Sarkozy on television last night was disturbingly convincing. He was the guest of Arlette Chabot, a highly esteemed interviewer: the night before, she had interviewed Ségolène Royal. Royal had been all right – charming, convinced, clear in what she wants but rather dull. After an hour I left. Sarkozy on the other hand was almost compulsive. Informed, clear and reasonable, he lived up to Royal’s criticism of him that he has an answer for everything, while at the same time visibly trying to counter his wider reputation for nervy, anxious aggression. In both he succeeded - he was almost too good. A viewer asks a question about Alzheimer’s disease, Sarkozy proves he hasn’t got it by rattling out figures of the number of sufferers, the social cost, the medical origins of the disease is and where we are with research. In a similar exercise at the beginning of the first campaign, on the TV channel owned by one of Sarkozy’s pals, so pat were his answers there was strong suspicion he had been briefed beforehand about the questions. It felt like that again last night, though much better disguised.

For it was an excellent performance, and I quite see why anyone listening to Royal one evening and Sarkozy the next would say No contest. To be honest, there isn’t one – on present form Sarkozy is bound to win in 8 days’ time. But while the performance was good, the script was pretty ropey, for there are very worrying aspects in Sarkozy’s vision of power.

One is that his republic (and I think one can call it that, he will control it) will be based on results. While that’s an effective way of assessing athletes, it is a populist, naive way of judging most professions. It results in cheating, moving the goal-posts or covering things up. Unemployment is an obvious example – the present government is under fire for giving partial, flattering results. Sarkozy has promised to reduce unemployment to 5% by the end of his 5 year mandate, so Chabot asked him “And if you don’t achieve that, you won’t stand for re-election?” Ah well, madame, it’s not as simple as that. Indeed it isn’t, and she had missed the main, deeper point that in themselves statistics and simplistic better/worse results are a slippery slope. For example Sarkozy’s pressure on the police to reduce delinquency does two things. It assumes that delinquency is something that should be left between the police and certain young people – that educators, social workers, all those  —ists beloved of the left, have no place in Sarkozy’s republic. Secondly it pushes to police to cheat. In the past if 30 cars were burned in one night this was treated as 30 separate incidents. Now, according to police officers, they are wrapped up as a single event so they can say “Yes, delinquency is falling”. To massage the car burning statistics a little more, Sarkozy last year created a new category: “incendie par propagation”. In other words only the car actually torched by human hand is considered the object of a criminal act, any others destroyed subsequently are merely accidental victims.

The other aspect of Sarkozy’s vision which strikes me as dangerous and on which I feel it was the interviewer’s duty to get clarification, although Chabot did not push it, is the assumption that once he is president he has a free hand to enact all and everything he has said he will do during the campaign. That is to say the democratic moment is the presidential election – after that, sit back and keep your mouth shut because “le peuple have voted me in”. Take the 35 hour week. Sarkozy has made no bones about wanting to reform it, so, he says, if trades union leaders object (as they must), he will tell them “It’s part of my programme, voted by le peuple, you have no democratic right to object. There will be no further debate.” It is the method of the populist-turned-dictator, naive populism combined with twisted logic: last night he said that when he suggested a ministry of national identity all the press protested, but “clearly the press are wrong because last Sunday the French people voted for me”. Q.E.D. A majority brooks no argument: the people cannot be wrong. This is extremely naive because very few of those voting Sarkozy on May 6th will agree with everything in his programme. The logical extension is that anyone who disagrees with one small point in Sarkozy’s programme should on no account vote for him.

Again it strikes me as odd that his interviewers didn’t pick him up on the obvious inconsistencies of his answers: he is against treating railways workers as a special case for retirement – they can retire after 37 years rather than 40 for everyone else. Sarkozy says “In a country where the word Egalité is stuck up in front of every public building, we can’t have that.” Then when asked about encouraging private medicine that principle is forgotten and he is allowed to fudge over a very inadequate answer about freedom of choice. Anyone who uses equality as a justification for a social measure is freely giving away rods for his opponents to beat him with. Even on prime time television an interviewer has a duty to push her interviewee to the roots of his or her logic.

On economic policies he went one further than economic patriotism and state protection – he said the way to prevent companies off-shoring (or moving to Eastern Europe) is to have more family businesses (like Michelin? which lays off workers just like any other), because only family-owned businesses have a total commitment to their work-force and to France. There must be no more investment from foreign pension funds. Apart from the fact that France’s massive debt is serviced mainly from abroad, it is painful to contemplate the state of French industry at the end of his mandate if foreign investment were withdrawn.

As has become usual in this presidential campaign, all serious talk about Europe and international affairs is side-stepped. Never mind, last night’s show will have convinced many that Sarkozy knows what he wants where Royal, fluttering about with Bayrou, keeps changing the parametres. For most people, that is enough.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 7:10 am and is filed under Political, Nicolas Sarkozy. 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.