Nicolas Sarkozy
Testimony: France in the Twenty-first Century
Pantheon, 272 pages, $24.95
For Nicolas Sarkozy, it has always been a question of
destiny to become President of France. His belief in himself
is absolute, and seemingly not far misplaced. As minister
for finance and then home affairs, he proved a politician
whose intelligence was equal to his ambition. Jacques
Chirac, the incumbent president these past twelve years,
promoted him at first, only to perceive him with a jealous
eye as a more gifted rival who should not be allowed to
succeed him in the Elysée Palace. No holds barred either: Sarkozy
was accused of holding an illicit account in a Luxembourg
bank, but the evidence for this smear had obviously been
forged, implicating some of the highest in the land. The
scandal is currently being hushed-up, in the way the French
are used to dealing with nastiness of the kind. In the event,
Sarkozy was elected President handsomely, on a high
turn-out, and he also has a large parliamentary majority.
France is his to do what he wants with it.
Sarkozy is among the few recent Presidents who is not a
graduate of the elite schools that train the French
governing class. A first-generation Frenchman, he is the son
of an Hungarian émigré with dubious aristocratic pretensions.
To have a Jewish grandparent, furthermore, is no asset in
today’s France. Challengingly, he is on record offering
opinions about the United States, and even the free market,
that can be taken as fairly well-disposed even though
carefully qualified for his voters. A believer in activism
for its own sake, imp-like, he races everywhere with a
slightly manic grin on his face, and a Blairite conviction
in his powers of persuasion. A rather comic debate arose
about whether his habit of jogging is too undignified for a
President. Marital to-ing and fro-ing with his wife Cécilia
also makes him seem a great deal more human than the weirdly
aloof and bombastic men who have preceded him in the
Presidency.
But what is to be done with France? Innumerable books and
op-ed articles by the best brains available posit national
decline and an identity crisis. Immobility stems from two
iron-clad sources, an all-encompassing welfare state and the
extra protectionism enshrined in the European Union.
Originally manipulated by the French for the purpose of
giving them a hold over Germany, the EU has now grown into
an empire, as its current Portuguese President boasts. No
longer sovereign, the component nation-states are colonies
locked into industrial, financial, social, and legal
straitjackets from which they cannot escape. The outcome
was not anticipated. According to measurements of
productivity, exports, and indebtedness, France has been
slipping down crucial statistical tables, while
correspondingly rising on tables of taxation and
unemployment. Having had enough of it, the electorate voted
against the treaty designed to give the EU its final
imperial structure.
The demographic plight is even more alarming. Like other
European nations, the French are not reproducing themselves.
To sustain population, a nation needs 2.1 children per
family—the present rate in France is 1.89. Moreover the
native French are being replaced by Muslims who have a far
higher birth rate and already account for a third of total
births, according to some estimates. Again according to
estimates, Muslims number some six million, or one in ten of
the population, enough to suggest that a bi-
national state is in the making. Mark Steyn dramatized this future
unforgettably when he said, “the only question is how bloody
the transfer of real estate will be.”
Apparently either unable or unwilling to assimilate, the
Muslims live for the most part in ghettoes, virtually no-go
areas as though under some strange civil version of sharia
law. Just over eighteen months ago, two teenagers jumped
over the fence of a generating station and were
electrocuted. Instant rioting in over 300 cities and towns
revealed the depth of the racial tension. Official figures
state that in the course of 2005 an astonishing 110,206
incidents of urban violence were recorded, mostly taking the
form of attacks on the police, and setting fire to public
institutions and private cars. Sarkozy at the time defined
the rioters by the general term of racaille, or scum; by
and large the authorities refrained from spelling out the
role played by Muslims. Rule by emergency decree was in
operation for weeks. Subsequently a proposal to make a
small but sensible change in employment law for the young
was enough to galvanize the unions, bring out the mob, and
enforce yet another government humiliation.
The demographic deficit has been growing for four or five
decades, but the stagnation and the rage alike are the
special legacy of Jacques Chirac. Preoccupied with French
standing in the world, he deployed his energies to build a
coalition with Russia, Germany, and the Arab world.
Opposition to American foreign policy was the sole feature
common to these powers, but that was enough, and Chirac
gloried in it. No amount of murder and terror could disturb
his support for Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat.
Essentially an unimaginative man, he left urgent domestic
issues to take care of themselves—politics for him has
been all about intrigue and place and money. Thus a miasma
of corruption at home and abroad envelops him, all the more
putrid since he had the law changed to remove himself beyond
the reach of accountability. No previous President, not even
de Gaulle, has been so thoroughly Bourbon.
Testimony is the book published in Sarkozy’s name for
electoral purposes. To judge from its contents, he may well
have neither written nor read it. “To build and to
love… . The primary mission of a politician is to give
hope… . I love our nation.” Change, clean breaks, dreams,
action, remaking, new—such vote-for-me guff, tricked out
page after page with a forest of exclamation marks, is
embarrassing, mortifying.
In contrast, what has he actually done? With political
brilliance, he has scuppered the opposing Socialists by
poaching a number of their best people, for instance
appointing Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without
Borders, to the Foreign Ministry. No real enemies remain
either to the Left or to the Right. Cartoonists depict him
as Tsarkozy or Napoleon. His prime minister is relegated to
a mere managerial role. In his cabinet, Sarkozy has more
than the regulation number of women and minority
representatives (though one of them turns out to have two
brothers accused of drug-dealing).
At Brussels, he has
lobbied successfully for French protectionism, in particular
permission to break the budgetary rules. The French may have
voted against the EU treaty, but thanks to him and
Frau Merkel, the German Chancellor, it is business as usual,
and there is no need to pay attention to anything so
fleeting as a negative referendum. Like everybody else, the
French are going to get the treaty just the same, though as
a sweetener for them he has managed to have removed a
commitment to the market and “free and undistorted
competition,” the very feature held in France to be the
essence of Anglo-Saxon capitalist horror. In regard to the
United States, he emphasizes that the Iraq campaign is a
“historic mistake,” and France would not be “submissive.”
Indeed he asks his American friends “to let us be free, free
to be their friends,” implying that they cannot be friends
as things now stand. Refusing to condemn Hezbollah as a
terrorist organization and a state within a state, he has
invited its leaders to a conference on Lebanon. A
characteristic rumor then spread that the Israelis might
take them hostage in exchange for the two soldiers whose
abduction by Hezbollah sparked off the war of 2006.
Sarkozy’s presidency will depend ultimately on how he
interprets that word racaille, which comes down to whether a
way can be found to integrate the six million Muslims; and
if not, what happens then. Otherwise, Testimony
notwithstanding, it looks as if he is turning into a French
President like any other, only more hectic.