Posts Tagged "Nicolas Sarkozy"

The Economist sticks up for Sarkozy

The Economist is the closest thing interpreters have to a textbook. It’s required reading for us if only because the general linguistic style and the breadth of the topics it covers.

It has to be said that I am a subscriber. In fact, I once applied for a job as a language professional in the capacity of Prononciation Researcher for the audio edition. I did not get the job, and I do think it was because of my experiences working for the French Socialist Party. Evidently not the Economist’s natural partners.

Usually, and to its credit, The Economist is a newspaper (some call it a magazine but it is registered as a newspaper) that is usually quite good about being straightforward in its bias. What I like about the newspaper is the fact that it is quite genuine about what it thinks is a good idea and what is a bad idea. It is also honest about its editorial line, rather than pretending that there isn’t one.

However, it is also prone to changing its mind and never admitting it was wrong. I’ve followed the paper thoroughly for 6 months and counting, and find it amusing that for weeks and weeks it talks about ‘Austerity is the way forward! More austerity!’ then suddenly, as growth plummets, it says ‘Well we always knew austerity would never work.’

French Coverage

What I enjoy most about The Economist’s coverage of the French Presidential elections is the stoic way in which it has tried to accuse François Hollande of being the bland and boring ‘Sauce Hollandaise’ (genuine article title) while also being a red menace who is hell bent on slaying the City.

The other side of the coin is its atypically subtle support for Nicolas Sarkozy. For weeks the paper has criticised him regularly with all the usual charges, until it published this article on the race.

This line particularly caught my attention:

This week, however, for the first time in five months a poll put Mr Sarkozy ahead in the first round, by 28.5% to 27.5%. The poll, by Ifop, may be rogue, but it has opened up the race.

This line was the basis for the entire article. One poll that was a bit out of sync with the rest. Other papers published the results as ‘neck and neck’. Forget about the margin of error. Forget about the poll that came out 6 hours later putting Hollande back on 30% and Sarkozy on 26%.

The rest of the piece is balanced. The Economist can rarely be considered propaganda. Perhaps I am just oversensitive, but I pick up on all these subliminal messages. Like:

Although Mr Sarkozy has come across as a warmer figure on the campaign trail, pressing the flesh in chocolate shops and local cafés, this had done little to lift his poll numbers.

A quote from the same piece. Who would have thought that just two issues ago, The Economist was saying that Hollande was too ‘normal’ and ‘jovial’ to be a serious President? And that Sarkozy was shielding himself from the people? Now Sarkozy is the People’s Candidate and Hollande is a cold blooded, red blooded, blood-thirsty Socialist. How we forget.

Belgian Ex-PM compares Sarkozy to Le Pen

Guy Verhofstadt, former Prime Minister of Belgium and now the leader of the Liberal ALDE group in the European Parliament has compared Nicolas Sarkozy to his far right counterpart Le Pen.

You can watch the original in French here or you can listen to the clip in English (my own interpretation) below:

I discovered this just after seeing this piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled ‘Nicolas Le Pen’. Just the latest in a series of bids for far right voters.

This will only intensify now that Le Pen is official on the ballot (explained here). As Verhofstadt would say, the campaign is developing in a very distasteful direction towards extreme right populism.

Analysis: The Roma and the Republic

The news from France is very bad.

Over the summer, President Sarkozy and the French Government have deported about 1,000 Roma people to Romania and Bulgaria. The mass expulsion of a community (based on ethnicity), the likes of which we have not seen in Europe since the Second World War, was duly met with widespread condemnation.

The European Parliament passed a non-binding resolution that Sarkozy put a stop to his expulsion of the Roma, calling the measures “discriminatory and contrary to Community law” and pointing out that that collective expulsions violate European law because they discriminate based on race.” So the question of whether this was a good or bad, legal or illegal is essentially over.

However, in an article on LabourList (here) Claude Moreas MEP made only the most superficial analysis of the political situation in France, which was callous at best and wrong at worst; so what I hope to do in this article is explain in detail the political reasons why Sarkozy ordered the Roma expulsion.

Part One : A Classic Power Struggle

Unsurprisingly, the motive for the Roma Expulsions can be traced to the beginning of summer between a minister and his contemporary, both of whom have their power bases where I live in Nice.

Christian Estrosi, the Mayor of Nice, an MP and Minister for Industry has always been a close friend of Nicolas Sarkozy. Estrosi, locally, has a friend called Eric Ciotti, who used to be his parliamentary aide until he was installed as President of the General Council (the Department of the Alpes-Maritimes) as a sort of deputy figure, and also became an MP.

Ciotti became the darling of his right-wing UMP party, earning the creative nickname “Monsieur Sécurité” thanks to his plans to punish the parents of troublesome teens. Meanwhile, Estrosi was involved in an expenses scandal over his daughters Parisian apartment. Appearing several times consecutively in Le Canard Enchainé (that’s like Private Eye) means the press smells blood.

So the apprentice began to eclipse the master. With a big reshuffle on the way, Estrosi was terrified that he would be kicked out and, even worse, that he would be made the junior partner to Ciotti. Even worse than that would be if Ciotti were to become Interior Minister – the classic springboard to the Presidency.

Estrosi had to catch up. He had to show that he could out-do Ciotti on security. He launched an attack way outside his brief with a plan to punish “laxist” mayors who didn’t do enough to protect their towns. It was born out of the Grenoble incident and at the same time a jab at the Socialist Party leader, Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille who has no security cameras in the streets. (Crime dropped by 0.9% in Aubry’s Lille compared to 0.5% in Estrosi’s Nice, by the way.)

Part Two: The Big Red Security button

In his LabourList piece, Moreas claimed that Sarkozy was

“Playing politics with peoples’ lives, he has reinforced his centre right constituency, attracting votes from people who may otherwise have been happier with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s ‘Front National’. As a strategy it’s working.”

What the Labour MEP forgot to add is that in March there will be elections for the departments (Cantonales for the Conseil Général). More importantly, these elections will be the last electoral test before the Presidentials in 2012.

However, Moreas was wrong to think that the “Steal Front National votes” strategy is working. Think back to last March and the Regional Elections, it was the FN that was able to steal UMP votes after a disastrous debate on National Identity. The Socialists won 21 out of 22 Regions.

So on the one hand we have the upcoming elections, and on the other we have the ministerial financial scandal “l’Affaire Woerth” that Sarkozy has been desperate to get off the front pages. He needed an opportunity to change to a higher gear.

Part Three : The Roma scapegoat

I wrote about the Grenoble incident nearer the time (a Roma was killed by a policeman which provoked other Roma to commit acts of vandalism), remarking that I thought it was strange that the President would get so involved in a relatively minor event.

I hope it’s clear now that I have put it in the wider context. This was the spark that lit the bonfire. Sarkozy had everything he needed to push the debate away from corruption and economics to security and immigration. Suddenly the Roma were perfect targets.

I return to the piece from Claude Moreas MEP:

“In fact, I recently led a delegation to meet Eric Besson, the French Europe Minister. [...] Sarkozy will not worry too much – he sees his actions as popular amongst centre and far right voters in France. As with the burka ban, he knows too that French Socialists may not go out on a limb to make this a national election issue.”

Two embarrassing and worrying errors here. Most concerning is the simple error that Eric Besson is not the French Europe Minister, he is in fact the Minister for Immigration, Integration and National Identity. This is important to understand not just because the Labour MEP didn’t know to whom he was talking, but moreover the title of “Immigration and National Identity” deliberately implies that the first is a menace to the second.

The other error is the claim that the Socialists won’t oppose the expulsions very seriously. It’s wrong because they (we?) have done, last Saturday in Nice alone around 5,000 people from the Socialists to the Greens to the Trade Unions to Human Rights organisations protested in the streets. Nice, I remind you, is one of the most pro-Sarkozy places in the country, and the home of dear Christian Estrosi.

Conclusion

For the elections, it is likely that the Roma will not be a central issue though, largely due to the fact that it has backfired spectacularly against Sarkozy. I think the Socialists will be more likely to use it as an example to paint the government as anti-republican. In any case, the Socialists would be wise not to rise to the bait but keep attacking on the Economy and Pension Reform.

The events this summer have brought shame on the French Republic, and Sarkozy has assaulted its key values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity for his own cynical purposes. Certainly, the March elections will make an exciting run up to the 2012 Presidentials.

The Last Lap: Seven hurdles for Sarkozy

This week marks La Rentrée, the official end of the summer and start of the political year.

This political year in particular will be important. With the Presidential elections in mid 2012, Nicolas Sarkozy is coming to the end of his first mandate, and at present his second one is by no means a fait accompli.

So to set the agenda for the coming political year, here are the 10 main hurdles Sarkozy needs to overcome as we enter the last lap of his Presidency.

1. The Reshuffle

Nicolas Sarkozy’s intentions to replace his Prime Minister have been announced several times, though Francois Fillon still remains in Matignon.

Fillon has proven more difficult to get rid of than Sarkozy and his friends would like. The Prime Minister’s personal approval ratings have shown that he’s one of the most popular right-wing figures in France and notably more so than the President. As a figure of responsibility, stability and sensibility within the UMP party, he has often had to play the fireman after Sarkozy’s incendiary comments.

Nevertheless, the reshuffle will be the last chance Sarkozy has to appoint another Prime Minister and organise the team that will take him into the elections.

2. L’affaire Woerth that won’t go away

Like the MPs’ expenses scandal, L’affaire Woerth was a scandal that could not have come at a worse time. Just in time for the summer, it was the perfect gift to any journalist who needed to fill a front page or an editorial. Also like MPs’ Expenses, it was more of a political scandal than a judicial one as the rules were not technically broken but certainly had their structural integrity tested.

As a relatively complex financial scandal, details and speculation kept the story going. What is particularly damaging for Sarkozy is that because of its complexity, few will understand but all will disapprove. Segolene Royal called the government corrupt on prime-time news, which was then backed up by a particularly worrying poll for the President.

3. A poor economic recovery

Unemployment has always been a problem in France (several theories why) and now it’s higher than ever at around 9.5%. This contributes to a massive deficit of 8%, which means that the government won’t be able to offer any pre-election giveaways.

A piecemeal return to growth, which is unlikely to exceed 1.4% in 2010 (compare it to the 3% expected from Germany), won’t help either of these two problems.

4. A Socialist Revival

After an extraordinary showing in March 2009 in the Regional Elections and a surprising show of unity during their party conference in La Rochelle, the media narrative of the Socialist Party has turned from a Party in terminal decline to a Party revived and ready to win the presidency for the second time in history… as long as they can find a suitable candidate.

5. Pension Reform

Sarkozy’s plans to raise the legal retirement age from 65 to 67 have put him on the wrong side of the populist argument. On September the 7th, he was faced with a nationwide strike.

I can’t explain in words how serious the situation in France is at the moment, but let me try and illustrate how important the issue is. Nice, a very rich and right-wing city in the most pro-Sarkozy department in the country, saw between 20,000 and 30,000 people take to the streets. Multiply that from Lille to Toulouse, and you might get the picture.

6. Disquiet in the ranks

If Fillon caused Sarkozy some trouble by trying to put out the fire, the rest of the UMP grandees have been lighting some more matches. Three of Chirac’s Prime Ministers, Juppé, de Villepin and Raffarin have all been ready to criticise various aspects of governmental policy. It looks like the centrists in the party will not be writing Sarkozy a blank cheque any longer.

7. The Roma and the Republic

This deserves a longer post, but Sarkozy has assaulted Marianne (the female personification of the French Republic) in his forcible deportation of the Roma. Even the Pope, the most reactionary man on the planet, has condemned the policy. Even the European Parliament, with its right-wing majority, condemned the policy in a single afternoon.

Let’s hope Sarkozy had a nice holiday, because he’s got his work cut out for him this year.

Then he came for the Roma

The Right, particularly the French right, always plays on fear.

It’s one of the major reasons why in 2002, Chirac and Le Pen ran their campaigns  on security, which made the distinctly un-authoritarian Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin loook quite far out to sea.

Sarkozy, with a distinctly more right wing agenda than Chirac ever ran, has moved from one enemy to the next.

First, he came for the racaille, which roughly translates as ‘scum’ or perhaps more appropriately the ‘chavs’. Then he went after the burka, a post I’ll write soon enough.

His next target to divert attention from his flailing popularity ratings is to attack… the gypsies!

It follows from this weekend in Loir-et-Cher, where the police shot a gypsy in a road-block related incident. Upset by this, the ‘travallers’ began a rampage of vandalism in the local villages.

This morning in Cabinet, he thus announced a special meeting on the 28th to “tackle the problems posed by ‘travellers’ and their behavior” while also announcing the expulsion of all ‘irregular’  encampments.

Sarko’s “hyperpresidentialism” is well known, but I really do not consider this, though unacceptable, to be an event worthy of such a large amount of attention from the President of the French Republic. At the very limit, it’s something for the Prime Minister, and certainly more in the domain of the Interior Minister (that’s the Home Secretary.)

I come back to my introduction for a moment; the French right always plays on fear, and is an expert in focusing on a detail to turn it into a generalisation. It scares people.

The next issue is that he called the entire community gens du voyage which I translate as ‘travellers’ or at least ‘travelling people’. It of course supposed to imply that the entire group have no fixed domicile, don’t pay taxes, don’t have incomes (fortune telling not included) yet do have cars and spend a lot of time begging.

The French have never liked gypsies (they’re not French, after all), but for Sarkozy to start finger-wagging at such a group, no matter how marginal and poorly integrated (probably their fault as much as the French’s) at what is quite simply just delinquency and petty crime, which are by no means rare activities, seems misleading to me.

Francophones might like to read this piece from a journalist at Le Figaro as well, here.

The Future of the Front National

Le Pen is dead, long live Le Pen! Back in March I noted that the elections to the Conseil Régional Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur would be the last time Jean-Marie Le Pen would present himself as a political candidate before retirement (here). It’s worth looking at how French fascism will cope without him.

As Jean-Marie steps down as leader, there are two candidates ready to take his place. In first position, with J-M’s backing, is his daughter Marine Le Pen, a blond 41 year old, who can carry on the family business of fascist populisum.  The other contender is a man called Bruno Gollinisch, a 60 year old holocaust denier and long-time colleague of J-M.

Les Pens: Jean-Marie and Marine

Marine managed to win a decent score in March, rivalling her UMP competitor with about 19% each, which could be attributed again to the family brand and protest votes, but it remains a significant achievement.

A recent poll for Libération (the newspaper) showed that 64% of the French people believe, as Ségolene Royal (a socialist) claimed, that the government is corrupt, after a series of scandals and policy failures.

The Front was too happy to join in the condemnation, because it is this sort of discourse that they have perfected. Nobody benefits more than from the idea that the main parties are corrupt  than extremists, be they Front National or Lib Dem (not that I would compare the two, since the FN never threw out their principles to join a conservative government, after all.)

Yet since 2002, the Front has never been able to repeat its surprising score in the those Presidentials. This was partly because Sarkozy moved his party and government to the right to steal some far-right votes, yet it didn’t last for long and they soon moved back home.

So although JM is on his way out, it is far too early to say that the FN has had its day. 2012 looks ever more exciting.