FRANCE: Sarkozy Needs Also to Get Past Himself

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, May 2 2007 (IPS) - Opinion polls suggest that ruling party candidate Nicolas Sarkozy will win the second and decisive round of the French presidential elections May 6. But to do so he must triumph over Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal and also his own poor image among a substantial minority of French citizens.

The opinion polls suggest Sarkozy would win the election by a narrow margin of two to three percent.

The liberal French see him as a dangerous man due to his radical rhetoric against immigrants often bordering on blatant racism, his right-wing social and economic thought along the lines of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and his uncontrollable bouts of wrath directed at friends and foes alike.

Liberals are concerned also over his wish to change foreign policy in ways that they fear will make France a second-rung ally of the United States.

In the run-up to the election, liberals are pointing first to worrying personality traits. Among the more damaging testimonies is that of Algerian-born Azous Begag, who was deputy minister for integration and immigration when Sarkozy was minister of the interior.

Late in 2005, immediately after the rioting by youths of immigrant origin in protest against police abuses, Begag had criticised Sarkozy for calling the youths “scum”.

In a book published last month, Begag said that Sarkozy threatened to “break (his) mouth”, if he did not retract his criticism. “He called me a stupid, disloyal asshole,” Begag wrote.

Joseph Macé-Scaron, former director of the weekly Le Figaro, revealed similar threats in a radio interview. “I have witnessed Sarkozy as a threatening man, not as political seducer. I myself heard him saying, ‘I am not going to forget you, I am going to smash you’,” Macé- Scaron said last month.

“It is true, I was egocentric, impervious to all humanity, brutal, inattentive to the feelings of others,” Sarkozy told his official biographer, the journalist Catherine Nay. “But I have changed.”

Not everyone believes that. Héléne Miard Delacroix, professor of political science at the Ecole Normale Superior of Lyon 500 km south of Paris told IPS that liberal intellectuals across the country are exchanging e-mails encouraging each other to vote for Royal – in effect against Sarkozy.

“People are really afraid of him,” Delacroix said. “Psychologically, he appears unprepared for the position of head of state.”

Another university professor, who asked not to be identified, said the liberal middle class is afraid that the election of Sarkozy would “provoke an eruption of violence in the poor suburbia, where immigrants live, compared to which the riots of 2005 would be like a party in a kindergarten.

“People out there have not forgiven Sarkozy for the way he has described them,” the professor said. “If he is elected president, France will be burning for some time.”

The professor said he was afraid he would be sacked if he was identified as the author of such comments. “You do not know of Sarkozy’s powers and capacity of revenge, and I cannot risk my position,” he said.

Sarkozy seems to be aware of such feelings he provokes. In a public speech this week, he spoke about “so much hatred against me.” And asked, “Why this hate, this mistrust?”

But for better, or worse as some fear, Sarkozy is being seen as the likely next president. Sarkozy, 52, was minister of the interior twice between 2002 and 2007, and minister of economics and finance for a couple of months in 2004. Between 1982 and 2002 he was mayor of Neuilly, the richest suburb of Paris.

He was member of the party Rassemblement pour la Republique since the late 1970s, and is founding president of the party that supplanted it in 2002, the Union for a Popular Movement.

During the first round of the presidential elections Apr. 22, Sarkozy won a record 31 percent of the vote. President Jacques Chirac in his first round five years ago obtained only 19 percent.

Sarkozy’s triumph has been been seen partly as a consequence of his flirting with the traditional constituency of the neo-fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.

For Royal, the only chance to beat Sarkozy is to win over the moderates and the centrists.