Sarko's No Show No Go

Nicolas Sarkozy's erratic G-20 antics - threatening walkouts, then changing his mind and welcoming President Obama effusively - have led many to wonder: What on earth does the French president think he's doing?

Or, is he just behaving... stereotypically French?

The latter, I'm afraid. For all his campaigning about "change", Sarkozy is still a relatively classical French politician from the Gaullist movement, only more energetic. Gaullism is a form of popular conservatism with a tendency to concentrate the political power in the hands of one, carefully chosen (at least in theory), leader, somehow bridging the gap between the Republican and Monarchic historical traditions. The Fifth Republic, founded by De Gaulle in 1958, provides the constitutional framework to the Gaullist conception of power. Put simply, the French president is the boss, the closer you can get to an absolute monarch in a democratic system. And the current boss is Sarkozy.

What De Gaulle had in mind when he designed the current French constitution was to provide France with a strong and coherent leadership. The president, ie. himself, was to be given sufficient powers to take difficult decisions (for instance, leaving Algeria) and impose them (over the military at the time). France was no longer supposed to drift as it had done under the previous parliamentary regimes. France was supposed to follow a coherent strategy.

But things didn't work out that way. Instead, the presidency since De Gaulle has been filled with tacticians, more (Mitterrand) or less (Giscard) gifted ones, but all of them lacking the coherence and the predictability that can only come from a collegial and carefully balanced decision-making process.

Through such a perspective, Sarkozy's presidency is a perfect product of the system involuntarily put in place by De Gaulle. Sarkozy is a brilliant tactician, but his politics is difficult to categorize along the traditional divide between conservatives and liberals, or pro vs. anti-market. Sarkozy is before all a politician who bets on himself, and only secondarily a man of conviction, though he has some: he is not socialist, but he does not object to the French brand of corporatism. Therefore France is not going to become a free-market paradise under his reign. Sarkozy is also personally exempt from the wave of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism that has swept France for some years, but opposition to US policy can always be a cheap way to regain popularity. That is why Chirac led his personal crusade against the intervention in Iraq in 2003, and Sarkozy could very well do something similar in the future.

For now, Sarkozy has kept a firm grip on his own party. As an illustration of this, the very debatable - for both technical and legal reasons - "Hadopi" bill, which aims at cutting illegal file-sharers from the Net after their third offense, though not very popular inside Sarkozy's ruling party, is now being adopted by the National Assembly with very few modifications. France's return into NATO's integrated command structure has also been voted without a fuss by the National Assembly although many MPs were privately opposed to it. As for the opposition, the Socialist party has been more or less non-existent since 2002. That may or may not be good news for French conservatives: no one knows what their state of mind will be when they return to power, which will probably happen someday.

What is frustrating about Sarkozy's presidency is that while the man has both the personal capacity - he is one of the most skilled French politicians since Mitterrand - and the mandate - France has many grave and visible problems to solve - to conduct important and difficult reforms, he has been diverting some time and energy on various projects of doubtful interest: a series of expensive and debatable environmental measures (windmills are proliferating in a country where 80% of the electricity is nuclear) or the above mentioned "Hadopi" law.

The good news is that he nevertheless has been able to make some difficult reforms during his first year, including a reform limiting the impact of the wealth tax and canceling its most absurd consequences (for instance, some people were taxed on their house value because they lived in tourist areas where real estate had been going up, without them getting any richer in the process). He continued the difficult and somewhat incremental retirement pensions reform. Basically, the French are getting used to the idea that they will be working to a later age, and that there is no other way. Sarkozy's instinct also seems to prevent him from taking the easiest slope. He resisted the unions' calls for an increase of minimum wage when the financial crisis hit, just as he is resisting Obama's call for a stronger stimulus now.

But for all its merits, Sarkozy's policy sometimes lacks coherence. Immigration provides an example. To make a long story short, France's republican model of integration has worked well for decades, if not centuries. Confronted to a more important than usual, and culturally harder to manage, wave of immigration, the French elites, including Sarkozy, have been playing with the idea of introducing some forms of affirmative action inside the French legal system. Sarkozy has tasked a committee chaired by Simone Veil, former minister of Health and Auschwitz survivor, to look into the possibility of changing the Constitution's preamble, which contains the 1789 Declaration of Human rights, in order to make "positive discrimination" (one rough translation for "affirmative action") legal. In December, the Veil report concluded that this was not a good idea, but Sarkozy is still trying to find some way to allow the state to discriminate "positively", starting with the legalization of "ethnic statistics".

Immigration in France is an extremely complicated subject and it would be dishonest to force the reader into simplistic conclusions, but one can safely say that the future of France may be at stake here, and to consider getting rid of the core principles of the French political system on the basis of simplistic arguments like those put forward by the promoters of "positive discrimination" is not very responsible, to say the least.

But that part of Sarkozy's agenda is also designed to compensate for his more aggressive stance toward illegal immigration, which includes a minimal number of monthly expulsions, a policy which is relatively clumsy (a recent incident involved the arrest of Moroccans who were actually transiting through France on their way to... Morocco) but is more designed to send a general message of firmness.

Sarkozy's immigration policy seems calculated to give some satisfaction to the conservatives regarding illegal immigration, while at the same time cornering the left's predictable opposition with affirmative action gestures. That may be smart from an electoral point of view, but it hardly makes for a coherent long-term strategy. Pushing out illegals while promising them privileges if they succeed is more than a little contradictory. Tactics takes precedence over strategy.

So what are the results of Sarkozy's hyperactivity? His popularity is not very high at the moment, but that can be blamed, at least partly, on the economic situation, and the socialist opposition is in no position to endanger his presidency anyway. In any case, the next general election will not take place before 2012. Sarkozy is hated by a large part of the left, which is pretty much normal for any outspoken conservative leader. He did at least start some reforms which could have been - and sometimes had been - stalled for decades. No one can predict what France will look like at the end of his presidency, but in the longer term, Sarkozy will probably not be an easily forgotten president.