An interesting clutch of articles about Nicolas Sarkozy in this week’s Courrier International – for those unfamiliar, a French weekly which consists mostly of articles gathered from the foreign press, often about France but also looking at their own and other countries. The interest is always to see how non-French journalists see the world: on Sarkozy this week there’s La Stampa, Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung, an Irish businessman writing in the Wall Street Journal and others. Of the eleven extracts, all are critical, except, understandably, the Bulgarian press. The Italian journalist (Carlo Bastasin) sees Sarkozy’s reforms as disappointingly déjà vues: “he is faithfully following the political model of the European right for the past 15 years [meaning, I think, recent Italian and German governments]…he is liberalizing the labour market while simultaneously protecting capital….still assuming that capital and work must be in opposition. Today it’s much more difficult to distinguish between capital and labour, in an open economy they are no longer antagonistic. Countries which have successfully faced up to globalisation…have reformed labour and capital at the same time. Margaret Thatcher weakened the resistance of the unions, but at the same time she made the financial markets more dynamic and opened up the capital available for British companies….the same happened in Scandinavia and the Benelux countries.”

The German papers unsurprisingly (given their experience with Sarkozy in Libya and at EADS) criticise Sarkozy as an “uncomfortable partner”, but also for not yet tackling what they see as the most important problems facing France, such as high employer charges, which are making French products uncompetitive – unlike German products. Much of this will be familiar to readers of the British press, but for me the most interesting is the idea put forward Lisbon’s Público (although it looks as if the two journalists, Leonor Baldaque and Pierre Vesperini are French). They come back to and build on the idea of Sarkozy’s treachery (which I said in a recent blog was once considered the key to his character but which now is never mentioned). As many of us remember, in the run-up to the 1995 presidential election Sarkozy stabbed his long-time mentor and benefactor, Jacques Chirac, in the back by siding with the heavily favoured front-runner Edouard Balladur. Chirac was a no-hoper, Sarkozy said. But Chirac won. Cast into outer darkness with the loser Balladur, Sarkozy was repeatedly and publicly humiliated by cat-calls, whistles and cries, in the National Assembly for example, of “Traitor, Traitor.” His many biographers agree that this was the descent into darkness for the man-who-wants-to-be-loved. The two journalists go further, seizing on these tortured months as being the genesis of Sarkozy’s present urge to create as many “traitors” as he can – in other words all those Socialists and Centrists whom he persuaded into his government: Eric Besson, Kouchner, Martin Hirsch, Jouyet, Fadela Amara, Jack Lang, Rocard and others. Not so much ouverture as trahison. “This is our hypothesis: M. Sarkozy has decided to make treachery not the exception but the norm in French political life.”

It’s an intriguing hypothesis. As is the wider implication given by the whole spread of articles that the French president, whose popularity and therefore success depends much on the media, who, through his own media, has persuaded a large majority of his own compatriots that he is doing it right, is seen abroad (and mostly in Europe, which he hopes to convert to his ideas) as a less than useful, if not potentially dangerous thing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 4:32 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.