Jean-Francois Cope leans back and contemplates the Zorro-masked crusader figurine on his desk.
“My mother bought it for me when I joined the government,” he says. “Because Zorro fights injustice and when he’s knocked off his horse, he gets straight back on.”
“Now I’ve got Napoleon next to him,” he adds, rearranging a plastic Bonaparte.
Cope, dubbed “Sarkozilla” for his killer political ambition, is the man with the most difficult task in France. He holds the key to whether the country can lift itself out of the gloom-ridden, scaremongering, anti-Muslim, nationalistic extremism that intellectuals warn has taken over mainstream debate.
Secretary-general of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing ruling UMP party, humiliated in local elections last week when the extreme-right National Front virtually equaled its score, he must convince the classic French right to resist the onslaught of Marine Le Pen’s party.
Yet he is unabashed about appropriating far-right topics. He is the man behind the “burqa ban,” which means from next month women in niqab, or Muslim full-face coverings, will be banned from all public places.
He is about to lead a controversial national “debate” on Islam to decide the place of Muslims in the secular state and he has declared he will run for the French presidency in 2017. In the meantime, he must try to stop the UMP collapsing and Sarkozy being eliminated from next year’s presidential race.
“He and Sarkozy were rivals for years, their personalities and egos are so similar, but now we’re seriously looking to Cope to get us out of this terrible mess,” one party member in Paris said.
Cope is a lawmaker with a bulldozer reputation for rebelling against Sarkozy as head of the UMP parliament group. He’s as interested as the president in targeting “national identity,” integrating immigrants and blasting crime.
BULLDOZER BACKGROUND
His family, Jews originally from eastern Europe, were saved from the Nazi concentration camp roundups by a French family, who hid them. As mayor of Meaux outside Paris, he proudly dynamited the town’s run-down tenement blocks.
He is a rigid product of France’s exclusive postgraduate school for civil servants, ENA, but his father, a top surgeon, has retrained as an actor and appeared in France’s biggest TV soap opera, the Marseille-based Plus Belle La Vie.
So why are record numbers of French people now voting National Front?
“Fear,” he said with a sigh. “People are afraid of everything. There has been a banking crisis, a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis, a geostrategic crisis and an environmental crisis. That’s considerable in a country that’s used to being protected, but the National Front doesn’t have any answers.”
Cope said the UMP’s best tactic is “solutions,” such as the niqab ban. It’s about women’s rights and the notion of living together, he argues.
“If you meet a woman in a burqa, she can’t reply to your smile. It’s a denial of identity,” he said.
The UMP — a broad coalition party of moderate centrists and right-wingers created by former French president Jacques Chirac in 2002 — is tearing itself apart over the debate on Islam ordered by Sarkozy.
Some in the party complain of a lurch to the right and the stigmatization of France’s estimated 5 million Muslims just to gain populist appeal. Cope, who will lead the debate next Saturday, is defiant.
Topics include the building of mosques — a few overcrowded, makeshift prayer rooms spill on to the street — as well as Sarkozy’s drive to ban halal food in secular school canteens and define how French imams should preach.
Sarkozy’s former diversity adviser, sacked for denouncing the debate, called Cope an Islamophobe.
‘EXTREME BEHAVIORS’
Cope dismisses this outright. He argues that fundamentalists are creating a “deformed caricature” of Islam and stoking tensions in France.
“There are a certain number of extreme behaviors led by fundamentalists, who are using their religion for political ends and use extremist techniques,” he said, citing street prayers, the niqab, women refusing to be treated by male doctors and girls banned by their parents from mixed swimming sessions.
“None of these phenomena existed 10 years ago. They have developed today with fundamentalism. The National Front is seizing on them to caricature Muslims and exacerbate tensions. All this is happening with a backdrop in France of a social crisis and an identity crisis for some recent immigrant families who haven’t been able to integrate for various reasons — they were put in ghettos; they have education or professional problems; crime; or they can’t make ends meet,” he said.
The 1905 French law separating church and state predated the arrival of most Muslims, he argues, so now “Islam in France” must be defined.
“We have to remind of the rules of secularism and come up with concrete measures,” he said.
To him, French people crave one thing — “a future.” France’s main problem is that “people think they have no prospects.”
He blames French pessimism on the “weakening of the value of work,” and he wants to abolish the 35-hour week, which has created “two Frances,” one which toils very long hours and another, largely the public sector, which does not. Both feel discouraged and unable to make ends meet.
The UMP is riven with infighting over how to direct voters away from National Front candidates in the final round of local elections. Sarkozy’s poll ratings are historically low.
Cope, with an eye on his own future presidential ambitions, has been touring party meetings promising that hard times bring “the most beautiful battles.”
“I’ve never known a presidential race to be easy,” he said, rising from his desk to firefight the next controversy.
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