Nothing in his presidency became it like the leaving it. “I take
full responsibility for this defeat,” Nicolas Sarkozy declared
Sunday evening as results from second-round ballot showed that
Socialist François Hollande would be France’s new chief of state.
“I did everything I could to defend our party’s ideals. Now the
French people have made their choice, there is a new president, and
he is to be respected.” The tone was statesmanlike, a dignified
class act. After five hectic, erratic, politically self-destructive
years in the Elysée Palace, when he seemed indifferent to the
impact of his words and actions on public opinion, Sarkozy had
finally learned to be presidential.
His term was a case study in how to disorient and finally
alienate those who believed in him and voted him into office. His
defeat, making him only the second one-term president in the
history of the Fifth Republic — the first was Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing, beaten by another Socialist, François Mitterrand, in
1981 — was an astonishing fall from grace. This pugnacious,
dynamic, brazenly ambitious son of a Hungarian immigrant came into
office with a sound conservative program. He promised to bring real
change to French politics. He was determined to lead, push, and
coax a stagnant France out of its state-dependent slough of
politco-socio-economic despond.
Early polls ranked him the most popular president since Charles
de Gaulle 40 years ago. “The French people have chosen change,” he
declared on his victory night in May 2007. He pledged to “break
with the ideas, the habits, and the behavior of the past.” He
praised “those who get up early to go to work,” vowed to encourage
entrepreneurship. With his free-market ideals and vocal admiration
for the U.S., pundits dubbed this edgy outsider who had not gone to
the right elite schools, this self-described “little Frenchman of
mixed blood,” l’américain. He took it as a compliment. He
began his first day in office jogging in a T-shirt emblazoned
NYPD.
He made some right moves. Public sector workers went on strike
over his reform of their generous retirement benefits? He faced
them down. He correctly identified France’s absurd,
Socialist-decreed 35-hour work week as an obstacle to prosperity,
and took initial steps to end it. The labor market was too rigid;
he made it easier to hire and fire. Retirement age was increased
from 60 to 62. He ended France’s knee-jerk anti-Americanism,
bringing it back into NATO’s integrated military command.
Sarkozy also got credit for banning the controversial
head-to-toe burqa worn by some women in France’s growing Muslim
community, and cleaning out gypsy settlements that were causing
trouble. Along with Germany’s Angela Merkel he helped cool Europe’s
sovereign debt fever and stabilize the euro. Although he initially
missed the importance of the Arab Spring, he later prompted the
military campaign against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.
But while this was going on, he was losing contact with the
French themselves. For one thing, they couldn’t keep up with this
man in motion, whose basic political tactic was to keep moving and
produce new programs, proposals, and laws as fast as possible.
Those initiatives went by so fast in a blur that they were often
unperceived and unappreciated. For another thing, the French soon
came to find the man’s personal style, or lack thereof,
repugnant.
They could accept that he was hyperactive, with an endless
supply of new ideas and projects — including, unfortunately,
doubling his salary to $360,000 and ordering up a fancy new
presidential jet modeled on Air Force One. But in this country
where the chief of state is endowed with the majestic trappings of
monarchy, they could not admit that he appeared grasping, common,
gauche. In a word, unpresidential. It was Nicolas
Sarkozy’s political tragedy that a man so in love for decades with
the idea of becoming president that he confessed he thought about
it every morning while shaving, was unable make the transition to
presidential class once elected. Strange to tell, this man with
three decades of political experience appeared to lack political
instinct.
To start with, there was his turbulent, and very public, love
life. Everyone knew that Cécilia, his second wife and mother of
their 11-year-old son, left him briefly for another man in 2005,
while he consoled himself with a political journalist. But when the
capricious lady humiliatingly repeated that caper only weeks after
he was sworn in, they were embarrassed. And taking up on the
rebound with an Italian model-cum pop singer, an acknowledged
man-eater who declared “Monogamy bores me terribly,” was a bit much
even for the broad-minded French. The derisive giggling began when
he giddily announced at a press conference, “With Carla, it’s
serious.” Like some love-sick adolescent. “It’s Snow White marrying
the dwarf,” quipped one comic, wickedly referring to his diminutive
stature and tango-dancer elevator heels.
Ever conscious of their image in the world, the French were even
more distressed that their president was being mocked in the
foreign press. Italy’s La Repubblica noted with distaste
that the man sitting “on De Gaulle’s throne” was “a shirt-sleeved
president in Hollywood sunglasses who received his ministers with
his feet on his desk, using the familiar tu form of
address with everyone.” German newspapers found him “shameless,
irritating, narcissistic, a new Napoleon.” They noted that
Chancellor Angela Merkel disliked his familiar manners, especially
the way he hugged and kissed her on both cheeks at every summit.
The British press, miffed that he had dared respond to the Queen’s
formal invitation to visit by cutting his stay a day short,
dismissed him as “a soap opera star.” Worried a senior advisor at
the French Institute for International Relations, “Can he incarnate
France with dignity and legitimacy?”
Then, too, the man was just plain unpleasant. Not the sort you
would want to have a friendly drink with. Unlike successful
politicos the world over, he couldn’t even pretend to like people
in general. Seemed to scowl more easily than smile. Known for a
hair-trigger temper, he stormed out of an interview with CBS when
an American journalist dared ask a question he found offensive. His
own staff he berated as imbeciles, cretins, and worse. When a
member of the public at an agricultural fair declined to shake his
hand, Sarkozy tongue-lashed him, “Go to hell, you poor bastard!”
Some began to wonder whether the nuclear button was safe with
someone so irritable and impulsive. Others wondered what he was
smoking.
His popularity plunged from a record 67 percent to a low of 37
in his first year. His own electorate began to turn against him. In
the first municipal ballot of his term, some candidates in his UMP
party quietly asked him to avoid campaigning for them and deleted
the party logo from their leaflets. In a sign of political failures
to come, they lost 38 of France’s largest cities and towns to the
Socialists. It was an early, stinging rebuke to Sarkozy.
Allegations involving dirty money dogged him all during his
term. There was the so-called Karachi case, a murky affair
centering on kickbacks on a 1994 sale of three French submarines to
Pakistan. The money, it was charged, went to fund the 1995
presidential campaign of Edouard Balladur, of which Sarkozy was
financial director. His own campaign in 2007 came under official
scrutiny due to claims that Sarkozy had received millions in
illegal contributions from Lillian Bettencourt, heiress to the
L’Oreal fortune and France’s wealthiest woman. This spring, a Paris
investigative news site published an Arab-language document
purporting to prove that he had accepted over $60 million from
Muammar Gaddafi to finance his 2007 election. With several
investigations ongoing, none of these allegations has been proven.
But Sarkozy’s need to constantly counter such charges was a
constant distraction from the business of governing — and from
campaigning for re-election.
He delayed the start of that campaign until the beginning of
this year, far later than his advisors wanted, and spurring
speculation that he might not want to risk rejection due to his
unpopularity. When it did begin it was often ill-tempered and
belligerent. It also bore the mark of improvisation. Battling a 64
percent disapproval rating and polls that consistently showed
François Hollande winning by a comfortable margin, Sarkozy
erratically changed direction and sprang new programs and promises
almost daily. Mainly he veered further and further right in hope of
siphoning off votes from the National Front (a disastrous tactic
that cost him vital votes from the moderate center and
independents), hammering the message that he would save France from
Islamists. He would cut immigration by half, closing France’s
borders, in violation of European Union agreements, if
necessary.
Grasping at straws late in the campaign, he attempted,
unconvincingly, to cast himself as the people’s candidate. He used
a video showing him with Barack Obama, suggesting that the American
president backed him. He made excuses for his record, claiming that
he was distracted early in his term by his failing marriage, and
had to deal with the world financial crisis. In the campaign’s
final days he resorted to that tired old loser’s pose: he was the
victim of a biased media that hated him. His supporters physically
harassed journalists at his rallies.
Sarkozy’s last hope was a knockout blow at the single televised
debate on May 2 with François Hollande, who was running as a calm,
easygoing Monsieur Normal. He and his inept staff thought the
Socialist was a creampuff who would buckle under attack. Another
miscalculation. It quickly turned ugly as Sarkozy called Hollande
arrogant and other names, and repeatedly shouted “Liar! Slanderer!”
in reply to his remarks. It didn’t work as the Socialist kept his
cool and mocked Sarkozy for refusing to stand on his record. A
majority of viewers thought Monsieur Normal won.
Having botched his term, Sarkozy has left his UMP party a
shambles and France arguably worse off than when he took office.
The National Front is now in a position to attract disaffected UMP
members and fashion a new conservative party centering on NF
programs and values. For the first time in its history, it will
likely win seats in the National Assembly in the June legislative
elections. As its leader, Marine Le Pen, asked a crowd of
supporters, “How does it feel to go from being fascists, racists
and xenophobes, to people who are being eagerly courted?”
Sarkozy’s legacy to France is a tarnished presidency, a revived,
victorious Socialist Party, and an economy burdened with a record
debt of $2.24 trillion and counting, some $500 billion more than
the day he took office. Unemployment stands at 10 percent and has
been growing by the month. Although he tried to hitch France to the
German locomotive, the reality is that it is falling further behind
Europe’s economic powerhouse.
A lawyer by trade, the man himself has little to worry about,
except possibly those ongoing investigations for alleged
corruption. He said this week that he would leave politics
permanently. Asked during the campaign what he would do after the
presidency, he answered, “Make a lot of dough and live la dolce
vita.” Now, rejected by a French electorate he never really
connected with, he can be on his way.
