There are few more improbable places from which to start a revolution than the Casino de Paris, a late 19th-century music hall where Maurice Chevalier, Josephine Baker and Zizi Jeanmaire once strutted their stuff. Thanks to a popular campaign led by a French-Italian actress, Annie Girardot, it narrowly escaped the developers’ wrecking ball, to be reinvented as an edgy-ish concert venue at the turn of the 21st century. Perhaps it is hoped that the newly revamped Casino will serve as a clever metaphor for Nicolas Sarkozy’s political career: At any rate, the appearance of France’s former president there, on November 22, upstaged his very willing wife, Carla Bruni, for the first of her three shows. Slipping, supposedly inconspicuously, into a stall seat after everyone else had sat down, but before the lights went out and the music started, Sarkozy drew a roaring blast of applause, renewed at the intermission and during those songs Carla wrote just for him. “Nicolas, reviens!” his fans screamed in the hall, while a tanned, relaxed Sarkozy signed autographs smiling a lot and saying very little. The feeling, said concert-goers, was that of his 2007 victorious campaign, rather than a defeated politician’s private outing. “His arrival was timed to perfection — at every show. And the entourage was watching out for him,” one said. “Well, you don’t expect Carla’s audience to be anti-Sarkozy anyway.” Coming, as it did, two weeks after a flattering television documentary on his 2012 campaign, in which he appeared as a loving husband, doting father and all-round domestic paragon, this was a second testing of the public waters by a very cagey Sarkozy, intent on toning down the personal image that cost him his job a year-and-a-half-ago.
The personal has always been political, in France as elsewhere; but never more than for the most polarising president of the Fifth Republic. A series of costly mistakes, starting the very evening of his election with a VIP dinner organised at Le Fouquet’s, a luxury restaurant on the Champs-Elysees, which was amplified by a short cruise on a billionaire friend’s yacht before his inauguration, stamped Sarkozy indelibly as “the bling president”, “friend to the rich”. Cellphone cameras did the rest, unhelpfully capturing his brusque, demotic style (“Get lost, you sad b---d”, he famously told a heckler at the Paris Agricultural Fair).
When Sarkozy lost to the bland Francois Hollande last year, the feeling was that most of the 565,534 voters he lacked to win had been turned off by his personality, or their perception of it. Sarkozy, rightly as it transpired, predicted during the campaign that Hollande would not be up to the job, but even he could not have expected France’s seventh Fifth Republic president to be breaking new unpopularity records every week.
In private, Sarko is scathing and agitated as he describes the “mess” Hollande is making of France. From the rising unemployment to the tax revolt, and above all to the skyrocketing poll figures of Marine Le Pen’s Front National (FN) — Polling Vox reported yesterday that an astonishing 42 per cent of the French “do not discount the possibility of voting for the FN” at the March municipal elections — Sarkozy feels that irreparable damage is being done. He also feels that he, Sarko, could fix it. In 2007, he would remind you, he had managed to beat Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father and the FN founder, down to 10.44 per cent, a quarter-century low. Less than a month later, FN candidates had been crushed in the general elections, polling a grand total of 4.3 per cent of votes. But that was then.
Now, all major parties are similarly rejected by crisis-battered voters, who do not believe any of them can change things for the better. Taxes started rising sharply in the last two years of Sarkozy’s term, as the economic crisis bit. And Sarkozy talked tough on immigration, but did less than voters would like. There was a time when Sarkozy, in full “hate the sin, love the sinner” mode, had managed to lure back potential Front voters, convincing them that he felt their pain and had better solutions for them than the Le Pens pere et fille (father and daughter). But that time may very well have passed for good. So, the old faithful who turned out at the Casino de Paris aside, can Sarkozy convince the rest of the French that he is born-again, experienced yet changed, softer yet tougher, the only way out of the present doldrums? There may be more than three years to go, but for now, Hollande is getting nothing right; Sarkozy’s old acolytes on the Right are tearing themselves apart; and Marine Le Pen looms like Godzilla. It is, from Sarko’s peculiar vantage point, ideal.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2013
