FRANCE:When the French leader did prevail in 2010 he reminded his country of his foremost qualities
NICOLAS SARKOZY will not mourn the passing of 2010. What the French president predicted to be “a year of renewal” in a television address last New Year’s Eve turned out to be his most difficult since taking office.
In a tumultuous 12 months, two trends held constant: the unemployment rate, and the president’s popularity. Almost 10 per cent of the working-age population – and a record 25 per cent of young people – end the year without a job, and polls show the spectre of joining the dole queues dominates voters’ thoughts. Meanwhile, the president, who came to power in 2007 pledging to get France working, enjoys the approval of just 30 per cent of the electorate, a figure that has barely budged since January.
The nadir came in March, when Sarkozy's centre-right UMP bloc suffered a heavy defeat in regional elections and lost control of 21 of the 22 regions in the French métropole. Gallingly for the president, both the Socialist Party and the far-right National Front revived themselves and emerged emboldened. That result set the tone for the rest of the year.
It left the Elysée Palace weakened just at the point when a succession of damaging scandals were about to spill on to the front pages.
In the good times, the revelation that one junior minister had spent €12,000 of taxpayers’ money on Cuban cigars, while another had blown €116,500 on a private jet to Martinique, might not have outraged a country that has long tolerated the ruling elite’s extravagance. This year, both were forced to resign.
But those controversies were as nothing compared to the furore ignited by the Bettencourt saga, a private inheritance dispute involving France’s richest woman, L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, which engulfed the UMP and some of its top figures.
Four investigations are ongoing into various allegations, including one of illegal party funding. Former labour minister Eric Woerth, who was UMP treasurer during the period under investigation, denies any wrongdoing. However, the man once touted as a potential prime minister was removed from cabinet last month, and the story worked wonders for the opposition by reminding the public of the close connections between the ruling party and the business elite.
The regional elections and the Bettencourt drama were the backdrop to an acrimonious summer that pushed some of French society’s strong underlying complexes to the surface. After violence involving French Travellers in a town in the Loire Valley and several nights of rioting in a predominantly immigrant suburb of Grenoble in July, Sarkozy visited the Alpine city and delivered his toughest speech yet on security.
Breaking a mainstream taboo by explicitly linking immigration and crime, Sarkozy said he was determined to pursue “war” against criminality, and to widen the state’s ability to strip French nationality from foreign-born offenders. Within weeks, hundreds of illegal gypsy camps were being dismantled, and Roma migrants were being photographed boarding aircraft. The rate of Roma repatriation did not rise dramatically, but the concerted and well-publicised action drew the accusation that Sarkozy was trying to please soft National Front voters who had been crucial to his election in 2007, but who had abandoned him in March.
On the international front, Sarkozy had a relatively quiet year. His efforts to draw Russia closer to Europe appeared to pay off, but a low-key visit to Washington proved that his ardent wish for a close relationship with President Barack Obama, and for greater involvement in the Middle East peace process, has not been fulfilled. In contrast to the French president’s ubiquity during the financial implosion of 2008, Europe’s economic crisis this year served to illustrate how power in the Franco-German couple has shifted subtly towards Berlin.
The year may have been trying, but when Sarkozy did prevail in 2010 he reminded France of the qualities that made him such a formidable force three years ago. His greatest triumph – the passage of a pension reform bill that raised the retirement age by two years – was achieved despite a wave of tense autumn strikes and fuel shortages, and represented an important victory on a reform that had eluded previous governments.
The pensions overhaul, and his success in enacting a divisive ban on face veils in public, showed that Sarkozy’s strengths – his gift for strategy, self-belief and some of the best debating skills in French politics – are firmly in place.
They’re likely to be tested further in the coming year, when the countdown to the 2012 presidential election grows more intense and the field of his potential rivals narrows. Two big questions are whether Dominique Strauss-Kahn will return from the IMF and try to wrest the presidency from his old adversary, and whether the Socialist Party can resist the fratricidal tendencies that have undermined it in the past.
But the president still has grounds to hope for the renewal that eluded him this year. France takes over the chairmanship of the G8 and G20 in 2011, giving Sarkozy the global platform he relishes and the chance to show off his energy and burnish his statesman’s credentials. Don’t write him off just yet.