Can Sarkozy win?

 

 

Dominique de Villepin gave an interesting interview in Le Figaro this morning, in which he effectively said that Sarkozy is the wrong kind of candidate to put up against Segolene Royal. While I generally struggle to agree with the French prime minister on most issues and while I question his ulterior motives, I would concede that he may have a point.

 

Royal has so far succeeded to shift the parameters of the campaign away from concrete policies. To my mind, the best explanation for the Royal phenomenon has come from Stefan Collignon, professor of political economy at the London School of Economics, who has pointed out that by staying clear of concrete policies, she managed to get the French to project all their diverse hopes onto her. Of course, she is bound to disappoint some or most of those hopes once she gets elected. But in the meantime, this has turned out to be a highly successful strategy. What we do not know is whether she can pursue this strategy right until the end of the election campaign, which has still five months to run, or whether she will come unstuck at some point?

 

De Villepin’s argument is logically based on the assumption that she can maintain her strategy successfully. It is not an unreasonable assumption. Pundits wrongly predicted that she would be crushed during the three television debates with Strauss-Kahn and Fabius. She lost each one of them, but it did not matter. She committed policy gaffe after policy gaffe, and nobody cared. During the last TV debate, she displayed ignorance about the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in a discussion of Iran’s nuclear policy. When she visited the Middle East, she failed to distance herself during a joint new conference from comments by a Hezbollah MP, who compared Israel's policy towards Lebanon with Nazism. She also said that she shared many of Hezbollah’s criticism of the US.

My favourite gaffe is the one she produced recently in China, where she said a press conference: “I have met a lawyer who told me that the Chinese courts are much faster than the French ones. You see: Before giving lessons to others, we should make comparison.”  I would categorise her comments about the European Central Bank and French competitiveness also as remarkably fresh.

 

In most western countries such a politician would have either never risen to the top, or been destroyed shortly after arrival. This has not happened in France, and it does not feel like this is about to happen soon.

 

So what are the strategic consequences for the French right? Before Royal arrived on the scene, Sarkozy was the clear favourite to win in May. The reason was that he was the only top politician in France who offered a realistic alternative to the generation of old men who have been running France for the last three decades. Factually, that may still be the case, but Royal may be offering an even more alluring prospect: While Sarkozy offers new policies, she offers a break with politics as we know it. In a country with its revolutionary instincts still in tact, this is a tantalising prospect, one too good to miss.

 

There are two broad strategies the UMP can pursue: The first is to run a competent, but traditional campaign, in the hope the Royal’s teflon strategy will crack. The second is to nominate a candidate who tries to fight Royal on her own turf.  Sarkozy has started out on the former position, and has since moved to the latter. He replaced his speechwriter to deliver the kind of ECB-bashing populist folklore that Royal has been delivering from the start. In one sense, she has already won the election. She has moved Sarkozy onto her court.

 

De Villepin’s argument is that Sarkozy cannot win this kind of contest. I don’t think Villepin believes that either he or anyone else in the party stands a better chance of defeating her than Sarkozy. De Villepin may be deluded, but he is not quite that deluded. But he may have a point in that Sarkozy is perhaps better off fighting an issues-based campaign. In many respects, the self-made Sarkozy presents a far bigger break with the past than Royal, who is after all an ENArque, and who if elected will surround herself with old men from the past.

 

A policy-based compaign is certainly not guaranteed to win Sarkozy the election. But since the French right have no Royal in her midst, it is the best strategy the UMP has.

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