Jean-Philippe Mathy, Professor of French and Comparative & World Literature

Nicolas Sarkozy, the newly elected President of the French Republic, centered his campaign on the theme of “la rupture,” i.e. the promise of a decisive break from the traditional way of doing things through a series of bold social, economic and political reforms. The first hundred days of his presidency, a period the French call “the state of grace,” have provided ample evidence of Sarkozy’s carefully scripted new public style (according to a recent poll, 71% of respondents are happy with his performance so far). He introduced in the solemn surroundings of the Elysée Palace a degree of unconventional, congenial simplicity that contrasts sharply with the constrained, elegant, and somewhat stuffy protocol favored by his predecessors. The new President, an avid bicycle rider, also enjoys jogging through the neighborhood, stopping for short, impromptu conversations with passers-by or members of the Elysée staff. His youthful, energetic, engaging manner is more reminiscent of Tony Blair than of the older, more statesman-like figures of Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand. How much of this new style is the consultant-driven image of a savvy politician, and how much of it heralds the substantial change the rhetoric of rupture is meant to convey? Sarkozy’s campaign was a masterpiece of political communication. He excelled at setting the agenda for the national conversation, forcing his opponents, and the press, to meet him on his own turf, on his own terms. His constant appeal to a revived sense of national identity and national pride compelled his socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, to insert patriotic references in her campaign speeches, asking her audience to sing the national anthem during electoral rallies and her compatriots to put the tricolor flag in their homes. The Left proved much less adept at, and less comfortable with, this exercise in national symbolism than its opponents. Sarkozy’s staunch law-and-order rhetoric on crime and immigration enabled him to disqualify the Socialists, whom he accused of laxness in these matters, while luring thousands of votes away from Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme Right candidate. Voter participation was very high (83% as opposed to 72% five years earlier), and Nicolas Sarkozy received more than twice as many votes than Jacques Chirac, who was endorsed by the same party, did in the first round of the 2002 elections.

France’s two-round, single-majority electoral system reflects the fractured and contentious nature of political opinion in the country’s history. In the first round, a multiplicity of parties representing the diversity of homegrown political ideologies endorse a candidate for the Presidency. The two contenders with the highest number of votes compete in the second round, and all the winner needs is a simple majority, which is half the number of votes plus one. No less than twelve candidates entered the last election (four fewer than in 2002). Sarkozy and Royal were the top vote getters, the former with 31% and the latter with 27% of the vote.

Nicolas Sarkozy has been credited with having done for the Right what François Mitterrand did with the Left a quarter of a century ago. The latter managed to durably marginalize the Communists, paving the way for the Socialists’ domination of all subsequent left-wing coalition governments, while using the rise of the National Front to divide and weaken the mainstream Right. Sarkozy, for his part, drew from the lessons of the 2002 presidential elections. His advisors clearly bought into the dominant interpretation of the rise of the National Front in the 1980s, which is that many low-income workers, the traditional constituency of the Left, switched over to the National Front, convinced that the pro-European Union socialists would do nothing to protect their jobs from what they saw as the effects of immigration and foreign competition.

Sarkozy made sure his strong stance on immigration, in the aftermath of the ethnic upheaval of the fall of 2005, during which black and Arab youth from impoverished and segregated housing estates burned buildings and cars and battled the police for several weeks, would rally a plurality of votes from those among his compatriots, many of them blue-collar and elderly, who yearned for a restoration of civic order and public safety. While eliminating the threat of the National Front, Sarkozy managed to rally behind his banner all the components of the anti-socialist constellation, from Gaullists to Christian-Democrats to Liberals, turning the UMP into the arm of a pluralistic, self-confident and forward-looking modernist Right, “a Right without complexes,” to use one of his campaign’s most quoted slogans.

But the candidate was not content with consolidating his hold on the conservative electorate. His strategy was to tap into blue-collar economic discontent and cultural disorientation, poaching from both the National Front and Left electorates, while driving a wedge between legitimate concerns about the state of the nation (which he promised his victory would address) and Le Pen’s divisive, racist, and incendiary definition of Frenchness. This balancing act meant referring in turn to both versions of the republican legacy, the Republic of order and the Republic of progress. It accounts for the “catch-all,” some will say schizophrenic, nature of his political program, which reaffirms the sacred principle of the separation of church and state while recommending government funding of mosques (to avoid involvement by foreign Muslim governments and organizations), and extols the virtues of free market capitalism while advocating “humane globalization.” The son of a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant, he publicly denounced the xenophobic rhetoric of the far right, but threw oil on the fire in the fall of 2005 by calling the mostly black and Arab rioters “scum” and vowing to clean up their neighborhoods “with a power washer.” Once elected, he further confused and weakened the opposition by appointing several prominent socialists to his administration and to honorific positions, angering many would-be cabinet members from his own party.

His avowed pro-Americanism, apparently not only motivated by geopolitical realism but by a professed love for the country and its culture, a rare occurrence among French politicians, has led many U.S. conservatives and neo-conservatives to welcome his rise to power, after the prolonged tension of the Chirac years. George W. Bush recently invited his newly elected counterpart, who was vacationing in New Hampshire, to an informal lunch at his Kennebunkport, Maine, family residence. Sarkozy’s American connection goes beyond a propensity to vacation in New England. His successful attempt at diverting some of the disgruntled blue-collar vote away from his rivals on the right and the left, resembles the Republican Party’s own record at winning over conservative Democrats in the rural South and “Reagan Democrats” in northern cities. His advisors’ skillful use of the media and efficient promotion of an energetic and capable image, as well as his ability to build a modern, “big tent” right-wing party and turn it into an instrument of his own political ambition, are reminiscent of Karl Rove’s twice-victorious attempts at making an American President.

Given this context of anticipation of a new era in transatlantic relations, the President’s first official foreign policy declaration, a speech before the French ambassadorial corps, was eagerly awaited by academic experts and journalists alike. The most commented upon excerpt was a suggestion that Iran might be the target of a military attack if it did not comply with international injunctions to curb its nuclear program. Sarkozy quickly dismissed this possibility as “catastrophic,” stressing that all other alternatives were preferable to the use of force, but the interpretive machine was set in motion. Unsurprisingly, it was the tone, rather than the content of the presidential declaration, that drew comments of yet another ‘rupture’ with the preceding government. Commentators pointed out that the French president had not advocated military intervention, but merely evoked its possibility, while claiming his continued support for the diplomatic route backed by United Nations sanctions, favored so far by France and the European Union. The mere suggestion that the use of force might be a conceivable alternative to diplomacy and economic sanctions, if they were to fail, was nonetheless seen as a major departure from the views held by Jacques Chirac and his Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin regarding France’s involvement in the Middle East. Inevitably, the firmness of the presidential tone and his assertion that Iran’s attitude was unacceptable to France, drew parallels with the uncompromising stance of the United States government on the issue, reinforcing the view that the new French leader was indeed much closer to the Bush administration than his predecessor on issues of foreign policy.

Is it really the case? French postwar foreign policy, as codified during General de Gaulle’s presidency in the late fifties and early sixties, has been remarkably consistent over the years, regardless of the ideological persuasion of the man living in the Elysée Palace. Gaullist, right-of-center and socialist presidents alike have pursued similar policies in Africa, for example, and all of them have expressed disagreement with the United States at one point or another, while swearing their unwavering commitment to the long-standing friendship between the two nations. Nicolas Sarkozy, nicknamed “the American” by his critics, has repeatedly criticized the war in Iraq as well as the U.S. position on global environmental policies. Despite statements in his party’s electoral program that “France will only help regimes that defend democracy and actively fight corruption,” the new President went on a tour of African capitals shortly after his election, meeting with dictators such as Gabon’s Omar Bongo, a long time supporter of French interests on the continent, while ignoring more “pluralistic” countries, such as Niger, Mali and Ghana.

His prominent, much-publicized role in the liberation of the Bulgarian nurses jailed by Muammar Gaddafi, obtained in exchange for a French nuclear reactor (officially to provide drinking water from desalinated sea water), angered his European partners, drew criticism from his domestic opposition and worried American conservatives. The Germans bristled at what they perceived as a unilateral, eleventh-hour move that enabled France to reap the commercial and diplomatic benefits of months of arduous negotiation by European envoys. American conservatives expressed concerns at Sarkozy’s apparent willingness to trust Arab dictators with nuclear technology (like Chirac had done with Saddam Hussein), a possible sign that the honeymoon between the French leader and the American Right might already be over. In a recent column, George Will cautioned his readers against putting too much faith in the supposed conservatism of “France’s new peripatetic president.” He disputed Sarkozy’s credentials, calling him a “Keynesian” and questioning his “suspiciously opaque formulations” regarding “regulated liberalism.” In Will’s view, Sarkozy will no more break with the long-standing French tradition of “statism as a prerequisite for national greatness” than his predecessors. The same holds true of foreign policy. Presidents come and go, electoral majorities, ideological configurations and power dynamics constantly evolve, but the conception of the French national interest elaborated in the postwar period remains strikingly unchanged.

The decisive break from the past signaled by Sarkozy’s election might be mainly generational. The new President is 52 years old, and many of his cabinet members and advisors are younger than he is (several of them were born in 1965). The French political leadership went from the pre-WWII generation (the three former Presidents were born in 1926, 1916 and 1932, respectively) to the post-68 generation, skipping over the first wave of baby-boomers who came of age in the sixties, helping to change France’s culture landscape, but missing their chance of producing a serious presidential contender from their midst. French postwar politics were framed by a series of momentous historical events: the collapse of the Third Republic in 1939, the German Occupation and the Resistance, and the Algerian War. The “Sarkozy generation” cut its political teeth in the early eighties, a time of profound change in France’s intellectual climate, marked by the repudiation of Marxism, the decline of the Communist Party, the rejection of sixties radicalism, anti-colonialism and philosophical critique, and a pervasive sense that the country had stepped out of history. On the campaign trail, the UMP candidate never missed an opportunity to denounce the legacy of May 68, long a watershed in the country’s cultural self-representation, but responsible in his eyes for contemporary France’s many woes. Ironically enough, the youngest French President to be elected in 33 years, owed his victory to the votes of the elderly, a powerful demographic bloc in an increasingly aging country.

1 “What Sarkozy Won’t Change,” The Washington Post, August 26, 2007