Le Showdown

The first round of France’s presidential elections, held April 22, proved him right. Out of a dozen candidates, two now move to the second round, slated for May 6. The brash former interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy took 31 percent of the vote. Ségolène Royal, the beautiful common-law wife of the Socialist party chairman, who rose out of her party’s second tier to prove herself a politician of uncanny charisma, was just behind him at 26. Going into this election, polls showed 70 percent of French people thought their country was in decline. Forty percent professed to be undecided just days before the election.

But they didn’t behave that way. Eighty-five percent of the public showed up to vote, the highest tally in a first round since 1965. Interview shows with the major candidates throughout the campaign could draw a sixth of the country to their television sets. Extremists seemed to be the big losers. The fascistic National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen suffered its first major reverse in two decades, falling to 10 percent. The French Communist party, once a European powerhouse, finished seventh, pulling in a microscopic 2 percent of the vote. French editorialists are confidently writing the obituary of both, explaining their survival as somehow linked to outgoing president Jacques Chirac, a holdover of the Cold War. But it is not that simple.

The French system of presidential elections is similar to the one Louisiana still uses in many of its elections. The first round is open to all comers, provided they can gather enough signatures from the country’s mayors. The top two face off against one another, no matter what their tallies are. This system produces perversities. In the last presidential elections in 2002, the hard left–antiglobalist, Trotskyite, and otherwise–was so energized that it drew votes away from the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, with the result that not Jospin but Le Pen made it into the second round. This enabled Chirac, who in those pre-Iraq days had rock-bottom approval ratings, to win re-election in the second round with 82 percent of the vote.

This year’s perversity is somewhat different. It is that Ségolène Royal, after a bold start to her campaign, fell into such a slough of incompetence that she drew an opportunistic alternative candidate into the race: François Bayrou, a marginal politician of the center right, with no platform and no program. He won 18 percent of the vote, not enough to advance to the second round but enough for him to claim (whether credibly or delusionally) a role as power broker. Drawn into the campaign by the widespread impression that Royal was unfit to be president, he may wind up making her president.

Little rascals

The election was, as virtually all the candidates admitted, a referendum on whether the French wanted to be ruled by Nicolas Sarkozy, probably the most gifted European politician of his generation and certainly the most polarizing. A lot of French voters were comfortable with the idea. The 11 million votes Sarkozy received were a record for first round candidates. In fact, he got more votes than the top two candidates of 2002 combined. A onetime protégé of Chirac who has become a bitter rival, Sarkozy describes himself as a “man of the right”–but his campaign was a Nixonian mix of tough-on-crime rhetoric (he plans to introduce minimum sentences into the French criminal justice system) and programs of the left (such as affirmative action).

This left-wing side to Sarkozy allowed him to pay homage to his opponents while throwing them off-balance, and to bolster his claims to represent all Frenchmen. Thus, while he was the only candidate with a serious plan to shrink the French state, he planned to do so by natural attrition, filling only half the spots that opened up due to retirements. He talked about the “moralization of investment capitalism” (a favorite trope of the antiglobalists), opined that France should have been more protectionist towards its steel industry in recent decades, and promised Le Monde that his very first act as president would be to convene a conference to guarantee salary equality between men and women.

The 50th anniversary of the European Union fell in the middle of the campaign, and papers were filled with articles that were banal, pompous, and sad. In a country that had derailed the E.U. by resoundingly rejecting its constitution in a referendum in 2005, Sarkozy was the most committed Euro-skeptic, a leftish position in France. Sarkozy called proposals for another referendum “madness.” He was less interested in Europe than in France.

And Frenchness. Sarkozy suggested that, as president, he would establish a department of “immigration and national identity.” Sarkozy’s own advisers were divided about the idea. The historian Pierre Nora made the best case against it, saying that to link immigration and national identity was “either a tactic, a misunderstanding, or a short-sighted idea, because the shaking of national identity is not just a matter of immigration–far from it.” (Nora argued that what had most decisively altered France’s identity was peace.) Strong majorities–55 percent in one Figaro poll–were thrilled by Sarkozy’s idea.

Sarkozy’s ability to harness the identity issue was central to the removal–perhaps the permanent removal–of the extreme right from French politics. The National Front had trouble figuring out who its friends and enemies were, and descended into unintentional slapstick. It actively sought the support of the half-Cameroonian, Israel-hating comedian Dieudonné, who had run as the candidate of a small group called Europalestine in the last European elections. Dieudonné announced that he would give his vote to whoever had the most credible position on the fate of Cameroon’s inland pygmy tribes. At the height of this campaign, Dieudonné appeared at a public function with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s wife Jany (who had led a group called SOS Children of Iraq during the anti-Saddam U.N. embargo) to press the pygmy cause.

The 20 days of rioting in the autumn of 2005 were, of course, the main shadow hanging over the election. This spring there was a minor riot in the Gare du Nord–a major train and subway hub in Paris–and André Gerin, the Communist mayor of the historically violent suburb of Vénissieux, published a book in which he claimed to discern “the seeds of civil war.” Sarkozy’s opponents sought to use his directness on the subject of suburban disorder to wrap him in Le Pen’s mantle. In October 2005, Sarkozy had used the word “racaille” to describe suburban criminals, and it became the rallying cry of all who stood against him. It is often mistranslated in English as “scum”–which does convey the way Sarkozy’s more paranoid opponents seek to depict him: as a kind of Nazi keen to dehumanize his fellow citizens. But almost certainly Sarkozy was trying to do the very opposite. Racaille means “riff-raff” or “rabble” or “mob.” It is not a flattering word but it is not a dehumanizing one, either–its effect is to belittle the political import of the rioters. It is derived from the same word (rascaille) from which we get our own word “rascal.” At a time when some French people were muttering about Muslims and dark-skinned foreigners, racaille was a relatively level-headed thing to say.

François Bayrou made hay of Sarkozy’s unpopularity in high-crime neighborhoods. “He hasn’t been able to go there for months, despite all the guards he has around him. Do you think it’s a healthy sign in a country like ours when the minister of the interior himself can’t go to the suburbs?” You could also ask whether it is a healthy sign when presidential candidates offer criminals a veto on the country’s crime policy.

Grecian formula

There is a famous confrontation from the 1974 presidential campaign that conservative Frenchmen like to quote. During a debate in which François Mitterrand consistently tried to pass off his coalition of Socialists and Communists as somehow more generous than its rivals, his opponent, conservative Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, replied, “Monsieur Mitterrand, you don’t have a monopoly of the heart.” Giscard won.

The genius of Ségolène Royal, who continues to be vastly underrated as a candidate, has been to pull a Giscard in reverse. Born in West Africa to a colonial military officer, she set out to show that the right does not have a monopoly of order. In so doing, she has brought about a sea-change in her party. This change has been long brewing. In October 2004, stung by the way France’s crime problem had been used against them in the 2002 elections, the Socialists met to chart a course for the next ones. One roundtable discussion addressed the party’s dependence on the ideology of 1968, particularly on matters of crime and family life. “Without being a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary,” wrote the Socialist aide Laurent Baumel at the time, “one can safely assert that the new personal liberties that the men and women of the ‘1968 generation’ enjoyed, the chances they got to escape more traditional family models, did not have wholly positive effects on their children’s identity and adjustment.”

Royal was flexible enough to manipulate these family values to defeat party rivals Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius, two vastly more experienced, considerably more mainstream, and much better organized politicians. Royal is not married, but she and her partner, Socialist party chairman François Hollande, have four children. She insisted she didn’t want young girls pressured into wearing racy underwear–which must happen a lot because it struck a chord. She said she wanted to “draw inspiration” from the way Tony Blair treated business as a partner for the left, not an adversary. She criticized the effects of the réduction du temps de travail–a strictly enforced limitation of the work week to 35 hours that was the signature domestic-policy initiative of the Jospin government. On one subject after another, she was like Bill Clinton attacking Sister Souljah’s violent rap lyrics, declaring her independence from the unions and other interest groups whose embrace, however loving, had robbed her party of its mobility. And she wrapped that talk, unusual for a French socialist, in a feminist rhetoric, calling it an assertion of her “liberté” as a woman.

Some of her ideas were populist and even dangerous. Her instinct is to distrust forms, to prefer “real” democracy to “bourgeois” democracy. From a book by the political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon she borrowed an idea of “citizen juries,” suggesting that elected officials be subjected to “surveillance populaire” by vaguely defined panels of randomly selected citizens. . . . By surveillance she meant what we would call oversight, but the English sense of “surveillance” was never far off. On cold reflection, this attempt to make democracy more “real” is deeply undemocratic–if our elective representatives are subject to veto, then we don’t really have elected rulers. But there was not much cold reflection in the dazzling light of the nomination battle, and 59 percent of the public backed her plan.

For a time. Once the frenzy of the nominating campaign was over, Royal proved a candidate so weak as to horrify the Socialist rank and file. For a politician who speaks so often about listening to ordinary people, she is authoritarian in private, according to Eric Besson, a snubbed top aide who gave a bestselling book-length interview this spring before defecting to the Sarkozy camp. She does not have an intellect of the very top caliber and she is not built for the unglamorous, reflective business of organizing, course-setting, and administration. In a way that will remind Americans of their own president, she misspeaks almost constantly. A practical joker got her cell phone number and tricked her into endorsing the independence of Quebec. On a trip to China, she told an official that France could learn a lot from China’s speedy justice system. Meaning to attack one of her detractors for his misplaced wit (esprit), she accused him of spiritualité (spirituality). People understood what she meant, but it was like calling Greeks “Grecians.”

And what is more, after having “stood up to” her party’s interest groups, Royal, in the sober light of dawn, may have realized that Strauss-Kahn and Fabius knew something she didn’t. The shrinking of her party’s base, and of the left in general, meant that the Socialists could not win the presidency without the support of every last special pleader in the country. At this point, she began to grovel, and it was an undignified spectacle. It was as if, two months before the presidential election in 1992, Bill Clinton had suddenly said, “Oh, gosh! I must have sounded awfully harsh on poor Sister Souljah last June! What a terrible mistake! I’m sorry!” She forgot the nice things she had said about Tony Blair. She accused the police of overreacting to the riot at the Gare du Nord. She attacked the head of Medef, the French businessmen’s federation, for making much the same criticisms she herself had made of the 35-hour work week. Eventually, a combination of her misstatements and her equivocations opened the possibility that there might not be a Socialist in the second round at all, and that the presidency might be there for the taking by an ambitious person. Such as, for instance, François Bayrou.

But even if the magic always wears off, Royal remains a magical politician. She is, like Clinton or Germany’s Gerhard Schröder, an instinctual animal of democracy–oriented around campaigning, not governing. The less she reasons, the better she does at it, creating opportunity after opportunity through ingenious demagogic improvisations. And that is what she is now doing with Bayrou.

Enemy of promise

Until he threw his hat into the ring of the presidential campaign last December, François Bayrou was known to the French public for three things. First, as minister of education in the mid-1990s, he presided over a doomed attempt at a kind of school voucher system. Second, in 2002, when Jacques Chirac united the entire French center-right into the UMP party (now led by Sarkozy), Bayrou led a rump of the UDF (the Giscard d’Estaing party) that stayed out. Although the UDF has been referred to as “the center” since Bayrou interposed himself in the campaign, his party has never been distinguishable from the UMP and has no real ideological reason to exist. Until this spring, it had the same goal as the Free Democratic party in Germany–to command enough of a base to shake down any narrowly elected government for a couple of ministerial posts. Third, Bayrou had the most outsize ego in modern French politics. According to an election-season profile in Le Monde, he replied “My virility,” when asked what his wife liked best about him. “One of these days, he will explode from vanity,” Jacques Chirac, an expert in such matters, once said.

Rather ingeniously, Bayrou defined the main problem in French political life as broken promises and proposed to address that problem by making no promises himself. So he had no electoral platform. This left him in a position of running as the candidate of “change” against two candidates who, whatever their flaws, would change the country more than he would. As an aide to Sarkozy told Le Monde, quite correctly, “Monsieur Bayrou proposes only that the president come not from the Socialist party or the UMP but from the UDF. Some break with the past!”

There was, however, a need for such a candidate, particularly among Paris’s bourgeois-bohemians, or bobos, as they are called. (That word, coined by David Brooks, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s gift to the language of Montaigne. See Le Grand Robert de la Langue Française, vol. I, p. 1492.) Bayrou is the candidate of the 18 percent of voters who were at once too politically correct to vote for Sarkozy and too intellectually proud to vote for Royal. But casting a vote for Bayrou turns out to have been like filing for an extension on one’s taxes. Now, Sarkozy and Royal are the only two candidates left in the race, and they will have to choose. Since Sarkozy will get most of the votes of the National Front (10 percent), and Royal will get all of the votes of the hard left (7 percent), the election will be decided by who gets the votes of Bayrou’s 18 percent. Bayrou said he would not endorse anyone. But, having said that “Nicolas Sarkozy, through his closeness to the business world and media powers, through his taste for intimidation and threats, will concentrate powers like never before,” he didn’t have to.

Polls show Bayrou’s voters leaning Royal’s way–by 35-to-25 or 45-to-39–although Royal will need a more decisive majority than that to carry the day. Daniel Cohn- Bendit, the 1968 student leader once known as Danny the Red, joined the Royal camp after his fellow Greens were demolished with barely 1 percent of the vote, and warned that the battle was uphill. “We have to avoid getting locked in the traditional right-left debate,” he said. “If we do, Sarkozy has won.” Sarkozy has networked and picked up the endorsement of most UDF politicians.

But in the days right after the election, Royal pulled a move of inspired, illuminated, almost diabolical brilliance. She decided to appeal, in a womanly way, to the purring megalomania of Bayrou, by telling him, in effect, “Oh, you weren’t really eliminated, mon p’tit chou . . . ” She challenged him to a “debate,” which was scheduled to take place on the afternoon of Saturday, April 28 (the day after this article is printed). It is always possible that this debate may backfire. It may leave Royal with a choice between attacking Bayrou and appearing sycophantic and unpresidential. Sarkozy may turn it to her disadvantage when he and Royal meet for the “real” debate on May 2.

But what is “real,” anyway? Engaging with the man whose voters she needs is a bold move. It is the break in French politics she has always spoken of. It is a promise kept. Bayrou’s ego and Royal’s antidemocratic ideas of “authentic” democracy–that what happens at the ballot box is less important than what happens on the television screen–have led the two to collude in the pleasing fantasy that the first round of the election did not happen, and in the dangerous principle that a democratic verdict can be safely ignored. In a week, we’ll see if they are right.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.