Portrait of Nicolas Sarkozy on 2007/4/25
Paris, April 24, 2007 -- It seems hard to say just who Nicolas Sarkozy is -- the man who won the first round of France’s presidential election. He has a clear lead over his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, although the second-round outcome remains uncertain.
Americans mostly see him as an Atlanticist and admirer of George W. Bush (temporarily in the closet, because as one of his admirers says, “he doesn’t want to be accused -- for the millionth time -- of being pro-American.”)
He is also, to most American and European observers, a free-marketeer who will bring supply-side economics to France, cut its bureaucracy, deregulate its labor market, reduce its debt, and open France to the winds of globalization. Yet as economics minister, he called for “economic patriotism” and arranged for a state rescue of Alstom, France’s world-leading power and high-speed rail conglomerate.
Two French historians and commentators, Marcel Gauchet and the late René Remond, have argued that he can’t really be identified with any of the French political Right’s major historical currents.
He is not a Gaullist (even if his party is commonly called Gaullist; it actually broke with the principles of Gaullism when its leader, Jacques Chirac, entered into “cohabitation” with the Socialists as François Mitterand’s prime minister in 1986). Sarkozy’s have never been the great DeGaulle themes of France’s destiny, its supposed special genius, and its need for sovereign independence.
Nor is he really an economic liberal in the traditional European sense, which is to say a pro-business, free-trade advocate, as in Liberal parties across Europe. He has a strong streak in him of the “Colbertian” economic centralism and tradition of government intervention that has dominated French economic thought and policy from the monarchy to Charles DeGaulle and François Mitterrand.
He does not belong to the old French Pétanist tradition of family-work-religion, anti-republicanism, and xenophobic nationalism, nor to the boisterous modern manifestation of that tradition in the party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
In last Sunday’s election he efficiently destroyed Le Pen as a political force by restating Le Pen’s themes in more acceptable form and stealing Le Pen’s votes. Now he is moving back towards the center, where Le Pen would never have trod.
He is not a religious conservative, a defender of the natural order, hostile to money values, capitalism, and modern secularism. Some on Spain’s right seem to see him as such, regarding France as the most secularized country in Europe, and Sarkozy as enemy of the relativist left and a bulwark against Islamic expansion in Europe. (Sarkozy acknowledges only occasional church-going, although in the final days of the campaign he spoke favorably of Europe’s Christian cultural origins.) Religion, in any case, is not a political issue in France, and church and state alike prefer to keep it that way.
There is a secular equivalent to that cultural argument to be found in the opinion expressed by one of Sarkozy’s foreign affairs advisors and strongest supporters, the Paris deputy Pierre Lellouche, who declared on French television Sunday night that Sarkozy’s (provisional) victory was a triumph of the right over the leftist spirit of 1968, and a reversal of 1981 (when a Socialist-Communist coalition took power in France).
Lellouche promised that now the economic and social policies that had triumphed in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and America under Ronald Reagan would be applied in France, and the country would recover its past preeminence.
This kind of thing is why Sarkozy has been attacked as “an American neo-conservative with a French passport.” But this too is untrue. Sarkozy is no ideologue, and whatever one may say about the Washington neo-conservatives they were, and remain, faithful to their “exporting democracy” ideology, their neo-Wilsonianism, and their market capitalism dogma.
Sarkozy is not an intellectual or theorist, least of all an ideologue. He is a 52-year-old man with an ambition: to become president of the French Republic. He is an outsider, whose father was a Hungarian who became a refugee at the end of the war in order to avoid being picked up by the Communist authorities as a class enemy, since his family belonged to the minor aristocracy. In Germany he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion but (according to his biographer, Catherine Nay), when transferred to France for advanced training, he deserted, and went to Paris, where he fell in with the Hungarian diaspora.
There he met Sarkozy’s mother, daughter of a physician and granddaughter of a Jewish immigrant (at age 14) from Salonika in Greece, who had eventually converted to Catholicism to please his French wife. Nicolas’ parents were married in 1950. A son, Guillaume, was born in 1951, Nicolas in 1955, and a third son in 1959, but after that the father moved on to other alliances and adventures.
Nicolas Sarkozy grew up the classic outsider, a fatherless foreigner whose two brothers were taller and better in school than he was. He later said, “I was fashioned by the humiliations of childhood.” He decided very early to become the president of France.
As many French writers have said, he is a Balzacian figure, the adventurer devoured by ambition who makes his way to the city and by superlative drive and tireless energy arrives at the very brink of his dreamed-for success. He could as easily be a man of the left as of the right. His allegiance is to success.
William Pfaff
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William PFAFF-Portrait of Nicolas Sarkozy - Columns - News
Now that he has been elected i can post this portrait
