Paris "liberated by her own people with the help of the armies of France, with the help of the whole of France, that is to say fighting France, true France, eternal France." General De Gaulle's mythic rhetoric, declaimed from the Paris town hall in August 1944 as the liberation of France painfully unfolded, was never intended to be historically accurate. Its aim was to re-establish an idea of France's greatness. That vision has dominated French political thinking for the past 60 years. But it may be that this ethereal idea of l'exception française is about to make way for something altogether more worldly and contemporary. The race, or poker game, for the Élysée Palace in 2007 is already well under way and if the election were held tomorrow there is every probability the winner would be a politician who seems ready to turn the page and move on: Nicolas Sarkozy. A recent poll put him 31 points ahead of his two closest rivals, Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin, both of whom are anchored in the past. During the next three years, of course, that could change.
At the moment, the public loves him because he gets things done. He has prodigious energy and seems to understand what is going on in France. Most French ministers stay in their ministries, ruminating on policy, if necessary summoning their partenaires sociaux (trade unions and employers) in a ritual dance of consultation. When Sarkozy became minister of the interior, the refugee holding centre at Sangatte near Calais was a real problem to both French and British governments, but no French minister had bothered to go there. Sarkozy went, saw and sorted it out. He worked with similar directness over security: he went round the country listening to ordinary policemen and women, imbuing them with importance, giving them medals and offering bonuses for increased "productivity." It may not get to the root of street violence, any more than closing a refugee centre will solve the immigration issue, but the public has the impression that the leaky ship is being patched up.
He is an inspired orator, and there are few things he loves as much as working up a live audience. He is also a skilled television debater - he has twice taken part in a live programme in which for 100 minutes he confronts a series of opponents whose sole aim is to wear him down and destroy him in front of millions. The first time he faced Jean-Guy Talamoni, a Corsican nationalist politician, Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France's racist Front National, and Elizabeth Guigou, former minister of justice. Thoroughly prepared, able to quote figures on apparently any subject without notes, he ran rings round all of them. At one point the elegant Guigou declared that police officers in a particular police station were racist. "I'll go there," said Sarkozy, with typical directness, "tomorrow at 8am. See you there?" Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
He is a clever strategist, frequently wrong-footing his opponents by passing laws that were proposed in their manifestos. When minister of the interior he achieved two things which the socialists had been promising for years: establishing a national committee to co-ordinate the different Islamic factions, and ending "double punishment," the system whereby foreigners convicted of a crime first served a prison sentence then, on release, were repatriated. Now certain categories of foreigners ("de facto Frenchmen") may be spared repatriation. "He's on the right, but he doesn't want to become locked into the contradictions of ideology. He wants his laws to be balanced and fair," Thierry Saussez, a political consultant who has worked with Sarkozy for 20 years, told me. When he gets something wrong, he has the much-appreciated humility to go on television and say that it's his fault. He also has personal courage. In 1993, a man took 21 schoolchildren hostage in Neuilly, threatening to blow them up. Sarkozy was budget minister in Paris at the time, but as mayor of Neuilly he drove straight to the school and remained there, negotiating the release of some of the children a
nd offering to exchange himself for the rest. The minister of the interior and prime minister stayed in their offices.
Whatever he does, he makes sure the public sees him doing it. Every day he is on the news in connection with some positive thing he is fighting for. He knows that to achieve the reforms essential to make France work better the public has to be involved.
If Sarkozy were a character in a work of fiction, he would strain credibility - except perhaps as a Shakespearean villain. Indeed his ruthlessness, energy and strength recall Machiavelli's vertù, that essential quality for a politician. Sarkozy's father, Pal Nagy Bosca y Sarközy, a dispossessed Hungarian aristocrat, joined the French foreign legion to escape Stalin. He made his way to Paris, there married a young law student whose family was Jewish and Greek. He sired three children with her and left. Nicolas, abandoned by his father, spent most of his childhood in front of the television. In May 1968, 13-year-old Nicolas, already on the right, marched with those supporting De Gaulle. Having thrown up his studies in political science in his second year, his first choice of career was to be a journalist, but in fact he became a barrister. He was 20 when he addressed a rally of young conservatives in Nice and caught Prime Minister Chirac's attention. But given his background and lack of diplomas, success in politics would be hard. In 1983, aged 28, he took the first of the bold decisions that established him as a front-rank politician, making him implacable enemies on the way. He was a councillor in Neuilly, a staid suburb of Paris, and had worked his way into the entourage of Charles Pasqua, senator and a leader of the party, when the mayor of Neuilly died unexpectedly. The obvious replacement was Pasqua, but he had just gone into hospital for a minor operation, so Sarkozy proposed himself, even though he was in Pasqua's team. By the time the mighty senator woke from????? his anaesthetic, Sarkozy had charmed enough burghers of Neuilly to be elected. Pasqua, the first to be stung by Sarkozy's treachery, was furious, while his partner at the top of the RPR, the equally treacherous Jacques Chirac, laughed: "Everyone betrays everyone else in this job" - and he took Sarkozy into his heart.
Latching on to a father figure, using him and then betraying him has become a Sarkozy hallmark. He had been one of "Pasqua's boys"; now he became indispensable to Chirac, mayor of Paris, former prime minister. Chirac's daughter Claude also became very close to Sarkozy: it looked for a time as though Chirac, already a sort of godfather, might become his father-in-law. Certainly everyone saw Sarkozy as Chirac's successor, inheritor of Gaullist France.
But there was another surprise ahead. Elected député in 1988 for the Hauts-de-Seine, within five years Sarkozy was budget minister under a different conservative prime minister in Paris, Edouard Balladur. By the time the 1995 presidential elections came around, Sarkozy was part of Balladur's circle. He abandoned Chirac as he had abandoned Pasqua. "Treachery," Nicolas Domenach, editor of Marianne, a weekly magazine, comments, "is part of the custom and usage of our democratic monarchy." But in the election Chirac thrashed Balladur, finally becoming president. He took pleasure in binning Sarkozy, along with Balladur. "Use him as a doormat," Chirac told his followers. "It's the only thing he understands." Complying with their president's wishes, Sarkozy was booed and spat at and to this day has not been forgiven by the chiraquie.
Sarkozy worked his way back into Chirac's team using that combination of strategy, effort and lack of pride which is pure ambition. But he did so badly in the 1999 European elections that once again it seemed his career could not recover. He spent two years in the wilderness, learning to be his own man, writing his political credo, Libre (free), a considerable piece of work for a self-made politician: the ideas in it are his alone and don't pander to potential voters. Then he started all over again, maki
ng himself indispensable to Chirac. The president made it clear he despised him but needed him - "indispensable mais insupportable." If Sarkozy would help him get re-elected, he might make him prime minister. The hyperactive Sarkozy loves elections, and using issues he had aired in his book, particularly security and immigration, he raced around the country whipping up votes. Chirac was re-elected in 2002, but didn't make Sarkozy prime minister. "He smashed nearly everything in the office," a witness told the Canard Enchainé. "I'd never seen him like that. He was shouting, hurling files at the floor." He was offered the ministry of the interior. For the first time working for his country rather than his own ambition, Sarkozy's ratings soared. Chirac, alarmed, moved him to the ministry of finance, the economy and industry in March this year, where wisdom had it that even he must fail: the country's finances are too catastrophic to be left alone, and any attempt to reform them will kill off the reformer. But Sarkozy saw the problem as the customer sees it and this, so far, has kept his rating high. At 49, he is poised at last to aim for the top job.
Except that the man who rules France does not want him to be president. This is the story which dominates the political columns in France, much as Blair versus Brown does in Britain - though unlike in Britain, the argument is often out in the open. Chirac doesn't think a referendum on the European constitution is necessary; Sarkozy, a minister in his government, announces it is essential. Chirac is willing to open the door to Turkey becoming a European member, Sarkozy firmly closes it. "You've crossed the yellow line," the president reportedly warned in an exchange quoted by the Canard Enchainé, to which Sarko replied: "Chirac hasn't even noticed that for the last ten years yellow lines on roads have been replaced by white: he is from another generation."
French politicians have a higher media profile than their equivalents in Britain or America, partly because with at least ten parties, there are more of them to score points off each other, and partly, as Nicolas Domenach suggested to me, because being Latin, the French like the "adventures" of politics. Not allowed to publish details of private lives, French editors make more of public lives. Domenach is also author of the latest biography of Sarkozy. (It is indicative that although not yet 50, there are three biographies about the man.)
Government ministers and their families live above the shop, usually in an elegant hôtel particulier. Their every need is met by a large staff of maids, butlers and footmen. The cooks are comparable with those in a three-star Michelin restaurant, and ply the minister and his family with a stream of home-baked pastries and other titbits. The ministry of finance has five large apartments overlooking the Seine for the minister's use. Each minister (there are currently 43) has his own cabinet. Sarkozy has a full-time cabinet of over 30, a personal power base of advisers and strategists who are consulted every day.
Much has been written about the elite which governs France, made up mostly of graduates from the École Nationale d'Administration (ENA). It is often implied that these graduates have muscled in on all the top jobs, whereas the school was set up specifically to produce the nation's rulers. The French of a certain generation feel it is essential that they are ruled not by a representative cross-section of society, but by the very best - or at least the best at passing very difficult exams. "French politicians are the cleverest in the world," Thierry Saussez the political consultant assured me. Brilliant on paper, perhaps, but in office énarques have proved poor communicators and bad listeners. Sarkozy did not go to ENA and does not get on with énarques, whether former prime ministers - Juppé or Jospin - or the multitude of anonymous ones who run every ministry. He upset many at the ministry of finance, where the crème de la crème of ENA graduates ends up, by bringing his cabinet direct
or and others across from the ministry of the interior. He trusts only his own advisers, the principal of whom is his wife Cecilia. His close friend (and special adviser) Pierre Charon told me that he then added insult to injury by sending back the énarques' jargon-filled memos with "Write this in plain French" scribbled in the margin.
Even though he is on the right, his insistence on provoking those in power endears him to a younger generation. He comes from a broken home, he divorced his first wife, married a woman also divorced and copes with assorted children and stepchildren. He is also the son of an immigrant and a Jew. His first book, published in 1994, was a biography of a Jew and outsider, Georges Mandel, minister of the interior in June 1940, shot by the Pétainist militia. Outsiders tend to moralise less: it is hard to imagine him calling Tony Blair "badly brought up," nor, with his Hungarian blood, lecturing eastern European countries on how to behave. Perhaps because of his background, he recognises how full of contradictions the population of France has become. Whereas republican France has felt it necessary, in the name of equality, to treat everyone as if they were the same, Sarkozy can see that "the manager in a nationalised industry has nothing in common with the person in an internet start-up? the taxi driver working all hours so he can build himself a house is at opposite poles to the civil servant who wants as much holiday as he can get." He goes further: "The republic is not equality, it is equity," by which he means an even-handed fairness for all. Though quietly stated common sense, that is republican heresy.
De Gaulle and the presidents who followed him have generally projected an insular and anxious notion of a France which tries to lock out foreign culture. Sarkozy is open to other influences. America fascinates him and he feels at home with the American lone-spirit ethos. He glories in pushing his body (and his bodyguards' bodies) through the pain barrier as he cycles or jogs mile after punishing mile: "Those who do not practise a sport cannot imagine how much freer and calmer one's mind becomes when one is alone, confronted only by one's self." Pizza and chocolate are his favourite foods, Hemingway, he told François Mitterrand, his favourite author. His critics say he is culturally shallow, considered a characteristic of Americans, and ridicule him for his all-American craving to be photographed with "the pipole," as the French call their celebrities. But what he admires most about America is its business efficiency. Spending a weekend with his son in Disneyland outside Paris he writes, "I admire the seamless organisation of Disney. No vulgarity, just marvels every second? It was with real regret that I had to leave my family to go and see the president." Successful businesses have always fascinated Sarkozy. Two of his closest, and oldest, friends are Martin Bouygues, head of the enormous construction, services, telecoms and media group, and Arnaud Lagardère - arms, aeroplanes and media - who considers Sarkozy "like a brother." But in a French election campaign being pro-America and pro-business are dangerous cards, playing into the hands of the left. Globalisation and liberal are terms of abuse. Capitalism is seen as unbridling man's worst nature - and the ENA elite are there to protect the French from the worst side of themselves. After all, the Enlightenment imperative is that the rational (the state) must dominate nature (market forces), which explains the perennial attraction of the left, in France seen as the only politics for the thinking person. Even though the left has no presidential candidate of Sarkozy's popularity, most French people still think the left will win the next election.
How can Sarkozy stay faithful to his pro-American, liberal instincts and get himself elected? If he were elected, it is tempting to imagine this very different sort of politician taking France in some unusual directions. He has no particular affection for the ancient and creaking Franco-German motor i
n Europe. He has made no secret of the fact that he admires Tony Blair for his courage and energy, and three times recently he has had quiet talks with Gordon Brown. He is a friend of José María Aznar. If Sarkozy becomes president, the British perception of Europe could change profoundly. He has an affinity with the new member states from eastern Europe. Sarkozy has no particular sympathy with north Africa; he was not even born when the Algerians began their struggle for independence. He does not share Chirac's admiration for the Arabs, and in the middle east would shift more towards the Israelis. He has little experience of Africa, that other enormous domain where successive French presidents have enjoyed meddling to build up the Francophone power base there. And most importantly, he does not consider the US an insufferable threat which must be countered.
Yet so far, when he has had to choose between market-led efficiency and short-term national interest, the latter has won. No sooner had he been appointed to the ministry of finance than he intervened in a disputed merger: two pharmaceutical companies, one French and one Swiss, were bidding for the Franco-German Aventis. Shareholders preferred the Swiss approach, but Sarkozy was determined to make a French champion, so he phoned the French bidder and told him to raise his offer, then telephoned the CEO of Aventis and told him to accept it. Germany was furious at this breach of European rules, which forbid state interference, so Chirac soothed their anger by agreeing that from now on France and Germany would create cross-border European champions to fight American domination. Germany assumed this meant that, for example, their mighty Siemens group would be able to buy part of the troubled French group, Alstom. "Non!" thundered Sarkozy in the Assemblée nationale: Alstom would not be dismantled. He went into battle with Brussels so that French taxpayers might yet again have the privilege of bailing out this French national champion, on its knees with debt. The justification this time: French engineering knowledge "must not be lost to foreigners." I am sure the Germans were pleased to hear that. "The state has a duty to protect national champions," Sarkozy told the press. "It's in l'intérêt général," Thierry Saussez assured me, "to save jobs and protect this flower of French industry." Calling a one-eyed, wingless lame duck a national champion is like saying France was liberated by the French. More important, until "competitive" is included in the definition of "l'intérêt général," something many thought had been agreed four years ago in Lisbon, France will never find its true liberté. It is this habit of honouring agreements only when it suits France, and quoting lofty ideals even as they break them, that has made France such an infuriating partner.
It is tempting to say Sarkozy is reverting to the French nationalist dirigiste stereotype, but it would be unfair. His only general policy rule is not to have a general policy rule. He wants to avoid getting locked in ideological rigidity, which he says no longer serves the interests of today's increasingly diverse population. Take each case as it comes - modern life is full of contradictions, so politics must be too: he wants to float like a butterfly. But while this makes it difficult for his opponents to nail him, it also makes it difficult for his friends to follow. It is a defensible position for a minister, but as a president it is a serious weakness.
The French electorate appreciate that he is getting things done and his gamble must be that when the time comes, in 2007, they will vote for his record, not for his political position. But despite his record, the odds are against him. There is a large silent minority that would like a liberal, deregulated economy, but there are too many people who are too well protected by the state to want change. That is Sarkozy's present problem with the workers in the nationalised energy companies, who are among the most cosseted in France. Already he has conceded a much smaller privati
sation than the EU wanted: originally 50 per cent of the companies' capital was to come from private investment, now it has shrunk to 30 per cent, with 15 per cent of that open to the employees. The disadvantage of being a butterfly is that you get blown by the lightest breeze. As president he will find the wind only gets stronger.
