Sarkozy's dangerous Mitterandian games with the National Front

The  great success of Nicolas Sarkozy as candidate for the Presidency of  France in 2007 was to mobilise a constituency for change.  He was,  finally, elected for one reason only: He was the candidate who seemed  best equipped to make life different and better for the French.  He  brought tremendous energy, intelligence and courage – do not  underestimate his capacities – to the task.   The tremendous failure of  Sarkozy is that he and his closest advisors have wasted these gifts.

On  Sunday the Front National polled 11% of the total vote in nationwide  county elections. Of course, the largest single block of voters, 55 % of  registered electors, were those who stayed at home. Hervé Gattegno,  editor in chief of the weekly Le Point, called the Front’s score a  “categorical defeat,” because it won only two races.  But for the first  time, the Front won in races where the majority rules. Its previous  electoral successes came through proportional votes, for municipal or  regional councils or the European parliament, and it is no coincidence  that the party’s program calls for proportional voting at every level of  government.  For the first time the Front has shown that it can attract  a majority of voters.

This  is one sign among many that the Presidency of Sarkozy is sinking.  If  he succeeds in gaining re-election in 2012, it will be as a discredited  leader.  His popularity ratings are about 30 %, a record low for a  modern French President.  The French no longer believe his promises. He  promised to help them to become wealthier, and they feel poorer.  He  promised to make them more secure, and their country is becoming more  violent.  He promised to make their society more fair, and it appears  less and less so.  He is not the sole vector of these forces, but he is  helping to drive them.  

Sarkozy’s  great policy success before the Presidency was to reduce the dreadful  carnage on France’s roads by harrowing drunk drivers.  That made life  less “convivial” in a country where long dinners raise one’s blood  alcohol, but it saved lives.  What happened to that justifiable campaign  is symbolic of what has happened in France since his election.  Bad  drivers were demonised: billboards denounced the authors of fatal  accidents as “criminals of the road”, and television ads warned, “There  are no small infractions of road laws.”  Drivers who were stopped by the  police and protested swelled the ranks of the 800,000 French, a record  number, who were annually subjected to the “garde à vue”, a day-long  stay in jail for questioning.  But in a case involving the son of Prime  Minister François Fillon, prosecutors declined to pursue the matter and a  scandal erupted. On one side, the image of privilege and impunity; on  the other, a nation of suspects.  Thus is the moral capital of a leader  squandered.

Sarkozy  also promised, if only implicitly, to end the threat that the extreme  right will ever rule France again.   He did not owe his election or his  ability to govern to the Front, the historic party of Jean-Marie Le Pen  that is now led by his daughter Marine.  He created an electoral  majority by persuading voters who previously supported the Front to  support his UMP party instead.  Now, by design or error, he risks  creating an electoral majority for the extreme right.  

He  is not the first modern French leader to help it grow.  In the early  1980s , President François Mitterrand deliberately promoted Jean-Marie  Le Pen, then an electoral nobody, in order to divide the Right - using  electoral reform and the State’s television networks to great effect.   It worked, but it also created a structural political feature.  The  Front was never just a toy or a tool.  Its growth survived Mitterrand,  and it humiliated his successors on the Left in 2002. That year the  Front came in second in the first round of presidential voting, and thus  shut the Socialists out of the final round, when only two candidates  compete.  

Now  Sarkozy  and his closest advisor, Claude Guéant, Minister of the  Interior and of Immigration (and a couple of other portfolios of no  interest here), are likewise playing with the Front, or more precisely,  with its ideology.  They have chosen to define immigration and identity  as the key challenges facing France, as the Front has loudly done for  three decades.

The  Left made this mistake, too.  In the 1980s, Mitterand’s culture  minister, Jack Lang, sought to ensure the support of the media and  cultural elites by attacking “American cultural imperialism.”  To do so,  he supported French filmmakers under the charge that Hollywood was  undercutting the “national identity.”  He thus created a zone where the  Front could claim that its own rhetoric was mainstream: If foreigners on  a screen are dangerous for the French, what about foreigners in the  street?  The Front’s ideologues happily quoted Lang in posing as  defenders of a national identity whose imminent demise can reasonably be  considered a joke or a fiction.  

Yet  Sarkozy’s government keeps placing “national identity” at the top of  their agenda, despite loud warnings.  Last year what was supposed to be a  massive national debate on the subject, led by former Socialist and  Minister of Immigration and the National Identity Eric Besson, became a  public relations disaster.   Nonetheless, in the weeks preceding this  election Guéant repeatedly evoked the theme, and the ruling UMP party  has placed a national debate on “Secularism (Laïcité) and Islam” on its  program for April 4.  

Why  are they still trying to drive this bent nail into the lid of their own  political coffin? One may observe that, faced with an economic crisis  that their “reforms” have not mitigated, and whose consequences include  the rapid degradation of model social policies in health, transportation  and education, Sarkozy’s government seems to lack ideas.  Better, then,  to talk about something else.  The debate on national identity was  likewise a decoy for the Left, to cover them from charges that they were  too soft on immigrants by showing that they weren’t scared of the  Yankees.  

One  may also observe that during the 2007 campaign, Sarkozy sought the  counsel of Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief strategist. Rove’s chief  innovation in the art of democracy was the theory of “wedge issues.”  It  is, in fact, a novel approach to a fundamental difficulty of democracy,  namely the construction of a sufficient consensus in favour of change.   Rove evacuated that difficulty from political strategy: Rather than  seek to build a majority, it is simpler to promote divisive issues that  shatter and fragment possible sources of opposition.  The long term  result, of course, is a higher level of social dissension (if not  violence), but by the time these results emerge, someone else will be in  office.  

Sarkozy,  too, is using foreignness as a wedge.  His government’s assault last  summer on Romanian migrants was an ideal example.  Of course not all manouches are thieves and traffickers.  But they are not always great neighbours, either.  One example: The French clochards in  my neighbourhood were driven out by a gang of Romanian beggars, and the  gang used muscle.  That doesn’t mean that all Romanians in France  should be rounded up like cattle and shipped to camps in boxcars or home  in “charters”.  It does mean that such a campaign can divide the  opposition, caught between its convictions and electors who have had  unpleasant encounters with conspicuous strangers.  

Over  time this strategy makes a government less powerful, chained in its own  contradictions.   This government’s mishandling of the Tunisian  revolution shows how.  It was bad enough that then-Minister of Foreign  Affairs Michèle Alliot-Marie was accepting favours from Ben Ali as the  population rose against him, and worse enough that when push came to  bloody shove her response was to offer Ben Ali “our know-how” in crowd  control.  It was no improvement when Sarkozy’s new ambassador to Tunisia  first promised a handout, then brutally insulted a Tunisian reporter  who quite legitimately asked him to comment on Alliot-Marie’s  misadventures. But during the county campaign, the government seized on  rumours of a coming wave of Tunisian and Libyan refugees (note that even  Italy was hardly submerged) to make clear that its tolerance for  freedom seekers stops at the border.  Claude Guéant declared that  “because of uncontrolled immigration, the French sometimes feel like  they’re no longer at home.”   Anyone who can read Francophone newspapers  can see that damaged relations with Africa and the Maghreb are part of  the payoff.

This  policy is working neither at home nor abroad.  Yet “Sarko’s Boys”, as  they’re called, persist in their error.  No doubt, like the Socialists  before them, they are betting that the Front National can never be a  serious adversary.  The Socialists paid for that arrogance in 2002.   Sarkozy may pay an even higher price.  He may be betting that the  Socialists will remain impotent and incompetent, and that Marine will  eliminate them from the 2012 presidential election just as her father  eliminated them in 2002.  Then Sarkozy will face off with Marine, and bien sûr, of course he will win, because a majority of the French will not vote for the extreme right.  

Never  mind that in two counties, they have just done so. The districts  carried by the National Front are North Carpentras in the Vaucluse  county, and Brignoles in the Var.  The latter county is home to many  French refugees from the former colony of Algeria, and the FN has always  done well there.  Carpentras, as Marine Le Pen noted, is the shocker.   In 1990 the Front was accused -- wrongly, as it turned out -- of  responsibility for the profanation of a Jewish cemetery there.   Carpentras lives off agriculture, and farmers became bulwarks of the  Front in the 1990s, when it became clear that the European Union was  costing them, and especially small farmers, more than it gave back to  them in subsidies.  The FN loudly despises the EU and wants to  renegotiate its fundamental treaties.   That used to be a radical  position, but not since the Euro came along, and with it price increases  that gouged the finances of French households.  

Carpentras  shows that the EU issue can help the FN win. This casts some doubt on  Sarkozy’s assumption that his UMP will always beat the FN.  The Front’s  score was only 8 percentage points behind Sarkozy’s UMP.  If it keeps  rising, and Sarkozy keeps falling, it may be the UMP that is knocked out  first in 2012.  

The  Front is not going to make the presidential race easier for someone  else to win.  It will hit below the belt, as it did when Marine accused  Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand (the late President’s nephew) of  pederasty on the basis of a novel he wrote.  (He denied the charge,  maladroitly but convincingly, if one was ready to hear him.)  It will  hammer on corruption and undue privilege, and there is some to hammer  on.   It will have these issues largely to itself, because its opponents  prefer to believe that these are not systemic problems, just anecdotal  peccadilloes.  Never mind that Sarkozy’s governments have been wracked  by conflicts of interest and unseemly advantages, like the 12,000 euros  worth of cigars to which former minister Christian Blanc treated himself  with taxpayers’ money.   That is bad behaviour at any time, but it is  revolting in a time of crisis and sacrifice.

Meanwhile,  the Front’s ideologues are increasingly acting as if the next election  is about the economy, not immigration.  Their economic policy is  changing before our eyes (to be precise, at www.frontnational.com).   The Front used to rage about the money wasted on parasites in the  State, in particular judges and teachers. Now it is calling to give them  raises and hire more of them.  This is a key program feature of  France’s extreme Left, and its adoption by the Front is both  opportunistic and historic.
At  this writing, the Front’s cadres are working on a fuller economic  program, and it will certainly be the cornerstone of their campaign for  2012.  They are going to promise that they can create jobs for anyone  who deserves one.  (Their definition of “deserve” will begin, of course,  with being provably French.)  Their conviction and confidence will be  attractive to many voters.  So will the fact that politics is about  ideas, and the Socialists and Sarkozy aren’t showing theirs yet.      Whether the Front’s ideas can work is another matter, but one hears a  lot of the French saying lately, “They can’t be any worse.”

Their advance would be a dreadful tragedy of Sarkozy, who
clearly wants to be remembered as a great French and world leader.
The Front’s renaissance compromises France’s future, because the
Front’s culture is founded on an elitism of caste, race and ambition.
France is hardening and being hardened by the politics of exclusion;
thus the Front looks closer to society than it really is.  Sarkozy
does not bear sole responsibility for that shift.  But he is certainly
helping it along, and time to define another path is running out.