France appears set to open a new political age tomorrow by choosing a
President it admires but does not widely like, while rejecting the more
popular alternative it does not trust to cure the country’s economic ills.
With a nine-point lead in opinion polls, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy
should cruise home against Ségolène Royal, the Socialist who promises caring
reform with generous public spending and state direction.
He promises radical change – la rupture, as he puts it – yet his
election would mark the first return of a sitting French Government since
1978.
The intensely fought run-off ends a campaign in which hope of renewal has been
heavily invested in candidates from a new political era. Mr Sarkozy, 52, and
Ms Royal, 53, are both a generation younger than President Chirac, who
leaves the Elysée Palace in ten days.
Both were disliked in their parties as overambitious, underqualified upstarts
who were out of their depth. But they have captivated France as unorthodox,
solitary leaders with fierce ambition ascribed to childhood trauma.
Each as adults took their absent fathers to court to extract support for their
mothers. Psychiatrists writing in the media have noted that each has sought
through over-achievement to prove themselves to unloving fathers.
Mr Sarkozy, whose slogan is “work more to earn more”, has led the field in
every opinion poll since December in the most hotly contested election since
1981. Yet his power to convince voters that he can improve life is matched
by the fear that he stirs with his unFrench gospel of self-help and his
uncompromising character.
Ms Royal, an unorthodox Socialist who claims a near mystical bond with the
people, yesterday made a desperate appeal to voters to “open their eyes . .
. and see the danger of the violence and brutality that will be triggered in
our country if Mr Sarkozy is elected”. Appealing to voters to “choose the
light” over Mr Sarkozy’s darkness, she said there is “something indecent
about his arrogance.”
Mr Sarkozy, an outsider with immigrant origins and rightwing thinking,
recognised yesterday that he was on the brink of achieving a lifelong quest
for power and with it the chance to revamp Europe’s most regulated nation.
“France is moving,” he said. “People have realised that the real danger is
standing still, that we can no longer be a nation where you can make more
money on welfare than working.”
His arrival on the republican throne created for the late Charles de Gaulle
would open a new political age for France. For the first time since the
1950s it will have a President who does not subscribe to the primacy of
“social solidarity” – the welfare state doctrine followed by both Left and
Right.
Ms Royal has been trying to fan dislike, widespread among the young and
especially nonwhites, for Mr Sarkozy’s abrasive personality and supposedly
divisive ideas: the work ethic, law-and-order, discipline and national
identity.
Mr Sarkozy has put his ideas into practice in nearly five years as Interior
Minister. He is also depicted as dangerously close to the owners of media
and industry. Showing new steel, Ségo attacked an uncharacteristically
docile Sarko over all of this in a television debate on Thursday, but she
failed to dent his armour.
One of the oddities of the 2007 campaign is that the stylish and feisty Ms
Royal remains far more popular than the pugnacious and moody favourite for
the election. With her nurturing, overtly feminine personality, she scores
double Mr Sarkozy’s ratings as “sympathique” and in tune with ordinary
people.
Yet for all their political differences and mutual antipathy, the two have
oddly similar profiles. Both fought their way to the top from outside the
Parisian elite, typified by M Chirac.
The characters of both were marked by conflict with their fathers. Each also
had an adored political father-figure: Mr Chirac for Mr Sarkozy and the late
President Mitterrand for Ms Royal.
The defining moment in Mr Sarkozy’s political career was his breach with Mr
Chirac in 1995. Ms Royal has remained loyal to the memory and principles of
Mitterrand, for whom she worked in the 1980s.
The prospect of turmoil in the immigrant ghettoes and mass strikes under a
President Sarkozy is widely cited as cause for rejecting the tough-talking
son of a Hungarian immigrant and half-Jewish mother. Le Monde, daily of the
thinking establishment, worried yesterday about tensions that could follow
the election of a candidate who stood for “American-style conservatism”.
Voters should take a gamble and choose Ms Royal’s “European-style
Social-Democratic realism,” it said.
The apparent readiness of voters to reject such warnings and put aside
distaste for Mr Sarkozy’s Napoleonic ambition is proof of a readiness for
change that has marked an extraordinary campaign.
Five years after voters put Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far Right agitator, into
the run-off with President Chirac and two years after rejecting the European
constitution, the mood of revolt has given way to hope and high expectation.
All 12 candidates in the first round of the election on April 22 cast
themselves as outsiders who would heal France’s sense of stagnation and deal
with globalisation, a force that is deemed to be a threat to the nation.
In the biggest turnout for decades, voters routed Mr Le Pen and the leftwing
fringe and eliminated François Bayrou, the centrist. He scored a healthy 18
per cent with a hybrid plan for market reform while keeping the dirigiste
state.
The bulk of the vote went to the candidates of the big parties that have
governed since the 1950s. Over the past week, Ms Royal has made a play for
Mr Bayrou’s supporters, but at least a third of them have sided with the
supposedly dangerous Sarkozy.
Mr Bayrou neatly defined the choice while he was still in the running: “Both
Royal and Sarkozy worry people – Sarkozy because we know where he is
heading. Royal because we do not know where she is heading.”
Reviewing the campaign, commentators voiced optimism. “This has been the most
passionately fought election since 1965,” said Jean Viard, a director of the
Sciences Po institute yesterday. “It is about change on all sides.
There is a paradox in Mr Sarkozy’s expected victory. For the first time since
1978, voters will be returning to power the party of government. In every
parliamentary election since that year, the ruling party has been thrown
out. This is evidence of how successfully Mr Sarkozy, a lawyer by training
but a professional politician since his 20s, has transformed Mr Chirac’s
discredited Gaullist machine, the Union for a Popular Movement, and cast
himself as the agent of radical change.
He has managed to promise economic change while reassuring a fearful and
nostalgic section of the country that he can restore the moral values and
grandeur that have faded with France’s malaise. His latest target is the
legacy of the 1968 student revolt. The libertarian ideas of the Sixties
generation destroyed France’s moral compass, he says. “They put Harry Potter
on the same level as Victor Hugo. They made the pupil equal to the teacher.”
Unlike Mr Chirac and other conservatives who began as leftists, Mr Sarkozy
was a rightwing activist when he was a student.
Mr Sarkozy’s approach hails far more from France’s Bonapartist tradition of
authoritarian leadership than from the doctrines of Tony Blair, who is
admired as a pragmatic moderniser by both Mr Sarkozy and Ms Royal.
While denouncing the social protection that stifles the nation, he shares none
of the laissez-faire ideas that were brought to the world in the
Reagan-Thatcher years. As the campaign has drawn to a close, Mr Sarkozy has
struck an increasingly patriotic, populist and lyrical note. He is talking
of his communion with the nation, “which I have come to feel like a living
person”. In Montpellier at his final rally on Thursday, he said: “The people
have risen, the people have regained the power to speak. I have touched the
soul of France.”
He is aware, though, that after declining under 12 years of grand Chiraquien
rhetoric, France expects him to deliver fast. “I will provide results,” he
promised. “I will not disappoint or deceive.”
Election timetable
May 6 Election: the presidency goes to candidate who gains most votes.
The new President appoints a Prime Minister and Cabinet to run the country
pending parliamentary elections in June
May 16 Deadline for President Chirac to leave office, making way for
his successor. A new Prime Minister is installed with a temporary Government
June 10 First round of general parliamentary elections. Straight
majority system, but candidates must achieve more than 50 per cent to win a
seat
June 17 Second round of elections to decide seats not won outright in
the first round
Around June 25 President is likely to reshuffle the Government after
elections. If the new parliamentary majority is from the party opposed to
the President, it will chose a new Prime Minister, who will appoint a
government — an awkward political arrangement called "cohabitation"
