Behind the Glitz and the Gaffes

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Hungry for a story, the media have had a lot of fun and sold a lot of copy chronicling the miscues, the (largely calculated) outrageousness, and headline grabbing antics of French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, while watching his slide toward a Fifth-Republic record (since 1958) for executive unpopularity. And on rare dull days, more than likely one of Sarkozy’s ministers will utter something contentious/inept/inflammatory to keep the show well-paced. More recently a few voices have warned against being lulled by all the hilarity into thinking that it’s just another neo-Gaullist buffoon at the helm while the storm-tossed left rights itself. The popularity numbers are improving, the new Madame Sarkozy is proving an effective ambassador and foil and, importantly, the rightward reforms pushed by Sarkozy proceed apace, measure-by-measure, directive-by-directive, piling up in the fine print of the Official Journal at a steady rate of accretion.

In his column in the daily newspaper Libération, pundit Alain Duhamel recently makes the point clear that Nicolas Sarkozy is anything but a conservative. It was Carla Bruni-Sarkozy who said it, as a guest editor-for-a-day at Libération earlier in the week, and Duhamel jumped on her statement ("My husband is not at all conservative.") to point out that this was neither eyewash nor disinformation, but simply the unvarnished truth camouflaged as a Sarko-style brash statement. According to Duhamel, France has affair with something new to its political scene, a right-wing reformer. First of all, the right-wing part. France has had no president in the Fifth Republic as unabashedly and clearly to the right as Nicolas Sarkozy, unstoppable on his basic message of law and order, merit, work, competition, wealth is fun, and people who have it shouldn’t have to give it back to the State.

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