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Getting Sarkozy
Son of Sarko
Nicolas Sarkozy's son, Jean (21) is proving to be a chip off the old block. It looks like he has positioned himself on the list for the council elections for the rich Paris suburb of Neuilly, his father's old power base. And, in doing so, he stabbed a former ally in the back.
Sarkozy Junior led a revolt among centre-right UMP supporters against the President's handpicked candidate for the post of Mayor of Neuilly, David Martinon. Martinon, who is close to the President's ex-wife Cécilia and has served as Sarkozy's press spokesman, was "parachuted" into Neuilly as a candidate last year. However, he has proved to be such a dud that voters in the solidly conservative town have considered the unthinkable and selecting another candidate.
Enter young Jean Sarkozy. The golden-locked student (one of Sarkozy's sons from his first marriage) was one of the first to "break rank" and declare Martinon's candidacy unacceptable. An alternative UMP list now replaces Martinon, who has bowed out of the race.
Will Jean follow his father into politics? It's a little early for him to run for Mayor: His father won the job in 1983 aged 28. In an interesting parallel, Nicolas nipped into the post after outwitting a bunch of party heavyweights and persuading them to back him, rather than his boss Charles Pasqua who had fallen ill.
"I screwed them all", he is reported to have said afterwards.
Covering the Sarkozy Saga is often a toughie for foreign observers. For some reason, France has been the subject of much wishful thinking by US and British commentators over the past five years. On one hand, there are those who imagine Sarkozy to be a Gallic Mrs Thatcher, prepared to turn France on its head in the name of economic reform. On the other, bewildered bloggers predict France's imminent demise at the hands of jihadis, Communists or conservatives. There's always a certain amount of schadenfreund in some of these comments, a weird glee that France is going down the plughole any day now.
And yet we're still here. Journalists often betray their prejudices when writing about Sarkozy. He represents a busy industry which horrifies reporters more drawn to France's traditional sedate pace. His unabashed right-wing views infuriate hacks who imagine France to be one of the few remaining oases of socialism.
Very few get Sarkozy and what he represents. One is The Independent's John Lichfield, who in a wide-ranging and balanced piece on the President's antics over the past month, looks at his positives as well as negatives, and investigates how he might regain lost ground.
Lichfield praises Sarkozy's claims for the need for a new "politics of civilisation", designed not to replace economic growth as a measurement of success but to bring in other factors, such as environmental impact and quality of life. Of course, France is making new rules here to ensure it clambers up the list, but he has undeniably captured something of the zeitgeist.
Lichfield is less convinced by the President's plans to put Christian morality at centre-stage in public life again, but once again Sarkozy has captured the public mood. New Europeans in central and eastern Europe aren't as determinedly secular as their western counterparts, and even in western Europe, there has been something of a revival of interest and sympathy for Christian culture (much of it as a reaction to bullying atheists and multiculturalists pushing Islam into the public sphere).
The municipal elections, in which Sarkozy's centre right grouping is expected to be roundly duffed, take place in four weeks. Sarkozy's actions - and behaviour - over the next month will be closely scrutinised by voters between now and then. After that, there's the question of how the public warms to the President's new wife, Carla Bruni. Here's Lichfield's interesting and wise conclusion:
"All eyes will be on him and the new Mme Sarkozy when they make their first big state visit, on 26 March, to Britain. Of the two, it is perhaps France's First Lady who is less likely to do, or say, something disconcerting or embarrassing. A failed Sarkozy presidency would be a calamity, and not just for France. He sold himself to the French people as the energetic, pragmatic, democratic antidote to the extremes of both right and left. Except possibly the Prime Minister, M. Fillon, there is no obvious alternative to M. Sarkozy in the rest of the moderate French democratic landscape – on the right or the left."
