Madonna versus "the Madman"

Le Sunday Times titrait, le 22 avril dernier, "The Madonna versus the Madman". Pas mal vu

Madonna versus ‘the Madman’ as France prepares for change
Sarko the target in tight poll race
Matthew Campbell, Toulouse
THEY looked like a couple of newlyweds as they advanced through the conference centre, greeting friends and supporters with euphoric grins.

An icon of the European left, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the visiting Spanish leader, was in a dark suit and open-neck shirt. Ségolène Royal, the French socialist “Madonna” and presidential contender, wore white. They were made for each other.

“We’re going to win,” chanted youthful supporters with the volume of a crowd at a football match. Occasionally Zapatero and Royal whispered to each other as they went up the aisle to the stage: love was in the air and Toulouse, the “pink city”, was under its spell.

“Every time a schoolteacher puts a picture of Ségolène up on the wall, the whole of France is illuminated,” gushed the Spaniard, who was guest speaker at Royal’s final campaign rally. “Women’s progress brings progress for the whole of society.” The crowd of 25,000 roared its approval. Royal kissed him and gave him a red rose. “Thank you for bringing the flame and warmth of Spain,” she said. Then she turned a blowtorch on her enemy.

Royal, who was called “La Zapatera” when she won a regional presidency in 2004 against the odds shortly after the Spaniard’s surprise election victory, suddenly became the Zapaterreur.

She accused Nicolas Sarkozy, who led most of the polls in the run-up to today’s vote, of brutally polarising society, of plotting to turn France into an American poodle, of envisaging sinister plans to identify criminals by DNA testing, of being a slave to big business. Evoking Spain in the civil war, she seemed to suggest that Sarkozy was nothing less than a mad dictator in waiting. “His project is simply to take power,” she said. “Mine is to give it to you.”

France’s presidential battle turned decidedly nasty in its final stages last week as Sarkozy became the country’s favourite punchbag and the candidates went to ever greater lengths to woo an estimated 16m undecided voters in one of the most difficult elections in memory to predict.

As Royal issued her frantic appeals for support in Toulouse, the capital of Airbus and French rugby, Sarkozy, the combative former interior minister who has dreamt since childhood of becoming president, left no political stone unturned in the hunt for votes. Followed by a tractor-load of journalists, he rode a horse through a bull farm in the Camargue on Friday with his mobile phone glued to his ear. Yesterday the campaign launched helium balloons over the Jura mountains, emblazoned with the words “Sunday I vote Sarkozy”.

The top two candidates will face off in a second round on May 6, given the impossibility of any one of the 12 candidates scoring more than 50% today. The whole of the country’s fractious political family was represented on the ballot from a pipe-smoking antiglobalisation guru to a Trotskyist mayor with an accent so thick that few understand him.

Turnout was expected to be high: for a change, none of the candidates was an incumbent president or prime minister. In a country in need of renewal and deeply disillusioned with its ruling elite, the public’s sense of excitement was intensified by expectations that the election might make a real difference.

The frontrunners - Royal, 53, Sarkozy, 52, and the centrist François Bayrou, 55 - are much younger than previous incumbents, promising a dramatic shift in presidential style and substance in a country run for the past three decades by leaders who cut their political teeth in the days of Charles de Gaulle, founder of the Fifth Republic.

They have shaken up the political world by defying traditional dogma, but there is still a long way to go before France abandons its slavish adherence to outmoded statist thinking.

After a promising beginning, Royal, or “Ségo”, as supporters call the charismatic mother of four, has disappointed those who had hoped that she might “deMarxify” her political family, one of the most left-wing Socialist parties in Europe.

In some areas she broke the Socialist model as, for instance, when she proposed boot camp for young offenders, but in economic affairs she has clung to the creed of more public spending.

In the same way, Sarkozy has disappointed those who expected promises to reconcile France with the free market, watering down rhetoric about a “rupture” with the past to appeal to an electorate in search of protection against an uncertain future.

Today’s elimination of other candidates from the far left and right could clear the way for a more modern appeal to the centre. None of the candidates seemed to embody change more convincingly than Royal, if only because she is the first woman with a real chance of becoming president in a country whose politics are dominated by men.

Her skilful defeat of two male “elephants”, as the Socialist heavyweights are known, in the party’s nomination battle was an earthquake in French politics. Nevertheless, criticism of her has been as fierce in her own team as it has in the other. By normally polite French standards it has been a distinctly dirty campaign.

She was accused of having an acid tongue, a bullying temperament and a selfish determination to succeed that had involved coldly using François Hollande, the father of her children - and Socialist leader - to get ahead in her party. She was blamed for foreign policy gaffes and lacking the gravitas to run a nuclear-equipped, industrial power.

Even her appeal to female voters last week, when she asked women to write “a new page in the history of France” by making her the first woman president, prompted grumbling. She was using her sex to win votes, her critics complained.

Famed for a designer wardrobe that highlights her feminine side - she eschews the trouser suits worn by American female politicians such as Hillary Clinton - Royal would certainly constitute a change in presidential style. Already male politicians were joking about issuing as an official Royal portrait for hanging in government offices the paparazzi snapshot of her on the beach in her bikini last summer.

She may have the last laugh if elected. Part of her novelty was a controversial plan to bolster “participative democracy” by setting up “citizens’ juries” to monitor the performance of elected officials; and last week she appeared to go a step further, suggesting the presidency itself should be transformed.

The French presidency is the most powerful executive post in Europe. Its incumbent sets the country’s direction, appoints prime ministers and pursues foreign affairs. He is under no obligation to explain how he spends his £22m budget. Not wanting to ruin a night’s sleep when on a foreign tour, Jacques Chirac, the discredited outgoing leader, would instruct his pilots not to land before 7am, regardless of the delays - and expense - and could spend £300,000 on a cocktail party without blinking. He has a servant to turn on his television.

Not for much longer. Some heard in Royal’s proposals for reducing presidential prodigality the creaking of the tumbrel, the cart used in the revolution to convey victims to the guillotine. She insisted that every euro spent should be a “useful euro” and that meant “the presidency of the republic must become economic and transparent”.

She wanted to put an end to “the monarchic drift that consists of making everyone believe that the head of state can spend public money without controls or limits”. In future, she said in a dig at the Chiracs, private holidays would have to be paid for out of the president’s pocket. “We’re going to enter the 21st century,” said Alain Duhamel, a political analyst. Could it be as simple as that?

Tightening presidential purse strings would have little impact on high unemployment, low growth and indebtedness. Nor would most of Royal’s other proposals. Given the inability of French politicians to get on with each other, even in the same party, Bayrou, the centrist, seemed to offer only more grid-lock with his promise to make politicians pull together in a “national unity” government.

The outcome was far from certain. The last opinion polls on Friday suggested that Sarkozy and Royal would be the two finalists on May 6. Yet because one in three voters was undecided, the contest was filled with suspense.

Bayrou, although trailing 10 points behind Sarkozy in one poll, was considered capable of winning a place in the second round. So was Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right National Front leader who astounded the establishment in 2002 when he broke through to the final. Last-minute polls yesterday showed him inching ahead of Bayrou.

As for the run-off, opinion polls have consistently singled out Sarkozy as the man to beat.

Astride a white horse called Universe on Friday, he looked like a cowboy as he rounded up bulls on a farm in the Camargue region, southern France.

Was he the saviour France has been waiting for? Sarkozy evoked Margaret Thatcher last week with his plans for selling council housing and creating a nation of property owners, daring talk for a country that has yet to shake off qualms about capital-ism - a vestige, perhaps, of the revolution 200 years ago.

There is no politician who breeds so much antipathy as this diminutive figure with the enormous ambition of making France more competitive, and the attacks on Royal were nothing compared with the abuse being heaped upon “Sarko”.

On the left they called him a “fascist” and “madman”; on Le Pen’s extreme right a “foreigner” who should not have been allowed to run on account of his immigrant origins - his father was a Hungarian who settled in Paris after the last war.

The assault was taken to new extremes last week by Marianne, a weekly news magazine that dedicated several pages to “the real Sarkozy”. He was accused of abusing his former powers as interior minister. It was recalled how he had intimidated a publisher into pulping a book about Cécilia, his errant wife.

Tales of Sarko’s excesses are legion: a French ambassador who raised questions about his fitness to govern at a private dinner apparently received a call afterwards in which he was told that his career was over; an author researching Sarkozy’s political career was reported to have been tailed so threateningly by secret police that he felt obliged to hire a bodyguard.

A self-styled workaholic and blur of boundless energy, he can be easily rattled, as happened last week when Yvan Gautho, a 35-year-old entrepreneur, asked whether he would have had the same successful career if his father had been deported as an illegal immigrant after settling in Paris in 1949.

Sarkozy’s uncompromising stance on immigration - he has stolen Le Pen’s proposal for an “immigration and national identity” ministry - has been a highly charged issue ever since he described youths of immigrant origin who set fire to cars in the suburbs as “scum”.

Sarkozy found himself on the defensive, denying that he was “antiimmigrant” and arguing that times were different back then. “When my father arrived in 1949 there was no unemployment,” he said. “After having spent his first night in the Métro, he found work. But he did it on his own. He never burnt a car and he never started saying he did not like the country that had welcomed him.”

His agitated reaction showed why Sarkozy’s “work more to earn more” formula for Gallic renaissance has been drowned under questions about his punchy temperament and fitness to wield power. Even his supporters admit there is something odd about Sarko. He sweats a lot. His shoulders twitch when he makes speeches. His face is a network of nervous tics and grimaces.

It could also be that a pugnacious - even ruthless - streak is exactly what is needed to pull France out of its malaise and Sarkozy faces no competition in that area. He gained his reputation for ruthlessness when he became mayor of Neuilly, an affluent Parisian suburb, at the age of 28. The Chiracs adored “little Nicolas” who had a close relationship with Claude, their daughter. “To think I’ve seen him in his underpants,” Chirac was heard commenting after what is known in the family as “the betrayal”.

In fact there were two betrayals. Not only did Sarkozy dump Claude, he also dumped Chirac, his political mentor, by siding with Eduard Balladur, a rival of Chirac for the Gaullist nomination, in the 1995 presidential election. The Chiracs never forgave him.

When Chirac won, Sarkozy found himself in the political wilderness. Instead of giving up hope, he slowly clawed his way back up the Gaullist party ladder, making himself indispensable to the government. Chirac watched in helpless fury as his former protégé ended up taking over the party he had founded.

He appointed Dominique de Villepin as prime minister in the vain hope of blocking Sarkozy’s presidential bid. It did not work. Chirac had to offer Sarkozy his backing in the hope that he will not be prosecuted once he leaves office over a host of financial scandals dating back to his days as mayor of Paris.

Sarkozy denied doing any deal with Chirac but his lead over Royal narrowed as the campaign turned nasty. Royal, for her part, seemed genuinely concerned about the prospect of being eliminated from the race by Bayrou or Le Pen.

“Help me” was her blunt appeal to voters in Toulouse. Another first-round defeat for the Socialist candidate after Lionel Jospin’s humiliation in 2002 could mean the end of the historic French Socialist party.

Sarkozy sounded more confident. He called the first-round vote “a warm-up”. He has been nominally handing out ministries to friends. He was also reported to have mapped out his first 100 days in power, including efforts to boost employment.

Previous efforts at even mild economic reforms have prompted violent street protests, followed by governmental retreat: Chirac was always too worried about losing power to try anything but the most timid of tinkering. After such a gruelling campaign, Sarkozy might also find peace more appealing than social upheaval.

In any case, some were arguing, France can survive without reforms. The country’s top companies make impressive profits given the constraints they operate under. True, economic growth is not as brisk as it might be - an average 1% less than everywhere else in Europe, says Sarkozy - but the country can muddle along like that.

“The rest of the world is jealous of France,” said Jacques Attali, a former aide to François Mitterrand, the last Socialist president, explaining the clamour in Europe for French modernisa-tion. “When I hear the British bashing France’s supposed weaknesses, I wonder why so few French people buy houses in the British countryside, while so many Britons are doing so in France. The reason is the same: the quality of life in France is one of the highest in the world.”

Judging by the national mood of gloom, not many people share that opinion. Certainly not Sarkozy, at least. Full employment, he said, “is possible in Sweden, Denmark and Britain. Why not here?”

In the next few months he may get his answer.