Nicolas
Sarkozy, end of the dream
The
former president isn’t the man he once was.
By
Nicholas Vinocur
9/19/16, 5:30 AM CET
PARIS — A few days
before Nicolas Sarkozy announced he would run for reelection as
French president next year, he fielded an unusual question from a
caller on a radio show: Could Sarkozy, the caller asked, ever make
him dream again?
The man on the line,
named Régis, said he had voted for Sarkozy for president in 2007 on
the basis of his uplifting campaign, and was considering backing him
in an coming right-wing primary. But he wanted a glimpse of the
candidate’s old, positive persona.
Sarkozy’s response
was blunt — and illustrates the deep change he has undergone since
he burst onto the world stage nine years ago as the most original
French leader in generations.
“The question,
Régis,” said Sarkozy, “is not whether I can make you dream.
Dreaming, what for? To put you to sleep? … The real question is to
describe the reality lived by French people today. I don’t think
it’s a happy reality, there are six million people who are
unemployed.”
After five years as
president, and four more fighting his way back into the limelight,
the former president is determined to return to the Elysée palace,
despite legal troubles and polls showing that a majority of French
people oppose his candidacy.
This version of
Sarkozy no longer has time for “dreams” or inspirational talk.
Politically speaking, he has slammed the door on his former self.
Gone is the man once
teased at home as “Sarko, l’américain” (intended as a
put-down, he took it as a compliment), who preached equal
opportunity, called for an Affirmative Action-style program to combat
hiring discrimination, professed his admiration for the United States
and ranked climate change and protection of the environment as one of
the top priorities for his presidency.
The 2016 Sarkozy —
grayer, more brittle, still remarkably trim — now looks more
favorably toward Moscow than he does toward Washington. On climate
change, he has turned from crusader to naysayer, telling a group of
business leaders this week that only “arrogant” people could
believe it was caused by man.
Forget a new
economic deal for France, or the soaring music and flapping birds of
his 2007 campaign ads. They are gone.
Of the eight
contestants for the conservative Les Républicains party’s
nomination for president, Sarkozy presents himself as the only one
with the grit and experience to avert disaster in France. Two months
before the November vote, his pitch boils down to “total war” on
terrorism: banning the burkini across France and setting up camps to
detain suspected terrorist sympathizers before they have committed
any crime.
“If we are not
careful, the risks of a disintegration of French society will grow
until they become inevitable” — Nicolas Sarkozy
“If we are not
careful, the risks of a disintegration of French society will grow
until they become inevitable,” he said at a recent rally,
commenting on an influx of refugees. “It will then be too late to
shed crocodile tears on a situation that, due to cowardice, we
refused to confront.”
Sarkozy’s
hard-right push even has Marine Le Pen’s camp reeling.
“He is hunting on
our ground, and often outflanking us on the right,” said Nicolas
Bay, the National Front’s election strategist. “We had become
used to this, but this time he seems to have lost any inhibition
whatsoever.”
Pivot to Moscow
For Régis and many
others who once admired Sarkozy, the changes prompt a question: What
happened to the man who ran for president in 2007?
Back then, the
“Bling Bling” president had already irritated the French with his
abrasive personal style and habit of hobnobbing with rich moguls. But
what he lacked in personal appeal, he made up for with a political
offering that was unlike anything on the market at the time.
Breaking with the
do-nothing years of Jacques Chirac’s presidency, Sarkozy called for
a radical overhaul of France’s ultra-protective, “broken”
welfare system (a no-no even for right-wingers); the end of the
35-hour work week; and a chance for workers to accrue wealth via hard
work — an idea that was more radical than it appears.
On foreign policy,
he struck out from Gaullist orthodoxy. Never embracing the doctrine
of a “multipolar” world (one in which the United States is less
dominant, and other players have more power) cherished by Chirac and
Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, Sarkozy wanted closer ties to
Washington and brought Paris back into NATO’s command structure —
a move that helped earn him a reputation in the United States as the
“most pro-American French President since the Second World War,”
according to leaked diplomatic cables.
With regard to
Moscow, he maintained a pointedly skeptical stance, criticizing the
“brutality” of President Vladimir Putin’s administration.
Of that Sarkozy,
little remains.
The candidate who
once called for scrapping any legal limit on working time now wants a
37-hour week, saying that abandoning the law would be pointless.
Instead of wanting to reboot a deeply indebted social welfare system,
he embraces the state’s role as a “protector” of its citizens.
In the place of upward mobility for immigrants through work, he now
advocates slashing immigration, reforming the Schengen zone and
administering language tests to newly arrived citizens.
“Crimea chose
Russia, we cannot blame them for it” — Nicolas Sarkozy
On foreign policy,
the shifts are no less remarkable. Once a Putin skeptic, Sarkozy has
become one of the Russian president’s champions in France, visiting
him twice over the past year and echoing his defense of the
annexation of Crimea.
“Crimea chose
Russia, we cannot blame them for it,” Sarkozy told a party rally
last year.
As for “Sarko,
l’américain,” he no longer exists.
Once a frequent
visitor to the U.S. embassy in Paris, the ex-president stopped
attending functions once he left power, according to a diplomatic
source.
Forged by failure
One take on
Sarkozy’s new approach is that he is responding to troubled times.
French society is traumatized after a series of terrorist attacks,
and Sarkozy is merely riding a wave of harsher political discourse
emanating from the Right and Left. A senior Sarkozy aide said the
former president was “answering an acute need for authority that he
has heard on the campaign trail everywhere in France.”
“His campaign is
based on reality, and the reality is that the French are anxious
about security and the economy,” added the aide, who asked not to
be named.
But terrorism alone
does not explain Sarkozy’s shift. Beyond his security proposals,
it’s his entire outlook that has changed to a form of conservatism
which acknowledges that major changes are not possible. Once proud to
declare France a member of the Western order, Sarkozy is now closer
to a traditional Gaullist viewpoint that positions Paris on the
fulcrum between East and West‚ another concession to tradition.
Aides argue that
being in power improved Sarkozy’s understanding of his country’s
political instincts. His 2012 reelection campaign, piloted by Patrick
Buisson, a controversial right-wing historian, was focused on the
“French people” as an indistinct, eternal mass that Sarkozy
claimed to understand.
Mass at Notre Dame
Cathedral of Paris for the Priest killed in church attack near Rouen
Nicolas Sarkozy
attending a mass in tribute to priest Jacques Hamel who has been
killed by two attackers at the Saint Etienne church in Saint Etienne
du Rouvray on July 26, at the Cathedral Notre Dame in Paris, France,
July 27, 2016 | Benoit Tessier/Maxppp out via EPA
But there is a less
forgiving explanation: that Sarkozy’s outlook was colored by
failure and timidity. Shortly after reaching power, he attempted to
enact his vision for Affirmative Action in France, only to have it
crushed by a Constitutional Council that ruled out any possibility of
keeping tabs on ethnic statistics in France.
On the social front,
he passed a law ensuring minimum service in public transportation
during strikes, and stopped taxing overtime hours (President François
Hollande undid the latter measure as soon as he took power). But he
stopped short of rescinding the 35-hour law, and never dealt with the
heart of the problem in the labor market, as he had diagnosed it
himself — the excessively complex and cumbersome labor code, and
the trade unions that defend it.
Who did take a crack
at the almighty labor code, for better or worse? Sarkozy’s
Socialist successor, Hollande.
When other
initiatives, such as his “Union for the Mediterranean,” ran into
trouble, Sarkozy simply abandoned them and moved on. And when it
comes to Russia, Sarkozy appears to be following a trend of
Russophilia that is sweeping across the French Right.
After trying to
reform France, Sarkozy claims that he gained enough experience to
know what works and what does not. Another explanation is that the
failure to bring about the change he had promised in 2007 killed his
appetite for risk, leaving only his desire to return to power.
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