In January 2012, four months before the presidential election,
Nicolas Sarkozy warned his countrymen, “If I lose, you won’t hear
any more from me.… I’ll make a lot of money and live la dolce
vita.” That wasn’t enough to scare them into voting for him.
They were sick of his pushy, flashy, undignified style, tired of
seeing him jog around Paris in a NYPD T-shirt, fed up with his very
public marital troubles. On May 6 they voted him out of office, a
humiliated one-term president. It was all the more galling because
voters had preferred the bland socialist apparatchik François
Hollande to him. Sulking, Sarkozy proclaimed he was leaving
politics for good. Never again would he run for high office. He
would become merely “just another Frenchman.” France would be
sorry, but he was parti pour de bon, gone, out of
here.
He set up a law office in a suitably chic district of Paris,
tried the lucrative international speaking circuit (he’s said to be
trying to improve his shaky English to make himself more
marketable), and has been considering heading a private equity
project with Qatari financial backing. For ten months the
pint-sized, 58-year-old Sarkozy kept a low profile — one of the
few activities where his five-foot-five stature is an advantage.
His third wife, the model/pop singer Carla Bruni, strummed her
guitar and brought out a new album. “I have no wish for Nicolas to
go back into politics,” she said. “We are very happy in our new
life.”
Occasionally, though, there were glimpses of the compulsive
political animal, the one who avowed years ago that he thought
about becoming president of France every morning while shaving. He
briefly made a show last year of trying to help unify his
center-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, fallen into
disarray with rival candidates bitterly vying for his vacated
leadership spot. When that failed, it was perhaps not entirely a
disappointment. It left him looking like the one-and-only,
once-and-future leader of French conservatism.
In recent months the sky has filled with Sarkozy’s trial
balloons testing the political wind. Close associates have busily
fed his ideas to the media. One day they would let it be known that
he was worried that the new socialist administration was driving
the French economy into the wall with its high-taxation policies.
On another they related his opinion that Hollande was seriously
underestimating the dangerous level of exasperation in a country
plagued by rising unemployment and a stagnant standard of living.
He lamented France’s diminishing international clout; Hollande had
spoiled the close working relationship he had worked so hard to
build with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “I can’t leave France
like this,” he was reported to have said.
The cast of those promoting a Sarkozy comeback includes former
Prime Minister Alain Juppé, now the popular mayor of Bordeaux and a
senior UMP figure. “I get the feeling that he wants to run,” Juppé
said recently. “He follows politics closely, and from our regular
phone calls I can tell he is extremely vigilant.” There is
Bernadette Chirac, wife of the former president Jacques Chirac and
longtime Sarkozy supporter, who openly called on him to run in the
2017 election. There is even Carla. Despite her professed happiness
as an ex-first lady, she felt it necessary to deliver some pointed
political analysis. “Hollande is terrible, and we’re going to be
stuck with him for the next 10 years,” she allowed recently.
“Because in the next election [the far-Right leader] Marine Le Pen
will be his opponent, and naturally he will win.” Her husband could
change that: “Nicolas could spare France this awful duel.”
Hollande himself appears to fear that Sarkozy will make a shot
at political revenge. Analysts more astute than I point out that,
for the first time in living memory, the new president has
deliberately shunned any reference to his predecessor since taking
office. The more Freudian among them hold that this shows
unconscious fear of Sarkozy. For proof, they cite the incident at a
recent agricultural fair in Paris. As Hollande made the obligatory
rounds among the cows, pigs, and chickens, he came across a little
girl who asked innocently, “Where’s Monsieur Sarkozy?” “You won’t
be seeing him,” Hollande shot back aggressively, while carefully
avoiding the dread name. A Freudian slip revealing a deep-seated
fear that he had not politically killed off the pugnacious,
still-smarting Sarko?
Last week his advance guard launched their most ambitious
barrage of Sarko-think yet. An eight-page spread in a conservative
weekly, which gave every sign of being approved by Himself, left no
doubt that he could be persuaded — easily — to make a comeback.
To be sure, according to quotations attributed to close friends of
his, he had no personal desire to return to the world of politics,
which he found “deadly dull.” Besides, they quoted him as saying in
private, “Why would I want to take over France in the sorry state
in which the socialists will leave it? No, frankly, I’m not tempted
to make a comeback, especially after the way my wife and I were
treated, with her prevented from singing for five years.”
But still. He couldn’t help believing that Hollande’s
application of clumsy socialist policies was setting France up for
a series of calamitous crises. The first would be economic, with
increasing unemployment and the collapse of entire industrial
sectors like automobile production. “Then there will be a social
crisis, then a financial one of a rare violence, and finally big
political trouble.” When, not if, this happens, he will be morally
obliged to act. “Unfortunately there will be moment when the
question is no longer ‘do you want to,’ but ‘do you have a choice?’
In such a case I can’t just keep on telling myself, ‘I’m happy, I
can take my daughter to school, I’m speaking at conferences all
over the world.’ Then, yes, I would have to get back into politics.
Not because I want to. Out of duty. Only because it’s for France.”
The historical parallel with the triumphant return to politics of
Charles de Gaulle in 1958, with France on the verge of civil war,
was only too obvious.
Sarkozy’s outburst caused a predictable splash, not least
because the French are indeed thoroughly disappointed with their
choice of Hollande as president. His approval rating is now
hovering around 30, the lowest of any new president in the history
of the Fifth Republic. Dozens of businesses and factories are
closing by the month. Sales of French automobiles are down 15
percent, while those of German and Asian makers are up, raising the
specter of no more Renault, Peugeot, or Citroën cars within a
generation.
The only constantly rising statistics are unemployment, now
around 11 percent (more like 25 percent among the young), meaning
some 3 million on the dole, and violent crime. A recent best
seller, Clockwork Orange France (an allusion to the 1962
dystopian novel by Anthony Burgess depicting gratuitous violence),
purports to show the true face of “an ultra-violent France where
you can be killed for looking at someone the wrong way.” Citing
official but seldom-published statistics, the author, a French
investigative journalist, claims that every 24 hours French
citizens are victims of some 13,000 thefts or burglaries, 2,000
aggressions, and 200 rapes.
Even the country’s present dire socio-economic straits may not
be enough to make Sarkozy a credible candidate for the title of
providential Savior of France. Charles de Gaulle in elevator shoes,
as it were. For one thing, his inability to leave the political
scene for even one year — after having vowed to leave it for good
— will remind many of the twitchy, unpredictable politico they
voted against. For another, he still faces a number of charges and
criminal investigations for corruption, notably for allegedly
financing his campaigns with secret envelopes full of cash from
Liliane Bettencourt, the L’Oréal heiress recently named by
Forbes as the world’s richest woman. And if he does get
involved in a private equity firm for the wealthy, that will
further alienate whole sections of the French electorate.
No one would accuse the impetuous Monsieur Sarkozy of lacking
ambition. Or of false modesty. “I will only run if no other natural
candidate imposes himself,” he humbly told a member of the National
Assembly recently. But he just couldn’t resist adding, “There won’t
be one.”
Photo: UPI
