The Sarkozy Phenomenon

The Sarkozy Phenomenon

Nick Hewlett

SOCIETAS

essays in political

& cultural criticism

imprint-academic.com

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Copyright © Nick Hewlett, 2011, 2017

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Other books by Nick Hewlett

Badiou, Balibar, Rancière. Re-thinking Emancipation, Continuum, 2007.

Democracy in Modern France, Continuum, 2003.

Modern French Politics. Conflict and Consensus since 1945, Polity, 1998.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank James Shields, David Lees and two anonymous readers for comments either on draft chapters of this book or on papers which influenced it. In particular, I wish to thank Emmanuel Godin for his careful and insightful reading of the whole draft manuscript and for his very helpful comments on it. The final version is, of course, my responsibility alone. (Translations from the French, unless otherwise indicated, are also my own.) I am also grateful to Anthony Freeman at Imprint Academic for his enthusiasm for the book from the start, to Rosalind Davies for her copy editing and to Jacqueline Speel for meticulous indexing. Earlier versions of parts of Chapter Two appeared in a book edited by Tony Chafer and Emmanuel Godin, entitled The End of the French Exception? (Palgrave, 2010) and in Modern and Contemporary France (XV: 4, Nov. 2007).

Thanks also to Gary Browning, for many conversations about many things, to my children Emily and Gus, who have many thought-provoking ideas of their own, and to Bridget Taylor for putting up with constant reports on the day-to-day progress of my work.

This book is dedicated to my friends in France, whose generosity and friendship over many years have been important for me personally and also valuable in enabling a better understanding of France and French politics.

Nick Hewlett

January 2011

Abbreviations

Pour mes amis en France

1. Introduction

I’ll be a president like Louis de Funès in Le Grand Restaurant: servile with the powerful, insufferable with the weak. I love it.

Nicolas Sarkozy, 16 February 2007 (quoted in Jeudy and Vigogne, 2007: 152)

From time to time, in one country or another, national political leaders emerge who offer themselves as vehicles for profound transformation, making it clear that they wish to change significantly the direction in which their country is travelling. In order for such individuals to achieve high office and to have a significant influence on the course of the political, social and economic life of a country, personal characteristics are of course important; in addition to being hungry for power, they are often hard-working, have well-honed oratory skills and charm. But personal characteristics alone are never sufficient for the success of such individuals. The circumstances in which they are operating must also be favourable to their project and, crucially, the leader must have the support of powerful groups both in politics and in the rest of society as well. Just as importantly, other groups who oppose the leader must be in sufficient disarray that they are unable to garner enough support to prevent the leader and their supporters from achieving substantial power and carrying out their wishes. The modern governmental history of France is peppered with heads of state whose rule may aptly be described as personalised, authoritarian and populist. The latest such example, Nicolas Sarkozy, has thus been likened to Charles de Gaulle, Philippe Pétain, Napoleon III and Napoleon I.

When Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president of the republic on 6 May 2007 France entered a decidedly new phase in national politics. We saw the victory of a candidate with the image of a tough, innovative leader apparently prepared to say the previously unsayable and to embrace drastic measures with open arms where this was deemed necessary for the good of the nation. He had made it clear from the start of his campaign that he did not wish to be seen as a mere representative of the centre-right, which three previous presidents after de Gaulle, arguably, had been. These were Georges Pompidou (from 1969 to 1974), Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974–81) and Jacques Chirac (1995–2007). Rather, Sarkozy placed great emphasis on himself as a special individual who had a mission to break with the past and do something decidedly different. Thus, despite having held three key ministerial positions under President Chirac and despite having had a substantial influence on important aspects of the Chirac presidency, one of his most-used campaigning words in 2007 was the French rupture. France needed to break, he argued, with years of economic stagnation, social strife and a lacklustre image on the international stage. The country needed to be jolted into a process of modernisation and he was elected with a mandate to make profound changes, as someone who, as he says at the very beginning of his autobiography, wants to be seen as a man who gets things done: ‘I’ve always wanted to take action’ (Sarkozy 2006: 1).

Certainly, it was clear that Sarkozy sought to be identified with a tough, law and order agenda, and during his two stints as Minister of the Interior under President Chirac he had already established a track record as precisely this. It was also evident that he wished to steer France in a more market-oriented direction than had been the case previously. This conformed with his position as a right-wing leader of the early twenty-first century in one of the most economically successful nations on earth by conventional criteria (although it is often not conceived as such). But Sarkozy was also a maverick and was not content with limiting himself to a mainstream right-wing policy agenda and there were also frequent references to left-oriented sources of inspiration, such as the Socialist leaders Léon Blum and Jean Jaurès and the communist resister Guy Môquet, who was executed by the Nazis in Châteaubriant in October 1941 at the age of seventeen. Moreover, Sarkozy’s election manifesto and campaign speeches time and again emphasised the importance of rewarding hard work on the part of ordinary people and promised to raise standards of living for all. Nevertheless, precisely what Sarkozy planned to do once in office was not clear, as both his campaign and manifesto were an idiosyncratic mix of determined statements of intent which, when all these statements were put together, lacked coherence and certainly did not amount to a strategy. It was clear both from the election campaign and from the immediate aftermath of the election that what Sarkozy wanted most was a personal mandate which would give him a degree of personal power that had not been seen since de Gaulle, who was president of the republic from 1958 to 1969. It was also clear that he would use this power to attempt to achieve far-reaching neo-liberal reform of the economy and a greater emphasis on law and order than had been seen for many years.

Sarkozy’s actual presidency has been no less extraordinary. His style and practice is indeed deeply autocratic and in his actions and words he wishes to make it clear that he and he alone holds supreme political authority. He seeks personal involvement in as many areas of policy-making as possible, often eclipsing the functions of the prime minister, whose own role in government has become less significant than it has been for many years. The president controls tightly what ministers do and say and demands absolute loyalty. Close advisors such as Claude Guéant and Henri Gaino are a dominant force and carefully control the image of Sarkozy and his regime as conveyed to the media and thus to the country as a whole. As soon as he became president - or hyperprésident as he was soon dubbed - he set about reforming in a large number of different areas with a zeal that was often in inverse proportion to the logic of the reforms. Indeed in a number of cases the planned changes came to naught, either through general bafflement as to their usefulness, their sheer unworkability, or determined opposition from the people they would most affect (e.g. Cahuc and Zylberberg 2009).

But in a number of other areas there have been significant reforms, including major changes to the constitution, taxation, conditions of work and pay, retirement age, public sector pensions, trade union representation, policing, universities, the health service and the judiciary. On the whole, the reforms were characteristic of a right-wing government of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. They tended to favour business and the wealthy at the expense of ordinary working people; to cut public expenditure and reduce the number of workers in the public sector; to restrict immigration and to reinforce state powers as far as law and order was concerned. This was certainly the main direction of the path taken by Sarkozy and his government, although the economic crisis derailed a number of measures and obliged government to introduce others. But there were, even in the early days, reforms which were less easy to place on the left-right spectrum and some that were more associated with a left-leaning agenda, including far-reaching reforms relating to the environment and climate change, or abolishing advertising on state-owned television channels, and the so-called HADOPI law which introduced new regulations regarding the internet and intellectual property. A maverick approach was also reflected in the nomination of certain ministers who were more associated with the left than the right, including former Parti socialiste (PS) members Bernard Kouchner as Foreign Minister and former PS national secretary Eric Besson as Minister for Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Development Solidarity. Martin Hirsch, former president of Emmaüs France, a charity working to combat poverty and homelessness, was appointed High Commissioner for Poverty Eradication, and Fadela Amara, former head of the well-known feminist organisation Ni putes, ni soumises (‘Neither whores nor submissives’, hereafter NPNS) as Junior Minister for Urban Regeneration. This much-trumpeted approach to government was known as ouverture, or ‘opening’ to non-strictly right-wing politicians.

In a clear break with tradition among French politicians, Sarkozy’s tumultuous private life not only became public knowledge but was analysed in detail by the national and (even more) by the international media, and this media attention was certainly at times used by the Sarkozy camp as a way of attempting to improve the president’s political fortunes. It often had the contrary effect, however. Cécilia Sarkozy, his wife at the time of his election as president, had been the subject of much discussion because she had already had an affair with a man in New York before returning to her husband in Paris. Soon after their move to the Elysée Palace Cécilia and Sarkozy separated and he began an intense and again very public liaison with the former model and successful singer Carla Bruni, and they married in February 2008. For many, this lively personal life confirmed the lack of substance which seemed increasingly to characterise the new French presidency, and older voters in particular (many of whom had voted for Sarkozy in spring 2007) became disillusioned. Such attention to Sarkozy’s private life certainly highlighted something new about his presidency beyond its undoubted trivialisation in some respects. Never before had a French politician relied so heavily on the media, with which Sarkozy had important business and personal ties, but partly because of intense media coverage of his every move, he quickly became unpopular. As early as February 2008 the new president was as unpopular as Chirac had been in February 1996 after the widespread strikes against labour reform in December 1995, with only 36 per cent of the French satisfied with Sarkozy as president (Le Monde 26.02.10). This was to prove to be a longer-term