Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

How Nicolas Sarkozy got it wrong

From immigration to tax breaks, the self-obsessive 'president of the rich' made a series of errors on policy and personal image


Graffiti outside a French courthouse reads 'Sarkozy get out!'
Photograph: CHESNOT/SIPA/EPA

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris Sunday 6 May 2012 14.55 EDT

The writing was on the wall for Nicolas Sarkozy as early as March when pelted eggs slid down the windows of the Palais bar in the Basque town of Bayonne as he waited inside, calling in riot police to rescue him and ensure his safe exit. On the narrow street outside the bar, crowds, including Basque militants, were shouting "Sarkozy out!" and "Sod off Sarko". It showed a different French reality to the highly stage-managed public appearances Sarkozy had made as president, greeted by hand-picked supporters behind police barriers. It was also a far cry from Sarkozy's strongman glory days of his triumphal 2007 presidential campaign where he rode a white horse called Universe around the Camargue while wearing a checked cowboy shirt and Aviator shades.

During this election race, Sarkozy told a magazine if there was victory his whole team would have contributed to it. "But if there's failure, I'll be the only one responsible."

Earlier, he'd talked of politics as a drug, warning: "You have to withdraw the needle slowly." Behind the showmanship of his final rallies, the record-breakingly unpopular president had seemed tired, irritable and down. Even before he began his difficult re-election fight, he told journalists off the record, as he puffed a cigarette and not his usual cigars, how he had contemplated the possibility of losing.

Sarkozy is the 11th European leader to be ejected since the economic crisis. But the irony is that he was not booted out directly because of it. The eurozone crisis was paradoxically one of the only ways he could have won the election, selling himself as Super Sarko, an international firefighter and problem-solver, protecting France. That was the message of his election posters which featured his portrait against the sea: Captain Courage in a storm. But instead of vaunting his crisis-busting skills or even leadership in the intervention in Libya, he chose to pour his energies into veering hard-right in a crusade against immigration and halal meat, blaming Islam for the troubles in French society, and claiming to protect the Christian roots of Europe. Much of this harked back to his ill-fated far-right flirtations in office, from his controversial ministry of immigration and national identity, which he eventually abandoned, to a speech blaming Roma for crime in France and dismantling their camps.

Sarkozy's courtship of the far right ultimately failed. By bringing the favourite topics of the Front National into the mainstream, namely immigration and fear of Islam, he served only to strengthen its leader, Marine Le Pen. He also dented his own legacy, leaving himself for the time being remembered in French minds not for what he defined as his bullishness in defending France abroad, or for reforms such as lowering the pension age, but for a divisive, stigmatising campaign that even some in his own camp privately felt was repulsive.

Sunday's vote was a personal referendum on Sarkozy. At the start of his mandate, he was briefly the most popular president since Charles de Gaulle; then he plummeted to record lows for four years and festered there. Rejection of the "president of the rich" was not just about his ostentatious vaunting of money – celebrating his 2007 win at a flash restaurant with the nation's richest people and borrowing a millionaire's yacht when he had promised to retreat to a monastery. It was not just about unpresidential manners – sending text messages during an audience with the pope, saying "Sod off, you prat" to a man who refused to shake his hand at an agricultural fair or parading his first public date with Carla Bruni at Disneyland weeks after his high-profile divorce.

All this combined with a feeling of betrayal and disappointment at his record in office after he had promised to transform France to its core. Sarkozy had vowed to be the president who restored the values of work and reward, but he left France with 1 million more unemployed people and millions who struggled to make ends meet. The rich got richer on the back of his tax breaks for them, and France had a growing sense of injustice and doublespeak. Before the election, polls showed that 64% of French people were unhappy with Sarkozy and viewed his record in office as negative. Crucially, a majority felt he had never intended to keep his promises to France.

Sarkozy said the only thing that would win or lose him the election was authenticity. But sincerity was a problem on the stump. What was Sarkozyism, analysts wondered. It appeared to have no fixed ideology but was more about a style of frenetic "hyperpresidency" making constant zig-zagging, contrasting announcements, bending with the wind in order to cling to power. In office, Sarkozy had vowed to lead an "irreproachable republic" – then allowed his student son to be put forward to run La Defense, Europe's biggest purpose-built business district. "In the end, his problem was that he put himself first, and at the centre of everything," said one banker who did not vote for him.

The question is what Sarkozy does next. "I will have had a great life in politics," he said last week. "I'll do something else. I don't know what." He had previously said he wanted to make money in the private sector. But the first pressing issue will be the justice system and whether, when Sarkozy loses his presidential immunity, he is called to testify to judges investigating allegations of illegal campaign funding. A high-profile investigation is ongoing into whether the L'Oréal billionaire Liliane Bettencourt handed envelopes of cash to Sarkozy's treasurer, party members or even Sarkozy himself to illegally fund his last presidential campaign. Another investigation is examining allegations that kickbacks from French arms sales to Pakistan in the early 1990s secretly funded the failed presidential campaign of Sarkozy's mentor Édouard Balladur. Sarkozy was his campaign spokesman. Sarkozy has denied involvement in either case but has yet to give his version of events.

During five years in office, Sarkozy was omnipresent and laid himself bare: for the first time a French president revealed his body, posing for cameras dripping with sweat, or running up the steps of the Elysée in gym wear. He paraded his private life like never before. The psychoanalyst Serge Hefez wrote a book, Obsessive Sarkosis, about the extent to which Sarkozy had got under French people's skins, into their dreams and minds. "I'm sick of his face, of even hearing about him," said one leftwing voter outside a polling station.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/06/french-elections-2012-nicolas-sarkozy-failure