Sarkozy - Again!

It is hard not to come back to the energetic President Sarkozy once again - especially as we read in today's Financial Times that Paris is launching a drive to challenge London as a global financial hub and while his Foreign Minister continues to demand European sanctions against Iran ahead of the United Nations. Aspirations to economic and global leadership in the West - is this hubris, mere rhetoric or can his Administration actually move France back into the top rank of nations from whence it has been gently slipping for some time?

Of course, a strong and distinctive vision is no guarantor of good governance or wise decision-making - just ask any Briton who has had to go through the agonies of the Blair Administration in the last four years. No one doubted the man's political skills (if political skills involve the acquisition and retention of power regardless of purpose) or his single-minded vision, but many came to doubt whether either of these was in the national interest by the time of his resignation. The same caution needs applying to such live wires as Sarkozy and Kouchner.

But Sarkozy's personal qualities are real enough. We may take just two - personal bravery and a remarkable memory. On the first, his name was brought to global attention when he walked unarmed into a schoolroom as Mayor of Neuilly to talk down a criminal maniac with explosives strapped to himself. That was in 1993.  He has never hid his fear but did what he thought that he had to do. Given that most world leaders seem to be better at taking decisions that kill kids, to have a world leader who has actually saved kids' lives gives him a fairly good start in the ethical stakes.

Our own 'man in Paris', Maurice Bood, who is Dutch by nationality, was a constituent of his and he tells the story of meeting him some time around 1995 and doing whatever local business was required in seven minutes. Sarkozy likes short meetings which tells you something of the man. Before leaving, and in order for him to remember the meeting, Maurice said "Thank you, Mr. Sarkozy. Please don't forget the Hollandais de service (The Dutchman on duty), a weak pun on Suisse de service that I won't bother to explain.

He smiled. Maurice had no reason to have further direct contact with him.  Two years ago, he met him on the street walking his Labrador dog and coming from his nearby appartment. "Good day Monsieur le Ministre". He looks up, "Ah! bonsoir monsieur le hollandais de service". As if in the meantime, he had not seen other people, worried about other matters and forgotten about the very tiny issue that Maurice had brought to his attention. That shows that remarkable power, useful in politicians, of recalling a person by an attribute but, in his case, retaining this memory a whole decade later based on only a seven minute conversation. 

Bood has reported that the best way to describe the first 100 days of Sarkozy in office is as a 'maelström'. He is like a Roman charioteer (so says Bood), leaving behind his "collaborators" (Sarkozy's own term for his Ministers), supervising all aspects of the government's activities personally and defining, with the help of his own counsellors, the main outlines of the policies of the French administration - at all levels. "I was elected to act not to stay in power", says the President.

The French media and the whole world of French political chatter are fascinated with their President even if the lustre is beginning to go. Perhaps it is a matter of enjoying a chance to watch an Olympian come to earth. Every previous President has stood on their not inconsiderable dignity. The pompous, stilted style of Jacques Chirac has been the rule under the Fifth Republic and not the exception, a sharp contrast with this free-wheeling ball of energy.

From the beginning, he seemed to be at occasional loggerheads with his own Prime Minister, François Fillon, and his Minister of Finance, Christine Lagarde, a former management consultant. Imagine Gordon Brown being told on matters of fiscal policy what to do by a directly elected Queen. After distributing 15 billion euros in social welfare, the French budgetary deficit will amount to nearly 42 billion euros. Fillon has spoken publicly of France being in a state of bankruptcy ... "I am the Prime Minister of a State in a chronic deficit that has never balanced its budget in 25 years".

For all his energy, the economy may still be Sarkozy's Achilles' heel. Sarkozy is like Blair without the Granita deal that gave his 'prudent' Chancellor carte blanche to sort out the national economy and provide the resources for his political adventurism. Economies tend not to respond well to whim and caprice. Fillon and Lagarde are struggling to construct an economy that can provide the resources for France's determination to remain a Great Power in a changed world.

The British cycle of economic regeneration had started with a direct social war with the trades unions which they lost, reversing a slow rise to power that had started in the aftermath of the General Strike of 1926 and culminated in a culture of 'beer and sandwiches' in Number Ten by the 1970s. Today, the trades unions feel lucky if they get to see the Prime Minister, although (in fact) British trade unions still quietly dictate some of the agenda in a very limited zone of employment law.

The French trades unions may not be on the rise but they have not been defeated in battle. They sit sullen and defensive behind strong fortifications mindful of what happens in liberalised economies. The President may be ready to breach those walls. He can appeal to public sentiment that shows (in polling) that 68% of the French favour the type of change proposed by the Sarkozy administration. These include state provision of emergency services during national rail strikes and the end of a variety of customary, almost feudalised, "acquired advantages". In a near-comical example, a bonus for driving a coal engine is still in existence when all French traction equipment is electrical.

We have already covered Sarko's departure from Gaullism and towards a more "Atlanticist" viewpoint of world affairs. His move from the paternalistic ("it is our back yard") approach to French Africa and his acceptance that de facto German leadership of the EU is probably unstoppable are also worth noting. His 'genius' may be to show that some old 1945 shibboleths may have to be jettisoned quickly if France is to have any hope of sustaining its Great Power status. 

Sarkozy's 'maverick' status accords with the frustration of much of Middle France that old attitudes have encouraged economic and political decline and that France is the last of the '45 Powers to embrace the new international economic order. It is a little humiliating that so many bright young French graduates not merely now avoid the public sector for the private sector but migrate to London to learn business in English and act as the economic equivalent of exiled Burmese dissidents. The young French business community in London is almost religiously irrational in its adoration of the Sarkozy phenomenon.

While all this goes on, the most conservative force in Europe - the French Socialist Party - appears to be close to dissolution. Before assuming that this is likely, we should recognise that many obituaries have been written for political parties and that parties tend to confound the merchants of gloom by reinventing themselves. But it has to be said that Sarkozy looks as if he will have a clear run with the French people for quite some time - may be two or three years certainly, maybe five, seven or twelve.  Bourgeois conservatism may have much longer still in power, until new conditions call forth new political models.

The troubles within the Socialist Party are so great that there is little point in rehearsing what will be of little interest to our readers. These people are not going to have any power of consequence for some time and little prospect of power until they get right a mix of nationalism, liberalism and welfarism that appeals to French voters.

The prediction from our French team is that, having established authority, the Government will change tack early in 2008 and apply more stringent measures to lower the public debt. There may be some political wisdom in Sarkozy's performance art surrounding national economics. If he can assert his authority and judgement, then when the pain comes, it will look as if it comes from someone who knows what needs doing instead of from a bunch of technocrats with no understanding of the people. The President can talk direct to the public whereas technocrats are generally appalling at mass communication. Thatcher braved it out through some brutal economic changes and Sarkozy (who is well briefed on how the UK was transformed) could well do the same. But to do this, he has to assert his authority over the French Right so that resistance, when the pain comes, is not merely futile but career suicide.

Of course, we may be wrong. Maybe Sarko is one of the last big spenders ... but it is hard to see how economic populism can work in the new global economy without eventually undermining his new political popularity when national decline fails to be reversed. Better (we would think) for him to use the methods of political populism to make the French people adore the pain that he may have to inflict in order to modernise the French economy and, in the view of the French liberal Right, secure their future.