FRANCE:The French president is perfecting the art of the climbdown and diversion, writes Lara Marlowe
When he was elected, president Nicolas Sarkozy promised to "say what I'll do and do what I say." But nine months into his five-year term, la méthode Sarkozy is altogether different.
Sarkozy likes to make shock announcements, without consulting the authorities involved. He believes presidential prerogative is a licence to take unilateral decisions vital to the future of, for example, public television and primary school education. L'état c'est moi.
When the announcement causes an uproar, Sarkozy back-pedals fast and creates a diversion. On February 11th, the day his son Jean, 21, and two associates created a scandale by announcing they were ousting the ruling UMP's official candidate for mayor of Neuilly, Sarkozy put in a surprise television appearance for a dull speech on the fact that France had ratified the Lisbon Treaty two days earlier.
Even the servile French press saw it for what it was: an attempt to divert attention from the Neuilly debacle.
Jean Sarkozy's pretensions to municipal office were widely condemned. Polls show that a renegade right-wing businessman, Jean-Christophe Fromantin, will take the mayor's office in Neuilly in the first round of elections on March 9. So what did Sarkozy do? He called Jean off and endorsed Fromantin, who refuses to stand on a UMP ticket. There will be no UMP candidate in the town that Sarkozy ruled for 19 years, and Sarkozy received Fromantin at the Élysée Palace on Monday.
At the annual dinner of the French Jewish organisation CRIF on February 13th, Sarkozy announced every 10-year-old French schoolchild would "have the memory of one of the 11,000 French children who were victims of the holocaust conferred upon him or her".
The former cabinet minister and president of the European Parliament, Simone Veil, herself a holocaust survivor, sat next to Sarkozy at the dinner and was shocked not to have been consulted. "My blood went icy," she said, calling the presidential initiative "unimaginable, unbearable and unjust".
Child psychologists agreed with Veil that "you cannot inflict that on 10-year-old children. . . These memories are far too heavy to carry."
Schoolteachers said it wasn't the president's job to dictate how they taught history. Intellectuals objected to the measure on the grounds that African and Arab minorities would feel aggrieved that children killed in the slave trade and the Algerian war would not also be recognised.
Now Sarkozy's aides refer to "the presidential intuition" on the teaching of the holocaust. Today, education minister Xavier Darcos will announce that the memory of one child murdered in the holocaust will be conferred on each class - not on each individual schoolchild.
Sarkozy's holocaust initiative was perceived as an attempt to impose his own emotion on the entire country. On February 15th, 17 French politicians, including the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin and the failed presidential candidates Ségolène Royal and François Bayrou, launched an "Appeal for Republican Vigilance", in which they stated their "rejection of any drive towards a form of purely personal power bordering on an elected monarchy".
The group was denounced by Sarkozy's entourage as "a coalition of losers".
Sarkozy yesterday launched a "Commission for New Public Television", headed by Jean-François Copé, the president of the UMP group in the national assembly. The commission represents yet another climbdown by Sarkozy.
The financial strategist Alain Minc had persuaded the president to make a shock announcement regarding state-owned media in his January 8th press conference. He would dare something the left always claimed they wanted to do: abolish advertising on public channels. The move would be a windfall for Sarkozy's friends, who own the main private TV stations and ad agencies.
Sarkozy consulted neither the culture minister nor the head of France Télévision. And he didn't realise that his plan would leave a €1.2 billion hole in the financing of state-owned media. On February 13th, journalists and technicians held the most widely observed strike since the state monopoly was broken up in 1974.
So what did Mr Sarkozy do? He backed down, leaving it to Copé to announce that there might be a little advertising on state-owned media after all.