That monarchic moment
Sunday is the day of Nicolas Sarkozy’s “investiture”, “dubbing”, “consecration” or “enthronement” as official presidential candidate for the centre-right UMP party. I’m deliberately using the words served-up by the French press, odd though they may seem to English-speakers, to show how the French themselves receive this event: it is a monarchic moment, full of echoes of the anointing of kings at Reims. However much M. Sarkozy may speak of “rupture”, continuity with the past runs deep. For Sarkozy, this wasteful (cost: 3.5 million €), technically unnecessary ritual (there are no other nominations for the job) in front of some 50,000 party members is almost more important than being elected president, for it means he has finally been accepted by his “family”, another word dear to the French, meaning all those who have been trying so hard to stab him in the back. The kind of family most of us would do anything to avoid. Their war-cry “Tout sauf Sarkozy” – anyone except Sarkozy – today rings hollow as, alone on stage, Sarkozy soaks up the adulation. But can it last?
I will admit that as a character Sarkozy fascinates me. In July 2004 I wrote a profile of him for Prospect, I think the first one for an English-language magazine, and I won’t repeat what I wrote there. But since his early teens he has had one idea in his head, to the exclusion of everything else: to be president. Ambition is too weak a word, he is obsessed with power. Yet his image of what power is seems at times childish – it’s a noisy, look-at-me sort of power, like today’s absurd extravaganza in Paris. It has to be bigger, brasher, bolder than the Socialist Party’s primary (which was genuine, with a serious choice between three contenders), with more people, better stars.
If he is elected president, he will become one of the most powerful men in the world. He will be difficult for other leaders to work with, for I believe he will enjoy throwing his weight around. But most dangerously for France, he is an angry man who sows discord everywhere he goes. Of course he has his ultra-loyal team, who have helped him get to his present position, but his past is full of treachery and betrayals – principally of those who cared for him most, his mentors Charles Pasqua and Chirac. His cartoon image, popularised by Le Canard Enchainé, is with two horns, a tail and a fork. He is not Mr. Nice Guy. “Use him as a doormat,” Chirac once said. “It’s the only thing he understands.” France needs reform, not revolution. Sarkozy wants the sort of adoration he’s getting today, with 50,000 people chanting his name: but in France adoration and reform do not go together. If, like Chirac, he wastes his time in the Elysée Palace, France will be badly off indeed.
He has enormous energy, the French call him l’homme pressé, speedy Sarkozy, but his energy is the fractious, disruptive kind, creating havoc and division in its wake. That kind of energy could rapidly become self-destructive during the election campaign. There are predictions of a major upset before the first-round vote, and despite the fact that his two closest friends, Martin Bouygues and Arnaud Lagardère, own and control much of the media, the febrile, over-ambitious and basically unloved Sarkozy is the most likely to give it.