Illustration: Hugo A. Sanchez/Gulf News
It wasn’t the most auspicious start to a campaign. Some 79 per cent of French voters said they don’t want to see Nicolas Sarkozy in the Elysee Palace again, in a poll taken immediately after he announced last week that he was standing for president in 2017. But it would still be wrong to write off the man variously described as a liar, a crook, a demagogue, a racist, a vulgarian and the “poison dwarf of the Republic”.
It was pure coincidence that Sarkozy made his announcement on the day French attempts to ban the burkini caught the world’s attention. Yet, he couldn’t have planned it better himself. At a time when the French see their cultural and political traditions behind this ban (which has broad bipartisan support) being ridiculed around the world, they are more-than-willing to listen to a politician arguing for more, not less assimilation of French Muslims into the French nation. The French have been brutally hit by terrorism in the last few years: Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice.
By and large they’ve responded with commendable coolness to slaughter. They marched; they carried “Je Suis Ahmad” signs, after the policeman, Ahmad Merabet, was slain in front of the Charlie offices. In between those spectaculars, the nation was subjected to the drip-drip-drip of dozens of “smaller” attacks. Cars running into crowds in provincial cities. A factory director beheaded by an employee in Savoie. A woman and her small daughters stabbed in Gard. Muslim and non-Muslim girls roughed up in the streets because they wouldn’t wear headscarves.
A Muslim waitress in Nice severely beaten because she was serving customers during Ramadan. Most recently, Belgian tourists and local children stoned on a Corsican beach for the offence of taking pictures. Media reports were always cagey: It usually took a couple of days to find out who the assailants were and that, yes, they had, in fact, shouted variations of “Allahu Akbar”.
The recent shock of the murder, in a church, of Father Jacques Hamel, his throat slit by a radicalised local boy from a seemingly assimilated family, has finally hardened French opinion. People now demand firm answers at the very moment when two national newspapers and a news channel decided they would no longer publish the pictures and give the names of perpetrators of such attacks. Many saw this as one more proof that their betters wanted to hide things from them.
So in comes Sarkozy, with a new book-cum-manifesto where he defends the notion of a “French identity”, the need for a broad national agreement on the principles of the Republic and the necessity to restore both public peace and public order. He is greeted by jeers from the media. His many gaffes are recalled. His love of bling, his rough manner, his 2012 defeat, his lucrative conferences abroad. And sure enough, his ratings fall. And yet to those conservative voters he needs to woo to win the November Right and Centrist Primary, this may be something of an asset. There’s no little irony in seeing a former president running as an outsider: In today’s climate, the ostracism by Sarkozy’s Right-wing rivals and the media is a strength. He is almost the only candidate, on the Right as on the Left, not to have attended ENA, the elite government graduate school, whose supercilious, technocratic ways are universally loathed in France.
His opponents have tried to paint Sarkozy as a racist and a xenophobe, but this is hard to pin on him. Both, his father — an aristocratic Hungarian emigre — and his maternal grandfather — a Jew from Salonika — chose to be French and raised him in the admiration of the country’s universal values and traditions. When Sarkozy excoriates the attitudes of those refusing French identity, while benefiting from the advantages of citizenship, then trying to change French society from their exogenous point of view, this resonates. It would be tempting to see echoes of Donald Trump in France, but Sarkozy is a gifted, experienced politician.
In the two-plus years, he’s been the president of Les Republicains, he’s reorganised a party in disarray, and had been campaigning in the provinces at the rate of three or four rallies a week for the past 18 months, nearly unreported. In fact, the quiet Sarkozy resurrection is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s 1966 first Californian gubernatorial campaign. The hard core of Sarko followers are fired up and he lags only by two points behind the 72-year-old former premier Alain Juppe, only recently seen as certain to win the Right’s presidential nomination. He’s winning significant political support, even from MPs and mayors who’d openly declared for Juppe. Sarkozy will remain the Marmite candidate to the end, both loved and hated. But he articulates what the French are thinking, and if he runs against Marine Le Pen or Francois Hollande (assuming the latter wins the Socialist primary in January), he will win.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2016
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a columnist with the Daily Telegraph, Weekly Standard and Newsweek.
