On Sunday Nicolas Sarkozy will be nominated official candidate for the centre-right UMP – the party dominating the Assemblée Nationale, formed by Jacques Chirac and his clan in 2002 as a personal power-base. Yet Chirac will not be present for this ritual consecration, and according to Le Canard Enchainé he has forbidden his wife to go. Many of the hard-core Chiraquie refuse to endorse the man who could be “their” man at the Elysée Palace for the next 5 years. Why is Chirac fuelling this public rift at the very moment when only unity and solidarity will win the prize?

Probably the only thing Jacques Chirac has in common with Tony Blair is that both men refuse to say when they are going, taking pleasure in teasing out their power to its last drop. The difference is that Chirac has not even said that he is going. Astonishingly he could wait until the middle of March before making his announcement.

Few imagine that he could possibly re-present himself – indeed it would be grotesque if he did. This year he will be 75, his record during the past 12 years as president is scarcely convincing, many would say appalling, his rating in the country slides inexorably lower. Since the referendum on Europe in May 2005 he has been like a ship stuck on the mud at low tide. Yet since the beginning of the year he has been enthusiastically launching project after project as if he will be at the helm to steer them along. Not the behaviour of a man on the brink of retirement. He is deliberately sowing uncertainty about the future, with the sole aim of making the hated Sarko sweat. And yet both are supposedly on the same side.

Chirac is a far more dangerous to Sarkozy than Ségolène Royal. Ever since the last presidential election Sarkozy has been saying “The next one is mine,” At first he seduced many with his openly-stated desire for a break with the present regime, a new, re-vitalised “liberated” France. But then it started to unravel. First of all abroad, as observers noted that, as Minister of the Economy, this advocate of the free market was protecting French lame ducks, proclaiming even the moribund “must not be lost to foreigners”, that “the State has a duty to protect national champions.” His compatriots not unnaturally liked that, but even they began to wonder, as he strode about the sickeningly run-down urban ghettoes, surrounded by wagon-loads of gun-totting police, calling some of those forced to live there “scum”. That was the start of his hard-line, zero-tolerance, I-may-be-small-but-by-gob-I’m-tough stance. Any initial appeal quickly soured as errors of judgement and fact were not acknowledged let alone apologised for. He still has a considerable following, as Sunday will prove, but it seems to be slipping. Is that what Chirac is hoping? That Sarko will alienate enough so that the elder statesman, serene, fatherly can step in to carry the flame? Again, it is grotesque to imagine that is a “plan” – apart from anything else it could result in a Royal/Le Pen second round. Or, more interestingly, a Royal/Bayrou second round – François Bayrou being perhaps the real contender in this election. Chirac may be opening the door to him – knowingly?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 10:16 am and is filed under Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.