Super-Sarko Shakes Up the French Political Scene
France, for now, embraces its new American-style president
PARIS—Sporting designer sunglasses and cellphone in hand, Nicolas Sarkozy cheered and waved enthusiastically to spectators as he followed the fabled Tour de France bicycle race while standing in a fast-moving, open-topped red car. The scene was vintage Sarkozy—confident, exuberant, dynamic. In a word, modern.
Just days before his Tour de France performance, Sarkozy celebrated his first Bastille Day as France's new president in tradition-breaking style. He held up the military parade to shake hands in the crowd, skipped the practice of issuing mass pardons for prisoners (reinforcing his law-and-order reputation), and joined some 600,000 people attending a free evening rock concert. It hardly seemed to matter that he canceled the customary presidential television interview that in the past followed the military parade. The French have become used to seeing their new conservative-leaning president almost nightly on the television news, American style.
Omnipotent. In less than three months in office, Sarkozy has turned the imperial French presidency into a folksy affair, patting official visitors on the back, running up the main entrance of the classical, 18th-century presidential Elysée Palace in his jogging outfit, taking a labor leader to lunch in a fancy Parisian restaurant, dashing about the country and abroad (last week to Libya, after playing a role in winning the release of six imprisoned foreign medics), and generally stunning his compatriots with the energy and pizazz that have earned him the nickname Super-Sarko. "Omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, the head of state decides everything, speaks about everything, intervenes in everything, evokes everything," opposition Socialist Party President François Hollande told the National Assembly last month.
Hollande's comment was not meant as a compliment but accurately defines the Sarkozy style—perhaps best captured by the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, which recently portrayed the head of state on its cover as a hamster running maniacally inside his wheel. "For the first time, and like in the United States, the French elected a television star and not a character from a novel," Régis Debray, the left-wing philosopher, told the weekly Le Point. "The link with the humanities, with the written word, is cut. Now it's the look and jogging."
But there is substance to the style. Since coming to power in May, Sarkozy has garnered some important achievements. He played a major role in unblocking the European Union's institutional paralysis following the 2005 rejection by French and Dutch voters of a proposed EU constitution. He and German Chancellor Angela Merkel restructured the troubled Airbus operation and its parent holding company, EADS. He is the first French president to name a government composed of an equal number of men and women, with the latter heading high-profile ministries including finance, interior, and justice.
A wily political manipulator, Sarkozy has thrown the opposition Socialist Party off balance by naming key party figures to top posts, including Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders, as foreign minister. Jack Lang, a former Socialist culture and education minister who chastised Sarkozy as a "Bush adapted for France" during the presidential campaign, accepted appointment to a blue-ribbon panel on reforming France's political institutions. Furious, the Socialist Party warned Lang he would be excluded from its leadership if he heeded the call. Lang resigned from the party instead.
But Sarkozy's most audacious political move to date was convincing the European Union to support Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a respected former economics minister who failed to win the Socialist Party's nomination for president earlier this year, as its candidate to head the International Monetary Fund, a post traditionally reserved for a European. Observing the president's siren calls to Socialists eager for attention, former centrist presidential candidate François Bayrou said Sarkozy was acting like a "piranha in a goldfish bowl."
Shifting policy. Sarkozy is also breaking new ground in foreign policy, moving away from the stubbornly independent stance established by Gen. Charles de Gaulle and followed by every president since. Sarkozy, for instance, has expressed strong support for Israel, breaking with France's unequivocal defense of the Palestinian cause. He backs Washington's demand that Iran drop its nuclear weapons program, and he has sharply criticized Moscow for human-rights violations. In another sign of rapprochement with Washington, Sarkozy appears to be rethinking his campaign promise to withdraw French troops from Afghanistan. And, in what is seen as a reflection of pro-American sensibilities, he selected former Ambassador to Washington Jean-David Levitte to head a new National Security Council based on the White House model.
Domestic political reforms are also beginning to take shape, which may prove the real test of Sarkozy's popularity. Parliament approved a law allowing employees to work overtime, with the extra earned income tax free. That's intended to spur the economy by encouraging individual initiative, but it seriously undermines the 35-hour workweek approved by the Socialists when they were in power.
Another key reform likely to be approved this summer would weaken public service unions by guaranteeing minimum service in public transportation during strikes, a change that may lead unions to order walkouts and demonstrations after the sacrosanct summer holidays. If so, the relaxed, cheering, smiling Sarkozy of the Tour de France could be just a memory.
This story appears in the August 6, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.