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With Friends Like These...
Jacques Chirac is helping Ségolène Royal become president. Why?
As we reported a week ago, Jacques Chirac is considering a crack at a third term as France's president. Only a tiny number of French people - and an even smaller slice of his own party's membership - would like the old anti-warhorse to run again. However, as the Independent reports, Chirac has come to believe that only a "grandfather figure" has any chance of saving France from Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal.
With the Socialist's campaign to choose a candidate for the presidential election next April over without degenerating into the unseemly brawl many of us had predicted (or hoped for), all eyes have turned to the ruling UMP party. Up to recently, party leader Nicolas Sarkozy has been the champion of the centre-right. Opinion polls still suggest any other centre-right candidate, whether Chirac, PM Dominique de Villepin or defence minister Michèle Alliot-Marie would be annihilated by Royal.
Sarkozy's UMP opponents are small in number but include France's two most important figures - the Prime Minister and the President.
So why oppose Sarkozy? Chirac loathes the popular interior minister for having "betrayed" him in an earlier election, throwing his lot in with a rival candidate. Villepin dislikes Sarkozy's bruising manner and claims that his pronouncements on young hoodlums and positive discrimination are un-republican. His positive remarks about America and his call for a "rupture" with the past raise concerns that Sarkozy has worryingly liberal tendencies. Both men, however, realise that they needed Sarkozy to govern, thanks to his support both in the streets and among their UMP colleagues.
There are other wobbles in the UMP, though. Sarkozy's tough line has made him a hate figure on the left and among youngsters in particular. One strand of the left's tactics has been to turn Sarko's self-proclaimed outsider status against him, making him seem like an extremist from the fringes of right-wing politics, virtually indistinguishable from far-right demagogue Jean Marie Le Pen. Sarkozy, they believe, is even more dangerous because he stands a chance of winning next spring.
Does the UMP want to run with a candidate the left and its sympathisers in the media are painting as a dangerous, divisive figure?
If not, they are leaving it rather late. Sarkozy is expected to announce his candidacy this week. The Independent reports that Michèle Alliot-Marie might run against him as a "ceremonial" opponent, with the promise of a top job should Sarkozy win in Spring.
Chirac himself will announce his decision in the New Year. Meanwhile, the UMP is looking increasingly divided, and mutterings from Villepin and Chirac's camp lend fuel to those on the left who are eager to damage Sarkozy.
Without Sarkozy, the right has very little chance of winning the presidency next year. Do Chirac and his team really hate Sarkozy so much they are willing to throw the 2007 race to the left, rather than let him run? Charles Bremner in the Times writes on how Chirac has "previous" in the shadowy field of backstabbing politics.
Others have noted that Chirac's interest in running again in 2007 is motivated by the desire to stay out of court. If out of office, he loses the presidential immunity from investigation he granted himself on assuming power. Several of France's top judges would dearly like to have M Chirac answer questions related to his time as Paris mayor.
EURSOC raised the possibility in June that Chirac might dedicate his last months in office manoeuvring for a guarantee he would not face prosecution. Might that come in the shape of a Royal Pardon? Sarkozy would be accused of protecting UMP interests if he granted Chirac lifetime immunity: Ségo, however, could pass it off as the forgiving act of a uniting president.
And would it be a conspiracy too far to note that anything Chirac does to undermine Sarkozy, helps Royal?
