Near the rusting, abandoned steelworks perched on a hill overlooking the forlorn northeastern town of Gandrange, trade unionists put up a gravestone inscribed: “Here lie the broken promises of Nicolas Sarkozy.” The French president, fresh from his whirlwind marriage to Carla Bruni in 2008, had vowed that the state would save the factory and he would come back to help. Neither happened.
Instead, Gandrange has come to symbolize what one local deemed “all that is wrong with Sarkozy.” His political opponents make symbolic campaign stops here, the unemployed struggle to pay their rent and the mood is grim.
“People can’t even bear to hear his name,” said Yves Mougenot, a lorry driver.
Last month, even the gravestone was stolen.
The French presidential election this spring hangs more than ever on the record-breaking unpopularity of one man. Sarkozy was elected in 2007 with a sweeping mandate to transform France with a revolution in the style of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, vowing to drag the country out of its old statist habits with an injection of free-market liberalism that would allow the French to “work more to earn more.”
He was the most overwhelmingly popular president since Charles de Gaulle. Five years later, 70 percent of the public think his record is negative. Unemployment is at a 12-year high, with almost 1 million more people unemployed than when Sarkozy took office. If former French presidents Francois Mitterrand abolished the death penalty and Jacques Chirac kept the country out of the war in Iraq, pundits are struggling to define what Sarkozy’s legacy might be.
He promised to boost the average citizen’s spending power, but up to 15 million people now struggle to make ends meet at the end of the month. Far from being given a state of grace because of the financial crisis, Sarkozy is personally blamed by France’s audit body for a fifth of the rise in the country’s public deficit. Schools are underperforming, class social inequality is pervasive and racial divisions run deep. France is the world’s most pessimistic nation about its economic prospects.
Sarkozy promised to lower taxes and ended up raising them. He defended the free market over the French social model, then turned resolutely statist, saying the French model saved the country from the crisis in capitalism. However, he is still accused of weakening the welfare safety net. A majority of people feel he never intended to keep his election promises to reform France.
“Anti-Sarkozyism has become a real political phenomenon and it has taken on a cultural dimension, particularly among the young,” Jerome Sainte-Marie of pollsters CSA said.
“It’s rare to see a president so profoundly unpopular and for such a long time: four years out of five. The reason is that Sarkozy set himself up as a man to be judged on his results and the French see no results on jobs, which is their over-riding concern, or on spending power, or even on crime and security: Sarkozy’s specialist topic and part of his political DNA. Economically, people feel the efforts weren’t spread fairly: there were injustices such as his easing taxes for the rich,” Sainte-Marie said.
Even in his own right-wing camp, Sarkozy’s re-election battle in April and May is seen as extremely difficult. The socialist favorite Francois Hollande has lengthened his lead and Marine Le Pen, of the far-right Front National, is snapping at Sarkozy’s heels.
Privately, the president tells supporters “the favorite never wins.”
He is to launch his campaign next week with a strong right-wing slant on “values,” proposing referendums on how to deal with illegal immigrants and the long-term unemployed. However, he is avoiding discussing his record in power. The thorny issue of what became of his reform ambitions is left to his ruling UMP party, which has distributed 6 million leaflets detailing Sarkozy’s “top 10 reforms.”
These include raising the pension age to 62, giving universities control over their budgets, limiting the impact of strikes by introducing a compulsory minimum service on public transport, expelling 30,000 illegal immigrants a year and banning women in the niqab, or Muslim full-face covering, from all public spaces.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon has defended the president’s “courage” in other areas, including slashing more than 150,000 public sector jobs, adding: “Maybe we didn’t always go far enough.”
Some supporters feel reforms such as easing rules for self-employed entrepreneurs have been lost amid a muddle of U-turns or failures, such as the ill-fated ministry of “national identity” or Sarkozy’s crusade to deport Roma Gypsies.
For political analysts, Sarkozy has never recovered from personally “flashing his bling” at start of his presidency: his lavish celebratory party at a Champs Elysees hotel and holiday on a billionaire businessman’s yacht, his public romancing of supermodel Bruni, or giving himself a pay rise. He promised to put morals back into discredited French politics, then tried to parachute his student son into a key business post; saw disgraced ministers stand down over issues such as paying for cigars with state money, or the foreign minister who quit after holidaying with cronies of former Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali during that country’s revolution.
One of Sarkozy’s main reforms was to cap the tax paid by France’s wealthy elite at 50 percent. However, he scrapped the measure amid public outrage that France’s richest woman, the L’Oreal cosmetics heiress Liliane Bettencourt, had benefited from an eye-watering 30 million euro (US$39.4 million) rebate. Judges were already investigating whether brown envelopes from the Bettencourt household financed Sarkozy’s party.
Personal image holds the key to Sarkozy’s re-election strategy. Last month, he held a three-hour off-the-record briefing with a few select journalists, to restyle himself as humble.
“I’m not a dictator,” he said, smoking not his habitual cigars, but a cigarette.
He said he would quit politics if he lost the election. On primetime TV, he admitted having “regrets.” He is working on what he has called a “hyper-intimate” confession, a mea culpa to the nation, to make him seem “more human,” in the words of a spokeswoman.
Hollande is styling himself as “Mr Normal” against the implied “abnormal” Sarkozy.
Sarkozy has launched a last-minute blitz of reforms, in part designed to eclipse his criticized record in office. This includes the deeply unpopular shifting of France’s hefty social charges away from businesses and on to consumers by raising the value-added tax. Supporters call it his “Captain Courage” phase, to show that the national interest of crisis-hit France is more important than his own popularity. It’s about being “presidential” in the face of crisis, his last trump card. The support of German Chancellor Angela Merkel is crucial because Europe is one of the last platforms where he is taken seriously by French voters.
“His personal relationship with the French has deteriorated,” Emmanuel Riviere of pollsters TNS-Sofres said. “He was seen as someone close to the French, who talked like them.”
However, his presidential stature nosedived when he famously told a man: “Sod off, you prat,” at Paris’s agricultural fair.
Conferences are springing up on the vexing question: What is Sarkozyism?
“It’s a style of politics,” said Riviere, a kind of frenzy of action and announcements, but its substance is “complicated to follow,” with no clear ideological line.
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