Uniting friends and foe
Today is his investiture – his day of glory, the day he has been dreaming of, so he tells us, since he was an adolescent – and already everywhere Sarkozy is sowing division and discord. I maintain he cannot help it – it is his nature. He says he wants to unite his compatriots – bring together in one government elements of the left and centre as well as his own further right – but he cannot help dividing them: his friends on the right, who believe that having stood by him during the difficult days they are being passed over, and the left, furious with some of their own most illustrious because they are contemplating serving under Sarkozy. Already there is anger even hatred on left and right - though in fact he is uniting his former friends and foes against him, both camps now sharpening their knives – and it’s only the start.
Like buying a ticket on the roller-coaster, popping the Sarkozy ticket into the ballot-box promised a rough ride. What is happening, of course, is that his own, unashamed thirst for power, endorsed by the majority vote, has made personal ambition acceptable in others. Whereas under Chirac and Mitterrand we all had to pretend to care deeply about others, now everyone can admit that clawing their way to the top is what they have always wanted. That unmistakable light behind the eyes is clear on the faces of those being wooed (or who think they’re being wooed) for a ministerial post. Bernard Kouchner, for example, a good man who founded the NGO “Médecins sans frontières », was a Socialist secretary of state then Health Minister under Mitterrand before becoming a very successful UN Special Representative in Kosovo. He has said he will no longer accept a secondary role: he feels he is too important. Despised as a turn-coat by his Socialist comrades, his eager little face tells us he can’t wait to thumb his nose at them from behind the smoked glass of his motorcaded car. Today’s press says he has accepted the ministry of Foreign Affairs – one of the most prestigious.
“I am not going to sit down with a man like Kouchner,” a remark ascribed in Le Monde to one of Sarko’s lieutenants. These party faithfuls have spent the past four months bad-mouthing the Socialists – and now here is their man, rather than choosing from amongst his own, asking the enemy to be in his government!
Patrick Devedjian, an MP and Sarkozy man from way back, takes this badly. He says he and his friends helped Sarkozy when it mattered most. Ah, but “without you, nothing would have been possible,” cried Sarkozy on Monday, resigning as head of the UMP party. A tear in his eye? Not likely! “Loyalty is for the feelings [overtones of sentimental], efficiency for government.” To which Devedjian replies “I don’t think loyalty is necessarily the opposite of competence.” Adding, apparently, that Sarko’s boys helped the new president “over Clearstream, don’t forget.” Clearstream – short-hand for one of those murky financial shenanigans which are reputed to make some people extremely wealthy, though it’s never quite clear who or how. The very mention of the name sets up all sorts of unsettling echoes of corruption, funds being siphoned to distant off-shore banks. A Sarkozy-like pseudonym appeared on one of the (fictitious) listings. The fact that one of Sarkozy’s closest threatens to spill the beans is serious, for it implies there are beans to spill.
Meanwhile as though by coincidence, the Paris court decided yesterday to continue with the prosecution of the three key people in the Clearstream saga, and totally unconnected though the same day, former prime minister Alain Juppé, already convicted once for mishandling public funds, was hauled in last night for questioning about another doubtful practice. There is obviously more to come.