French Election: WHAT SARKOZY'S VICTORY MEANS
Michael Givel
Doug Ireland http://direland.typepad.com/ May 06, 2007
In the third consecutive defeat for the French left in a presidential
election, NICOLAS SARKOZY has been chosen to lead France with a
comfortable 53.7% of the vote, as the pre-election opinion polls had
predicted. His Socialist opponent, Segolene Royal, received 46.3%,
according to the exit polls. A whopping record 86% of French voters
went to the polls today to give an unambiguous victory to the
autocratic, demagogic, hard- right nationalist Sarkozy, who campaigned
on promises of a "rupture" with France's mixed economy and its welfare
state, one of the most extensive in Europe.
The crowd in the hall where Sarkozy declared victory after the polls
closed repeatedly sang the national anthem, La Marseillaise -- with
its famous xenophobic refrain, "Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur
abreuve nos sillons!" (Translation: Let us march, let us march, May
impure blood soak the furrows of our fields.) And Sarkozy's campaign
was marked by incessant appeals to racism and the fear of immigrants,
symbolized by his adoption of a slogan used by the neo-fascist leader
Jean-Marie Le Pen, "France, love it or leave it," and by his proposal
for a new "Ministry of Immigration and National Identity," which was
widely criticized by the left and by anti-racist groups for
amalgamating the two concepts and suggesting a fundamental opposition
between the two.
In fact, the campaign strategy of "Sarko," as he is referred to in
France, was based on appeals to the electorate of Le Pen and his Front
National party, which in the last presidential election in 2002 had
beaten the Socialists for the place in the run-off against
then-president Jacques Chirac. That lurch to the right five years ago
by a significant portion of formerly left voters was confirmed by
today's vote, in which more than two-thirds of former Le Pen voters --
many of them from the one-time Communist-dominated working class
suburbs -- went for Sarkozy, according to the exit polls.
Indeed, as the weekly Le Canard Enchaine -- which has the best insider
political gossip -- reported a couple of weeks ago, a Sarkozy
confident of victory had already discussed his long-term political
strategy for remaining in power -- for, as Le Canard revealed, he
plans to integrate the Front National into his ruling UMP party in his
second term, uniting the hard-right and the neo-fascist extreme right
in an alliance imitating that operated by the Italian Silvio
Berlusconi with the "post-fascist" Alleanza Nationale of Gianfranco
Fini, who was Berlusoconi's vice-premier. In his victory remarks
within minutes after TV declared him the winner, Sarkozy -- frequently
referred to the in the French press as "Sarko l'americain" for his
aggressively Atlanticist views and his sympathy for Bush -- promised a
cheering audience of supporters that "the American people can count on
our friendship" and that the war on terrorism "is of primary
importance in the world, it is a fight that will be our fight" under
his leadership. In fact, President Bush called Sarkozy within a few
minutes after the polls closed to congratulate him, according to a
report on France 2 public television.
But in reality, what Sarkozy's victory means for France is something
closer to the so-called "Reagan Revolution" in the U.S. that began in
1981 the process of dismantling and destroying the institutional New
Deal legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Chirac was a Gaullist, and the
political heritage of General Charles De Gaulle, who led France from
1958 to 1969, included a vigorously statist approach to the economy
and defense of a wide series of social protection and social
safety-net measures that had been instituted by the left's Popular
Front government in the mid-1930s, and which were renewed and extended
by post-war governments dominated by the political activists of the
Resistance movement to Nazi occupation, who had a conception of
government as a guarantor of economic security for all. Sarkozy is of
a new generation than his predecessor Chirac and, ideologically, is
not a Gaullist -- but rather Sarko is in phase with the "Chicago
school" of economics led by Milton Friedman.
Sarko believes in minimal government, a slimmed-down state that
interferes as little as possible in the economy, an aggressively
laissez-faire approach that is dear to the economic barons of the
MEDEF, the French business leaders' association, whose tycoons were
solidly behind Sarkozy's candidacy. Sarkozy has already promised to,
in effect, abolish the ISF (the tax on large fortunes), accord more
tax breaks to big business and the upper-middle-classes, and make more
cuts in the state-run national health system (declared by a U.N.
survey to be the finest in the world in terms of delivery of health
services and quality of care.) Sarkozy's economic program is designed
to help the already-privileged classes retain and extend their
socio-economic position, to the detriment of the have- nots (the
massive pro-Sarkozy vote in the upper-income neighborhoods today
confirms that they understood Sarko's message to them.) And he has
promised a major down-sizing of the civil service employed by state
agencies.
Sarkozy is a skilled demagogue who, on the stump, tried to give the
impression (like Bush's first presidential campaign did) that he was a
"compassionate conservative." But Sarkozy's so-called "compassion" is
strictly rhetorical -- his concrete economic orientation is bound to
deepen the gulf between the haves and the have nots, to aggravate what
Jacques Chirac -- in a famous phrase from his 1995 re-election
campaign -- had baptized the "social fracture."
Sarko's speech tonight had accents of Petain, when he declared that
his election represented "a break with the past," and that he intended
to rehabilitate work, authority, morality, respect and merit." Another
odious moment in Sarkozy's victory peroration came when he proclaimed
that France would no longer be a country of "repenting" -- this was a
dig at Chirac, who was the first French president to apologize for the
crimes committed by the Vichy French state against Jews under the Nazi
occupation, and who'd sent an ambassador to apologize to the Algerians
for the French massacre of thousands of civilians in the city of Setif
that had triggered the bloody war for Algerian independence from
France's colonial rule. It was an ugly moment in Sarko's frightening
speech, and a bow to Le Pen's notorious anti-Semitism, and Sarko's
"break with the past" means a closing of the books on the most
unsavory parts of France's recent history.
Life for the have-nots will become even more difficult under Sarkozy's
hard-right, anti-immigrant, law-and- order society. He has announced
"zero tolerance" for illegal immigration, has deported tens of
thousands of immigrants during his two terms as Interior Minister and
split up immigrant families while making it tougher for them to become
French citizens. He has proposed strict minimum sentences for all
sorts of crimes, thus removing all discretion from French judges, and
France's already-crowded prisons will soon be overflowing with
expanded, and younger, populations. French prisons, like ours, are
training institutes for criminals, and by sending ever-larger numbers
of young people to them for petty offenses Sarkozy will, in fact, be
manufacturing new generations of hardened voyous (thugs in French.) In
1986, I was in Paris during the legislative elections that made
Jacques Chirac prime minister for the first time -- and the next day,
the police -- who sensed that the right's victory had unleashed them
-- displayed an openly hostile and noticeably new aggressive posture
toward people of color in the streets. I've had reports from French
friends that the same thing happened after Sarkozy's strong, lead
showing in the first round of this presidential election two weeks
ago. Now, with Sarkozy's election, one can expect that the forces of
law-and-order will consider that all restraints on them have been
removed, and it will be more unpleasant than ever to be an Arab or
black in France, no matter how many generations one's family has lived
there or how perfectly one speaks French. (Remember Sarkozy's hard-
line program of repression during the October 2005 ghetto riots
against racism, exclusion, and unemployment that had all France in
flames?)
Sarkozy absolutely hates the left -- in part because the Communists
burned his aristocratic family's chateau in Hungary (from whence his
family emigrated to France) in 1944. And, in a major campaign speech
just days before the election, Sarkozy surprisingly devoted 20 minutes
of his discourse to a violent denunciation of the May 1968
student-worker revolt (Sarko was only 14 at the time of that
rebellion.). The heritage of May '68, Sarko thundered, must be
"liquidated." He blamed it for a generalized attitude of "laxisme,"
for France's having become a country "in which work has no value, in
which people think they can do anything they feel like doing, in which
people are lazy," and on and on. May '68 was, of course, the fountain
of social ferment that led to the sexual revolution, to women's
liberation and the legalization of abortion, the gay liberation
movement and the eventual repeal of laws criminalizing homosexuality,
the relaxation of censorship laws, and a whole series of other
cultural changes that opened up a stuffy, paternalistic,
arteriosclerotic French society. But May '68 was also a general strike
by 11 million French workers that gained union recognition in many
factories, higher wages, and that won a reinforcement of the social
safety net in an agreement (negotiated on behalf of then-President
Georges Pompidou by a young Jacques Chirac) that became known as "les
accords de la rue de Grenelle" (the agreement of Grenelle Street).
What was unstated in Sarko's anti-May '68 speech was that all that
sort of thing, too, must be "liquidated." Dark days are ahead for
those who love liberty, equality, and fraternity in France.
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