France: Sarkozy’s old familiar song

Nicolas Sarkozy won the presidential election with over a million more votes than his Socialist rival in an extraordinary turnout of 83.97 per cent. He has persuaded centrists and Socialists to support his Rightwing programme to change France’s political balance

Serge Halimi

The last president of France fell out of favour with his own party: his successor is a man of the Right who has beaten a woman of the Left. This cautionary tale may comfort Republican candidates in the United States who want to succeed President George Bush, especially if they expect to run against Democrat Hillary Clinton in November 2008.

But it would be odd if the Right in the US were to adopt the new French president's political strategy; that would be taking a cue from its mirror reflection. Nicolas Sarkozy's strategy was not a new and magic formula. On the contrary, he studied keenly all the political skills used in the US for the past 40 years. His themes have been national decline and moral decadence, intended to prepare voters for liberal shock treatment and a break with the past; he proposed action against Leftist dogma, which he claimed had paralysed the economy and stifled public debate; he wanted to reinvent the Right on the lines suggested by Antonio Gramsci, so that he can show off his multimillionaire friends, and their yachts. He has redefined the social question — it is no longer about the division between the rich and poor or capital and labour, but an internecine feud between two sections of the proletariat, those who won't work and those who will; he claims to speak for the "persecuted" silent majority and wants to mobilise them. Overall, he means to take an aggressive political stand against a ruling elite that has thrown in the towel.

The US Right has used these tactics since the presidency of Richard Nixon and needs to learn nothing from Sarkozy, who took up the most effective arguments of recent US Republican presidents, embellishing them with references to Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum and Guy Môquet.

Decline is a favourite theme. It seems natural to call for order when your own house needs to be put in order. On August 8, 1968 Nixon, the Rightwing presidential candidate, began his speech accepting the Republican nomination by praising the silent majority weary of watching the US descend into chaos. Two eminent political figures, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, had just been assassinated and the Tet offensive by the Communists in Vietnam meant that the US had already lost that war. Nixon called on fellow Americans to listen to "a quiet voice in the tumult of shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. They are not racist or sick; they are not guilty of the crimes that plague the land."

 Sarkozy has taken advantage of the almost unprecedentedly violent riots in the French banlieues in October and November 2005 to develop his "stormy times" theme. At Charleville-Mézières in the Ardennes on December 18, 2006, he praised the France that believes in merit and hard work, is inured to suffering, and goes unmentioned because it does not complain, stop trains or set fire to cars: the France that has had enough of others speaking for it. This spring he enjoined a crowd in Marseille to rise up and express the feelings of the silent majority.