Whenever an American presidential election threatens to produce a controversial or conservative victor, some of our intellectuals and celebrities swear that, should the dread event come, they’re going to “move to Paris.”
This year there wouldn’t be much point.
France’s presidential election season has just begun and it looks like ours. One side believes the country is doing just fine, even evolving into a better civilization. The other side believes the country’s present course is a death spiral, and the election is basically a referendum on whether the public wishes its civilization to die or not. Under Donald Trump, the Republican party has become—and is likely to remain—the party that holds the second view.
In France this transformation is coming, but it is going to take a different institutional form. The country already has its apocalyptic party: the National Front (FN), which has been a major player in French politics for three decades. Although the FN is scrupulously democratic, the number of French people who fear it is the seed of a new fascist movement has generally exceeded the number who see it merely as a forthright expression of patriotism. That appears to be changing. The FN’s hostility to the European Union, to mass immigration, to free trade: These now strike a chord in a far wider segment of the French population. And since the British vote to leave the European Union last June, it seems possible these goals are susceptible of realization.
On top of that, the FN’s eloquent and telegenic leader, Marine Le Pen, has spent the last five years modernizing the party. She has purged activists fond of anti-semitic innuendos, embraced a trade platform that would please Donald Trump and Sherrod Brown, let down Catholics who had hoped the party might offer a home for resistance to gay marriage, and quarreled publicly and stridently with her own father, the party’s founder. The view among France’s political analysts is that these moves have attracted more voters than they have repelled, and that the FN is going to make it into the second round of next spring’s presidential elections.
That turns the upcoming selection of candidates by the two traditional parties—the Socialists of President François Hollande and the conservative Republicans of former president Nicolas Sarkozy—into a game of musical chairs. By next summer one of the two parties that has dominated French politics since the late 1950s will be on its deathbed.
It has generally been assumed that the moribund party will be the Socialists. Battered by terrorism and unemployment for much of his tenure, Hollande has seen his popularity ratings fall into a sub-Nixonian abyss. An early November poll by the national daily Le Figaro found that only 11 percent of French people have “confidence” in him. Occasionally his numbers nose up to the twenties. That has happened after each of the Islamist terrorist attacks of the past two years, when the French have felt they must stand behind their head of state. But then Hollande will say something silly, and his numbers fall.
In October, two journalists at the daily Le Monde, Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, came out with a book based on interviews with Hollande, who had given them extraordinary access over his first four years. It was called “A President Shouldn’t Say That” (“Un président ne devrait pas dire ça. . .”). Hollande’s entourage doubtless hoped it would cast him in a new light, as a truth-teller, a taker-on of taboos. But, as the book climbed to the top of the bestseller lists, it was clear that a president really shouldn’t say such things.
One of Hollande’s most oratorical flights, as he addressed the increasing presence of Islam in France, was: “The veil-wearing woman of today is going to be the Marianne of tomorrow,” Marianne being the symbol of all the liberties protected by the French republic. If you contacted the five smartest political consultants in France and gave them a week to construct the quotation most likely to infuriate the broadest cross-section of the voting public, it is unlikely you could top that one. Hollande confirmed a suspicion that conservatives and moderates have long held—that politicians now see the promotion of minorities, rather than the advancement of the nation as a whole, as the motivating ideal in French life. It is the Socialists’ idea of what French politics is now “about.”
But Hollande did so in such a way as to convince Muslims in particular, and religious people in general, that he holds them in contempt. “What is the bet we’re making?” he said. “It is that this [veiled] woman will prefer liberty to servitude.” Of course, the leader of a democratic republic ought to operate on the assumption that everyone prefers liberty to servitude. The problem is that there are many different kinds of liberty—and Islam introduces into French society a new idea of liberty that a lot of people of Muslim background find preferable to the old one. According to this view, the choices of your children are built on the wisdom of your ancestors. You are reinforced and strengthened by having unbreakable alliances with them. This is a better kind of freedom than watching Internet pornography and buying worthless knick-knacks until, around the age of 40, you realize you are destined to be friendless, alone, and sad. That is the argument Hollande must win when he speaks to Muslims. It is a much more difficult argument to win than the one he thinks he’s having.
Republicans will choose their candidate in a two-round national primary on November 20 and 27, and the stakes are high. If Hollande’s Socialists are as weak as they look, then those who vote in the conservative primary will be doing more than choosing the country’s next president. They will also be choosing the leader of the party that will command the whole nonpopulist part of the French electorate, as the Democratic party may soon claim to do in the United States. The round of debates that began in mid-October has been a spectacle of contenders playing it safe. The favorite thus far is Alain Juppé, the mayor of Bordeaux, who served as prime minister a generation ago. Juppé’s attempts to reform the state were destroyed by massive strikes in 1995. On top of that, he was convicted a decade ago of having engaged in featherbedding in the Paris mayor’s office in the 1980s and ’90s. But time heals many wounds, and Juppé, now well into his seventies, has acquired an avuncular appeal. The candidates have argued over whether the retirement age for workers should be 62 or 63 and whether the maximum weekly hours an employee should be asked to work without receiving huge overtime benefits should be 35 or 37. Juppé is good at such debates. He offers what the Financial Times calls “a steady hand on the tiller.”
Other candidates are trying to break the mold. There is Bruno Le Maire, a literary former cabinet minister who is every Socialist’s favorite Republican. There is Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, an elegant and ambitious libertarian who, having forgotten the difference between conserv-atism and capitalism, believes the French economy has lessons to learn from Uber, most of them involving union-busting—a position that ought to win the votes of 2 or 3 percent in France. And there is Nicolas Sarkozy, the country’s greatest political operator.
Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, has dominated the recent debates. Increasingly he is dispensing with picayune accounting questions in order to concentrate on constructing mighty oratorical parallelisms, on painting doomsday scenarios, and on stirring the souls of swing voters. He is hammering away at Islam, calling it the only religion that is destabilizing French society. He has warned of a “demographic shock” if France takes too many refugees from Syria. After trailing by 12 points in early October, he has begun to rise in the polls.
Sarkozy’s candidacy would be perfectly designed for the elections of 2016 except for one thing: He ran the same campaign in 2007, promising to protect France against the vicissitudes of globalization, and did nothing. In fact, he wound up presiding over the largest influx of immigrants of any president in history.
In recent weeks, Sarkozy’s former top aide, Patrick Buisson, has published a bombshell bestseller in which he explained how it is that Sarkozy came to abandon his conservative line. Buisson speaks with some authority, since it was his ideas that not only neutralized the National Front’s vote but also rallied it behind Sarkozy. Like Dick Morris under Bill Clinton, Buisson was brought in to reacquaint with human nature a person so ambitious that he had forgotten what human nature was.
Buisson’s book is profound, philosophical, right-wing to the point of royalism, and eloquent about what went wrong in Sarkozy’s first term. In Buisson’s view, Sarkozy mastered the oratory of fighting for France’s silent majority, although he holds those people in contempt. Or perhaps because he holds them in contempt. Buisson suggests that what drives Sarkozy is not mere heartlessness or opportunism but an actual psychological defect. “Certain men,” Buisson writes, “are so constituted that they wind up hating the people who have helped, served or saved them.” Buisson is not the only former aide to feel that way. He notes that Sarkozy’s chief of staff, Emmanuelle Mignon, complained in an email: “We’re even developing the habit of thanking those who have betrayed us and punishing those who have helped us.”
Buisson feels betrayed. His book has been such an event in the political cycle because it is hard to conceive how French voters could fail to see what Buisson sees in Sarkozy. In an interview in mid-October, Sarkozy promised that should his own Republicans be eliminated in next spring’s presidential runoff, he would join Hollande’s Socialists in creating a barrage républicain against Le Pen’s FN. That is a legitimate view to hold, but not one consist-ent with winning the National Front’s votes. And if Sarkozy cannot do that, perhaps the Socialist party can make a more coherent case to be the party of France as a whole—especially if Hollande is beaten for the nomination by his law-and-order prime minister Manuel Valls.
The last time Sarkozy won the presidency, in 2007, the figure of his deal-cutting, ineffective, and unpopular mentor Jacques Chirac loomed over the electorate. “Having Buisson with me is a signal,” Sarkozy used to say. “It’s a guarantee that I’m not going to turn into Jacques Chirac.” Losing Buisson is a signal that voters may not give him another chance to.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.
