BACK TO BURKE:

The Man Who Would Be le Président: Nicolas Sarkozy wants to wake up France. (Christopher Caldwell, 02/27/2006, Weekly Standard)

[Nicolas] Sarkozy has been a politician for most of his 51 years. He resembles Bill Clinton in that he leaves the impression that politics is the only thing he cares about really deeply; he resembles Ronald Reagan in that he seems to view politics as a battle between, on the one hand, hard-working people with on-the-ground knowledge of problems, and, on the other, vainglorious dispensers of official baloney, from academicians to columnists to "community leaders." Very few ministers of any description have visited the isolated and anomic banlieues that exploded in riots last fall. Sarkozy has been there dozens of times. As the minister of the interior, Sarkozy is responsible both for keeping order in the banlieues and for organizing France's religions, particularly the 5 million or so Muslims whom he has with difficulty shepherded into the French religion-and-state system, by means of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, which he launched two years ago.

When an 11-year-old boy was shot to death last spring while washing his father's car as a Father's Day present in the Cité des Quatre Mille housing project outside of Paris, Sarkozy promised to clean up the neighborhood "à Kärcher"--citing the trade name of a company that makes high-pressure hoses. While he was visiting Aulnay-sous-Bois at the height of the riots, a mother pleaded with him from a window to do something about the "low-lifes" (racaille) who were burning down the neighborhood. Sarkozy shouted back that he would, and used the word himself. To say that his impetuosity gets him in trouble, as the newspapers often do, is to miss the point. True, Sarkozy is a polarizer. The senior-circuit tennis player Yannick Noah, who--quite bizarrely--is one of the most quoted celebrities in France, allegedly told Paris Match last summer (the remark was never printed), "S'il passe, je me casse!" (If he gets in, I'm out of here!). But at this point Sarkozy is as popular as any politician in the country, even in parts of the banlieues themselves. While some kids echo the condemnations of the press ("Vraiment, 'Kärcher', 'racaille', ça ne passe pas," one Marseille teenager told Le Monde), others admire him. Everyone knows him.

One thing Sarkozy does not resemble in the slightest is a traditional French politician. "I am a man of the right," he says over breakfast, "even if I'm not a conservative in the traditional sense." This is an extraordinary admission. No presidential hopeful in decades, even in the UMP created by Jacques Chirac in the wake of De Gaulle's RPR, has ever accepted the label. Never in his political life has Jacques Chirac made a similar statement. From his time as prime minister in the mid-seventies, when he described his goal as the creation of "a labor movement à la française," to his recent New Year's address, in which he again attacked American-style capitalism, Chirac has taken many positions, but none of them on the "right." Since Sarkozy's profession leaves him liable to accusations in the French press that he is the favored candidate of Americans or free-marketeers, he is anxious to spell out exactly what he means by a "temperament of the right." It is something he has obviously thought about a lot. "First, the primacy of work; second, the need to compensate personal merit and effort; third, respect for the rules, and for authority; fourth, the belief that democracy does not mean weakness; fifth, values; sixth, . . . I'm persuaded that, before sharing, you have to create wealth. I don't like egalitarianism."

Out of this value system come plans for everything.

You don't have to be particularly savvy to notice that parties of the Right have been dominating Western elections in recent years, nor to figure out that the egalitarian path that Rousseau's France diverged onto over two hundred years ago has been a disaster. But Sarkozy is the first to recognize these things.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 18, 2006 9:07 AM