 and 2005 against the meteorically rising Sarkozy. The old guard of the Socialist party—figures such as the former premiers Lionel Jospin and Laurent Fabius and the former minister of the economy Dominique Strauss-Kahn—seemed unlikely to win in a duel with the young, brash, and popular minister of the interior. What the Left needed was somebody new and different: a new face, a new voice, somebody who would attend, at least in a subliminal way, to the psychological needs of a sinking nation.
There were two successive stages in Royal’s campaign. From December 2005 until early this year, she stormed the ramparts of the Socialist party and secured the nomination. Throughout this period, she took an almost neoconservative stance on most issues, horrifying many party activists but eliciting enthusiastic interest among the French public. This was true in foreign policy—in December 2006, she said bluntly that she not only opposed Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weaponry but any transfer of civilian nuclear technology as well—and it was no less true in domestic policy. Royal, inevitably dressed in immaculate white, stood for discipline in school, boot camps for truants and juvenile delinquents, a revision of the 35-hour work week, swift justice (she mentioned China as a model), and a booming economy (she mentioned China again). The European press wondered whether she might be a French Margaret Thatcher.
The second stage, from January on, was something else again. No longer content with brief, carefully planned utterances, she began to take part in TV and radio debates, listen to ordinary people, quote detailed figures, make promises, and to react on a daily basis to the flow of current events. She was not, to put it mildly, up to the job. The first time she was asked tough questions about world politics, she replied: “You would not test me like that, were I not a woman.” The second time, she gave embarrassingly wrong answers. If elected, she said, she would introduce a law against domestic violence—without realizing that such a law had just been passed by the current government. She declared herself against excessive taxation at the very moment François Hollande, her party’s head (and, incidentally, the father of her four children), was proclaiming that a left-wing government would raise taxes dramatically.
In addition, it became clear that she was not gifted as a speaker. She had no sense for puns, bons mots, or humor. Instead, she reveled in pompous, newly fabricated words: her praise of Chinese bravitude (instead of bravoure, the normal French word for bravery) will go down in history as a crushingly inept piece of political neologism.
The upshot of all this? On January 1, 2007, Royal was leading comfortably in the polls, with 52 percent of the prospective votes in the second presidential ballot. One month later, after her campaign blitz, Sarkozy had overtaken her—by five points. Royal’s wreck was not, however, Sarkozy’s salvation. Two other viable (at least in theory) candidates have re-appeared on the political scene: the centrist former education minister François Bayrou and the infamous nationalist provocateur Jean-Marie Le Pen. Dark horses though these men may be, they do pose a strategic threat to both the Sarkozy and Royal campaigns—for very different reasons.
April 20. THE CENTRIST AND THE NATIONALIST. François Bayrou—a devout Catholic, a horsebreeder, and the holder of advanced degrees in history—is a centrist. Politically, he belongs to a Christian-Democratic sub-current that was very powerful in the 1950’s before being crushed by the polarized Right-Left system forced upon the country by Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic. While many Christian Democrats joined the Gaullist Right, and others the socialists, a small group managed to survive under several successive names and acronyms. The UDF (Union for French Democracy), originally a conservative coalition supporting Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, is now Bayrou’s base. Having served as minister of education from 1993 to 1997, he represented the UDF in the 2002 presidential election and surprisingly gathered almost 7 percent of the vote: not bad for the “non-candidate” of a “non-party.”
Bayrou was convinced he stood a real chance for the presidency—provided he could distance the UDF and himself entirely from the traditional Right. This he proceeded to do, at some cost in supporters—but he didn’t care. Once a declared presidential candidate, he stubbornly railed against the disproportionate (in his opinion) media coverage of Sarkozy and Royal, finally winning his point and (according to some reports) garnering more coverage on radio and TV than any other candidate.
But the decisive factor for Bayrou was that Royal’s candidacy began to fall apart. As some socialists came to see the UDF as a lesser-of-two-evils alternative to Sarkozy, parts of the electorate switched to Bayrou’s side. By the beginning of March, he was at over 20 percent in the polls, and it began to seem possible that he might outstrip Royal on the first ballot, and then, as the only challenger to Sarkozy, begin to attract the centrist, the left-wing, and even the far-Right vote to beat the UMP candidate.
What would Bayrou’s politics be as president? He has contended that only a national-unity government—“like de Gaulle’s in 1944, which included the democratic Right as well as socialists and Communists”—will be able to deal with the French domestic crisis. In his belief, this national government should be balanced by stronger regional and local powers, their configurations based on history and culture as well geography. A supporter of a federal Europe, Bayrou nevertheless opposes the accession of Turkey to the EU. He has also expressed adamant support for Chirac’s anti-Iraq-war line, as do most French citizens. Regarding Israel, he has stated that “in the wake of the Shoah, all of mankind is a partner in the Jewish people’s decision to recover a land,” while adding that “We must . . . find some balance between the state established by yesterday’s humiliated Jews and the one that today’s humiliated Palestinians must establish.”
In February, alarmed by the prospect of Bayrou’s rise, Royal and Sarkozy resolved to bring in a fourth man whom they had hitherto kept at bay: Jean-Marie Le Pen.
It had seemed up to this point that Le Pen might not muster enough endorsements to qualify for the first ballot, but Bayrou’s surge prompted both camps to hint publicly that to deny Le Pen a chance to run would be bad for democracy. The needed signatures were finally gathered, and the National Front rose in the polls from 12 percent of the putative votes to 14 percent by the end of March. Some suspected that Le Pen’s real level of support was even higher, between 16 and 20 percent. (At that point, Bayrou’s numbers had stalled at about 20 percent, and both Sarkozy and Royal stood at 26 percent.)
There was, however, more to Le Pen’s resurrection than mere political jockeying. The old man had embarked on a drastic makeover: from a reactionary nativist whose main concern was to stop immigration and clear the reputation of the wartime Vichy regime to a Hugo Chavez-style populist promoting a Europe-third-world alliance against America. As long ago as 1999, Samuel Maréchal, one of Le Pen’s sons-in-law, had stated that one had to admit that France was becoming “a multiethnic and multireligious society,” and that “Islam was now France’s second religion.” This was greeted with an outcry of protest among the Front’s rank and file.
Seven years later, Jean-Claude Martinez, a National Front member of the European Parliament and Le Pen’s “strategic adviser,” reiterated Maréchal’s challenge, arguing that the National Front must adjust to globalization, forget about some of its founding myths, and welcome immigrant blacks and Arabs into the national fold. He even expressed enthusiasm for hip-hop, a form dominated in France by Arab and black performers, as long as the lyrics were sung in French. This time, there was no outcry. In the wake of the extended European crisis over the Danish “Muhammad” cartoons, the National Front sided with the Muslims, demanding that “religious sensibilities must be respected.”
Le Pen’s shift has led to breakaways from the National Front but also to new arrivals in the form of young men and women nurtured in France’s anti-American and anti-Zionist pop culture, Muslims who relished Le Pen’s anti-Semitic innuendos ("Sarkozy as Israel's president… I wouldn't mind") and his support for Saddam Hussein, and black-power militants. At the outset of the 2007 presidential campaign, the National Front went a step further, putting up large billboards featuring a sexy young girl of North African descent and a sharp anti-elitist caption: “They’re all wrong!” Chavez could not have put it better.
And so to Sunday’s balloting, from which two front-runners will emerge to battle it out in the second round of voting on May 6.
© Michel Gurfinkiel & Commentary, 2007