Sarkozy’s magic fading away

The French presidential election campaign has already started. And there's a lot of mudslinging on the front pages of newspapers. Hardly had former prime minister Dominique de Villepin been cleared from any wrongdoing in the ‘Clearstream Affair' than French-Lebanese ‘repenti' Robert Bourji (like former members of the Mafia cooperating with the justice department) was explaining to everybody that he had spent most of his life delivering suitcases full of African cash to former president Jacques Chirac, and politicians like Villepin and others.

Nobody believed him. Not because of the cash, of course, but because he said he was ‘sincere' and was not ‘manipulated by the Elysée Palace', where his friend President Nicholas Sarkozy would have put an end, he said, to such practices. He just wanted to ‘clean his soul'.

Alas, another Lebanese-born intermediary, Ziad Takkiedine, was singing another tune just a few days later, about the so-called ‘Karachi affair' (an arms deal between France and Pakistan in which part of the commissions paid would have been sent back to France to finance the campaign of former prime minister Edouard Balladur). Two of Balladur's closest aides were formally indicted whereas Sarkozy's people claimed the president knew nothing about the deal (he was Balladur's official spokesman during the campaign against Chirac). But former interior minister and Sarkozy's close friend, Brice Hortefeux, at the same time, was having more than suspicious conversations with one of those indicted; he did not know his telephone was being tapped. "They know everything!" he said about the judges.

The way it is going, it won't be necessary to watch American sitcoms these coming eight months to get entertained.

Meanwhile, Europe is in the doldrums. British Prime Minister David Cameron turns more and more to the Wild West and Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi spends his time between sessions in tribunals and bunga-bunga parties. Nothing unusual for a man who is only "half-time on the job", as he recently said in a taped conversation. France and Germany alone would thus be ‘keeping the shop'. Both countries indeed seem to be led by shopkeepers, as former chancellor Helmut Kohl recently said.

Half of the German government explains why Greece should be rescued whereas the other half talks about why it should not. The European Central Bank wonders whether it should buy Italian sovereign bonds and the EU if it should issue Eurobonds. Meanwhile, more than half of German exports go to countries in the Eurozone. And nobody seriously believes that Greece will ever be able to reimburse its debt with negative growth of 6 per cent. But what about the political project?

As for France, Sarkozy who is "not [yet?] a candidate", goes on about his ‘presidential status'. Hence a trip to Libya where he was hailed by a crowd of 1,500 and gave a De Gaulle-like speech. And he also undertook a mission to the UN for the sake of his American and Israeli friends, whereby Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was supposed to accept that the only way for Palestinians to get a state is to negotiate — with people who don't want to negotiate with him!

Slightly pathetic

All this could prove slightly pathetic; it seems Sarkozy doesn't realise that French people find him unbearable. A recent problem Sarkozy faced was the loss of his majority in the Senate. For the first time since its inception in 1958, the Senate is now Socialist. Why did the Senate go left? Because, some claim, of technical reasons, a succession of previously lost country elections (Senators are elected in turn by local representatives) and badly thought out local administrative reforms.

Yet, many even in his own camp say that Sarkozy and his team do not fully appreciate the degree of rejection they now provoke in the French population. It may be irrational or unfair, but it is a fact which is confirmed every passing day (incidentally, many of those who were elected from the UMP were the party's ‘dissidents' — meaning that they officially defected from the president's party although maintaining the same political line). And there is obviously no Plan B to Sarkozy, at least at this stage, especially following Centrist wonder boy Jean-Louis Borloo's decision not to run.

Actually, because of promises he could not respect, because of Sarkozy's somewhat irritating - not to mention inappropriate — behaviour, people seem to discover that over the years, they have been the victims of a kind of manipulation. As an additional example, 79 per cent of French people in a recent poll said that "Sarkozy was not sincere when declaring he had nothing to do with the Karachi black money affair". His impulsive and arrogant style could have been tolerated were he successful. But it has not been the case and the Titanic travels on the same route, with a crew denying reality. "Be curious, not judgmental", Walt Whitman said. He is still right but for sure the magic is gone.

Luc Debieuvre is a French essayist and a lecturer at IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques) and the FACO Law University of Paris.