The most important political contest of 2012, at least on this side of the Atlantic, will take place in France next spring. Nearly 45 million French nationals will be eligible to vote in the two-round contest, April 22 and May 6, to elect the president of the Republic to a five-year term. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has yet to officially announce his candidacy, now officially has a Socialist challenger in Francois Hollande, who won his party’s nomination last month in an unprecedented, national, open primary election. Hollande soundly defeated the head of the party, Martine Aubry, by nearly 400 thousand votes, more than thirteen percentage points.
From the tone of the babble over the last couple of months since the nation returned from summer holidays and the chattering classes began to speak about something other than DSK, one could have easily drawn the conclusion that political change would be inevitable, that the president, with approval ratings dipping below 30 percent, is facing certain defeat next year.
But this thing is far from over. True, the open primary election proved a huge success for the Socialists, who needed some mojo after the DSK scandal. And yes, no matter how much the French left and the fawning media establishment tried to paper over it, that untidy little business with DSK did not boost the Parti Socialiste (For a sad illustration of the depths to which a certain element of modern French society has fallen, see the nationally televised, and carefully staged interview of Dominique Strauss-Kahn following his return to France in which he speaks of his “moral weakness.”)
So following a troubled summer in which the national image took an international drubbing, the French public had good reason to be enthusiastic about this terrific exercise in democracy, the Socialist primary. More than 2.6 million voters participated in the first round and more than 2.8 million in the second round. Unlike any previous sort of primary election, all French voters had the possibility, in principle, to participate to select the Socialist candidate. To be eligible, you had to meet certain basic requirements. You had to be a registered voter (or, for minors, eligible to vote next year at the time of the 2012 presidential elections) and offer a minimum donation of one euro to help finance the primary. You also had to sign a declaration of support for the “values of the Left,” including equality, fairness, progress and all that. While doing so, the voters had the opportunity to provide certain personal information, like postal address and e-mail address, which of course is the invaluable bounty for the primary’s victor, Hollande, because his campaign will legally be able to use all that personal data.
By some estimates, the party raised nearly 4 million euros from the primary and collected between 600 thousand and 800 thousand e-mail addresses. Compared to US campaign budgets and compared to the 13 million e-mail addresses that the Obama campaign collected during the 2008 campaign, that may not seem like much. But for a political campaign in Europe, where spending limits are tighter and laws on privacy and personal data are much more restrictive, those are huge numbers. And they did it in a matter of weeks. Sarkozy’s campaign in 2007 is said to have had half that number of emails.
In the meantime, the president, as I noted in a previous post, was playing the politics of rarity. That which is rare, under the law of supply and demand, grows dearer. There’s been very little sign of a re-election campaign. Once it does get underway, it will likely be run primarily from the Élysée, but to this day it’s still difficult to identify who it is that will serve as campaign chief.
So when the president took to the airwaves October 27 for a nationally televised joint interview with TF1 and France 2, entitled “France Confronting the Crisis,” it was his first such appearance in nearly nine months. (The á propos was his return from the European summit where they “saved” Greece, until, that is, Papandreo returned home and announced a referendum…) Nearly 12 million people tuned in to watch Monsieur le president deliver a stately performance from the Élysée. In perspective, some 15 million tuned in for the France-New Zealand final of the Rugby World Cup in October. ”My role as the president of the republic,” he explained, “is not to talk. It’s not to comment on events. It is to take decisions. And I must go before the French and report to them the decisions that we have taken.”
So there it was. With that he framed the whole contest and marked the beginning of what US politics calls the Rose Garden campaign, a reference to the White House rose garden where sitting US presidents frequently address the press. This was Sarkozy at his finest, the president of all of France, serving the nation above the political fray. Yes, times are tough, the sub-text implied. No, we’re certainly not where we want to be economically. But in the face of the most dire economic crisis that Europe has faced in a generation or more, and knowing that things will likely get worse before they get better, what the nation needs is a statesman, one who has the experience to manage such serious matters and the gravitas to stand eye-to-eye with the Germans for a cause much bigger than the petty partisan politics of France.
Presto! a six-point jump immediately following the interview, according to one poll. Not only Sarkozy’s numbers saw a boost but, predictably, the bounce rippled across the center-right. And he demonstrated again with his talent for communication his ability to reach non-base voters. Some 55 percent of viewers found Sarkozy convincing to 45 percent who did not, according to another poll. Among voters on the right, an overwhelming 81 percent were swayed but even among voters on the left, 11 percent found him convincing.
Dominate escalation, to borrow a phrase from the arms race. Whatever momentum Hollande enjoyed coming out of the party primary had been dealt a critical blow. Sarkozy’s 75-minute television appearance deftly demonstrated that the president’s re-election campaign holds a dominant weapon: Sarkozy himself, who still has the power to overwhelm.
A friend and close observer sums it up well: “The longer Hollande is candidate, the less presidential he becomes.” On the right, the inverse is true. The less we see of Sarkozy the candidate, the more presidential he seems.
No question it will be a tough slog. Coming off the primary, the Socialists still enjoy a significant advantage in ground game and organization. If they’re capable of leveraging their considerable database edge, that can make up for a lot. But the PS election program, written months ago, calling for substantial increases in the state sector and spending is dead on arrival. Meanwhile the UMP has lost precious time for growing its grassroots. Ample evidence tells this author that much of France remains today sympathetic to the politics of the center-right. But with unemployment at 9.6 percent, the challenge for Sarkozy’s UMP will be voter apathy. Come Election Day, it will take more than an inspirational television interview to stir voters to the polls.
Expectations. Many argue that he has fallen short of what were enormous expections. Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to the leadership of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire and election in 2007 to the presidency signaled the advent of a new center-right in France. Out of the fragments of the Chirac-inspired Rassemblement pour la Republique, he brought a new conservative thinking to power in France, one determined to shake-up entrenched socialist ideas about the role of the state in the economy and society and the role of France in the world. This new center-right had exciting ambitions about how to reform the university system and public administration, about overturning non-sensical labor laws and lowering taxes to encourage growth. It employed an entirely new vocabulary about the value of hard work and entrepreneurship. It refused to accept France as an aging historical power but insisted on its leadership in the future, based on innovation and creativity. And in an exceptional departure, it had very different views on the United States of America, seeing les americains not the same as Villepin saw the US, as the hyper-power that needed to be balanced but as a society that could be admired, even occasionally embraced, as a source of sometimes great ideas and a friend in the liberal order of western civilization. This amity, at root, was based on a common affinity for just that, classical liberal ideas: the freedom of the individual. When it comes right down to it, that is what set this new French center-right apart. One hopes that, face á la crise, a return to these core liberal principles will ensure a second term.
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