TALK IS CHIC:

Solutions for Grandeur: Nicolas Sarkozy has become the most popular French politician by diving headfirst into the country’s most explosive political issues. If he has his way, this hyperactive, pro-American, Gaullist, free marketer will transform French politics for good. (Marc Perelman, July 2005, Foreign Policy)

Over the past three years, Sarkozy has become one of France’s most popular politicians by pushing reform, fighting crime, talking straight, and injecting progressive ideas into the ruling center-right party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). A politician who often runs against the grain, Sarkozy has challenged his fellow citizens’ views on immigration, social welfare, and tax relief, and told them that, in some cases, France should look abroad for its inspiration to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Britain and, yes, even President George W. Bush’s America. His emergence has breathed new life into France’s ossified political landscape where the same leaders have been holding sway for decades. And his ultimate ambition couldn’t be more clear: The 50-year-old politician, whose boyish energy and penchant for fidgeting has earned him the nickname “Speedy,” is hoping that French voters will show a California-like openness and make him France’s next president. Indeed, in 2003, he broke with French tradition by openly declaring his presidential ambitions and igniting a feud with his mentor, President Jacques Chirac. When I asked him about his political coming-out in a country where discretion is often preferred to ambition, he threw his arms up in the air: “What can I say? I’m ambitious. It’s true. Should I pretend otherwise?” [...]

Traditionalists who decry Sarkozy’s style see deeper danger in his substance: a pro-American free marketer who threatens to undermine not only France’s economic model but also the secular fabric of French society. “I don’t have a reference book in which I will find the solution to all problems,” Sarkozy says. “I try to be pragmatic and efficient. Maybe in that sense I am Anglo-Saxon.”

Although he is careful to stress that he does not see eye-to-eye with President Bush on many issues, he is unabashedly pro-American. “I like America and the Americans a lot and I say it. Do I need help, doctor?” he quips, raising his eyebrows. “Some of my friends tell me not to talk about it so [loudly]. Why? I don’t get it.”

He expressed similar warm feelings in April 2004 when, in an obvious stab at the reviled Chirac, the Bush administration rolled out the red carpet for Sarkozy, who met with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell during his visit. Of course, he knows the dangers of appearing too close to a U.S. administration that has confirmed many of the worst French fears of what an American superpower could be. Several close associates say that although he supported France’s opposition to the war in Iraq, Sarkozy has privately said that Paris’s use of its veto threat at the U.N. Security Council in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. He has not crossed that line in public, however, out of respect for the president’s primacy in foreign policy and probably because he realizes the decision is one of the most popular Chirac has taken in years.

But, in many other ways, Sarkozy is taking a page out of the American playbook. To remedy France’s tepid growth, he has proposed lower taxes and a relaxation of the 35-hour workweek. His policy prescriptions, as well as long-standing personal ties to the country’s top CEOs, have earned him the trust of the business community. “He is one of the few French politicians for whom a business success story is not suspect,” says construction magnate Martin Bouygues, who is an old acquaintance.

Still, Sarkozy knows that advocating the streamlining of the comprehensive social welfare system that the French cherish is politically risky, if not suicidal. Part of the “no” vote was indeed driven by fears that a free-market-oriented EU would subsume the French welfare state. This is why Sarkozy used his short stint as finance minister last year to shed his “pro-market” image by supporting state intervention to help French companies. He is also careful to couch his pro-market discourse in moral terms, lamenting the lack of respect for “the France that wakes up early,” and the “sclerosis” that has kept the unemployment rate at around 10 percent for more than two decades.

Political opponents, of course, say such actions are cynical ploys.

That a reputedly iconoclastic firebrand is terrified to be seen as actually proposing to change the current welfare state tells you all you need to know about France's future: it has none.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 4, 2005 9:03 AM