The Sarkozy Presidency

Breaking the Mould?

G. Raymond

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349438884, 9781137025319
• eBook ISBN: 9781137025326
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sarkozy came to power promising radical political and social change while simultaneously developing a presidential persona that melded the public and the personal under the glare of media attention, unparalleled in the French Fifth Republic. This volume provides a detailed analysis of the fit between his ambitions and the outcomes of his presidency

1

Nicolas Sarkozy: End of the Republican Monarchy?

Gino G. Raymond

It is one of the enduring paradoxes of French political culture that the society which, as George Steiner put it, began the ‘cycle of lived history a second time’ (1988: 151), so radical was its determination to break with the past, should have shown itself so susceptible to atavistic notions of leadership. Within little more than a decade after the taking of the Bastille, and with the accession of Napoleon to the role of First Consul in the country’s three-man executive, France had delivered herself to a military dictator and prospective emperor. Interspersed in the nineteenth century with failed attempts at constitutional monarchy, since the Revolution the susceptibility of France to a providential leader who eclipses parliament, especially one in uniform, is a recurrent theme in its history. The constitution of the Fifth Republic, however, while clearly attempting to prevent the institutional failings of previous republics from being repeated, provided new opportunities for the emergence of a figure to dominate the political landscape due to the new blueprint for the exercise of executive power.

The constitutional creation of a republican monarch

The contradiction inherent in the notion of a republican monarch could be traced back to the beginning of modern France’s political culture, and helps to explain the particular pertinence of the tension between democratic egalitarianism and quasi-monarchical leadership. The country’s first revolutionary constitution was a monarchical one which, although it lasted only from September 1791 to August 1792 before it was swept away by the more radical turn of the Revolution, nonetheless pointed to what would be the ongoing conflict characteristic of a Republic that had at its core the rights of man, but simultaneously entrusted their safe-keeping to an oligarchy of representatives (Furet and Halévi, 1996: 245). By the time Charles de Gaulle became undersecretary of state for war in the final days of the Third Republic, distrust of the oligarchy of representatives had long cemented populist anti-parliamentary sentiment as a permanent feature of political life in France.

The constitution of the Fifth Republic was not entirely new and vacuum-sealed, and has been described as a ‘rag-bag’ that still contained the legacy of a framework of government that was centred on the prime minister’s office (Machin, 1994: 98). The old party leaders of the Fourth Republic had voted de Gaulle into office because of their failure to find a way out of the impasse of the Algerian crisis, but that did not signal a wholehearted enthusiasm for the new constitution that he wanted, and that was approved by referendum in September 1958. Under the new constitution, de Gaulle inherited the traditional powers of the head of state exercised by his predecessors in the Third and Fourth Republic in judicial, legislative and diplomatic matters, and with regard to appointments to the public and military service. The break from the past came with the new consecration of the president as the supreme arbiter of the nation’s interests. Article 5 defined the president’s remit as the guarantor of France’s independence, its territorial integrity and the observance of treaty obligations. But the potential for the exercise of personalised power was most marked in the domestic sphere, in comparison with previous constitutions, by the provisions of article 16, which allowed the president the emergency powers to take whatever measures might be required to counter what he judged to be a threat to the integrity of the Republic’s institutions and the sovereignty of the state (Stevens, 1996: 75).

The powers in article 16 were deployed, uniquely, by de Gaulle in 1961, when he had to face down the quartet of Generals (Challe, Salan, Jouhaud and Zeller) effectively threatening a military coup in France by siding with those opposed to Algerian independence and encouraging disobedience to the government in Paris. Although exceptional, this prerogative, together with less dramatic powers such as appointments to the Constitutional Council and the power of decision over the use of referenda, enhanced the perception of presidential power as unassailable. The constitution still accommodated the exercise of prime ministerial power, in the fields of policy-making, the coordination of the business of government and the relationship with parliament. But the fact that in 1959 de Gaulle confided this post to one of his most trusted supporters, Michel Debré, made it improbable that a precedent would be set for prime ministerial action that could establish it as a sphere of legitimacy or authority challenging the president’s. Moreover, such was the widespread desire for a solution to the Algerian crisis, during the most difficult years from 1958 to the Accords d’Evian granting independence in 1962, that in terms of presidential style, de Gaulle could deploy a monarchical hauteur or loftiness, almost unchallenged. Fear had fostered a sense of deference, even among the political class, in the light of the prospective catastrophe for France resulting from the war in Algeria.

Once de Gaulle had achieved his objective in Algeria and the crisis was over, he was not going to allow the old fractious party rivalries to dominate national politics again. In April 1961 he outlined his objections to the mechanism that made the president dependent on an electoral college for his election. For de Gaulle, an electoral college was not a sufficiently broadly-based mandate for the presidency. Using the provisions of the constitution, notably article 11, in September 1962 de Gaulle announced his intention to call a referendum on the election of the president by universal suffrage. The former president of the Fourth Republic and a member of the Constitutional Council in the Fifth Republic, René Coty, called the move a ‘constitutional coup d’état’ (Chevalier and Conac, 1991: 677).¹ Other voices were raised to condemn the move in similarly dramatic terms. But when the verdict of the electorate was cast on 28 October 1962, de Gaulle’s victory was clear-cut and he could announce to the people of France that they had ‘sealed the condemnation of the disastrous party-based regime’ (Chevalier and Conac, 1991: 682). The Fifth Republic had witnessed the foundation of its ‘republican monarchy’ (Duverger, 1974).

As de Gaulle was fashioning the quasi-monarchical prerogatives of the Fifth Republic’s presidency, one of his most virulent critics was the other, future, dominant presidential figure of the post-war Republic, the socialist François Mitterrand. In his opinion, the Fifth Republic had been brought about by what amounted to a coup d’état in 1958, and he argued that de Gaulle sustained the regime by the systematic violation of the constitution and by resorting to the arbitrary exercise of personalised power (Mitterrand, 1964). After his election to the presidency, and although he would be the longest serving of the Fifth Republic’s presidents with two seven-year mandates, by the end of his tenure Mitterrand would still occupy the function as it was defined by de Gaulle. While de Gaulle was the lofty war hero, Mitterrand was just as elevated and untouchable in his own way, remotely manipulating the fortunes of actors on the political stage and deserving of his nickname ‘the sphinx’. Albeit in different ways, they were both men whose destinies were inextricably entwined with France’s, and in Mitterrand’s case the sense of predestination was there from a very early age. As he confessed to the journal Globe, as a child he had always dreamed of being a king or a pope (Giesbert, 1990: 19).

There were twists to the relationship between president and prime minister, endured by Mitterrand and his successor, Jacques Chirac, that would have been inconceivable to de Gaulle and the authors of the constitution. The first period of ‘cohabitation’ in 1986–8, yoking a socialist President Mitterrand with a Gaullist Prime Minister Chirac, due to the defeat of the Left majority in the legislative elections, posed a unique challenge to the dual executive, or ‘semi-presidential’ French system (Levy and Skach, 2008). Within a year of the first period of cohabitation, however, Mitterrand’s deft deployment of the presidential role as the supreme arbiter, and his underlying political tactic of dividing and seducing his opponents, had effected his ‘return to a state of grace’ in the eyes of the electorate (Favier and Martin-Rolland, 1991: 691). The path was thus prepared for Mitterrand’s election to a second mandate in 1988. As the subsequent periods of cohabitation suggested, in 1993–5 and 1997–2002, the French electorate were perfectly capable of varying their expectations and a president with a talent for exploiting the prestige of his office could use it to repair his credibility, as his prime minister became bogged down in the management of often intractable domestic issues.

Having been out-manoeuvred by Mitterrand during the first cohabitation, once installed as his successor, Chirac failed to take his cue from his presidential predecessor. His attempts to reshape the presidency and lessen the gap between the office and the people failed to convince them. In terms of presidential discourse, Chirac’s 1995 campaign was characterised by a commitment to heal ‘la fracture sociale’ or the fault-lines in French society. Nonetheless, his presidency was punctuated by social disorder, peaking in the widespread urban riots of autumn 2005. Constitutionally, Chirac’s desire to see the presidential mandate reduced from seven to five years, though endorsed in the referendum of 24 September 2000, did not significantly diminish the widespread public distrust of his presidency. When he finally quit the political stage in 2007, his legacy was characterised by a defensive political discourse and few enduring achievements (Cole, 2008: 198).

It could be argued that the unfulfilled ambition behind Chirac’s reform of the presidential mandate, namely to alter the perception of its Olympian nature and bring it closer to the people, stemmed from the paradoxical fact that he was not Olympian enough. Only someone commonly agreed to be an ardent defender of France’s prestige as a global power, like de Gaulle, could strike the most powerful blow in dismantling it, as he did by conceding Algerian independence. Similarly, any candidate claiming loyalty to the Gaullist legacy had to be someone perceived as pressed unambiguously from the presidential mould shaped by de Gaulle, before they could successfully aspire to dégaulliser the office (Colombani, 1998: 305). Chirac’s weakness was his inability to shake off the perception of him as the political operator he had always been, in order to assume the mantle of the supreme arbiter. Ultimately, Chirac was enamoured of the power of the presidency rather than embodying its authority, and this inability to fill the contours of the office made him, to use the phrase of one of his keenest observers, the résident rather than the président of the Republic (Colombani, 1998).

The first president to be born after World War II, the first to have begun his political career after May ’68, the first to gain ministerial office after the fall of the Berlin Wall (with the collapse of its concomitant ideological certainties), and the first to be shaped by the Internet age, the advent of Nicolas Sarkozy seemed to signal a figure who would emancipate the presidency most unambiguously from the legacy of de Gaulle.

Breaking the mould?

At the level of appearances, it is difficult to imagine two more contrasting images of the French presidency than those offered by de Gaulle and Sarkozy. The former was the patrician, austere, Catholic figure moved by a profound sense of duty rather than the love of material things. The de Gaulle household was always characterised by financial prudence, and the considerable royalties made from de Gaulle’s memoirs went largely to a foundation which looked after children like his own Down’s syndrome daughter, Anne (Fenby, 2010: 362). In terms of style, the contrast could not be greater with the figure nicknamed the ‘bling bling’ president by the French media, with his Ray-Ban and Rolex-toting image, and his determination to share the spotlight with the rich and famous. From the outset, Sarkozy faced severe criticism for his willingness to compromise the dignity of his office by sharing the convulsions of his sentimental attachments with the media, first regarding his separation from his wife Cécilia, followed by the very public courtship and eventual marriage to the former model, Carla Bruni. Sarkozy was the presidential face of the obsession with celebrity, and his mandate was regularly punctuated by press exposés of his appetite for high-profile friendships with personalities such as actors and businessmen, even with dubious pasts (Mandonnet, 2008).

Both de Gaulle and Sarkozy were men of rupture, advocates of a break with the past. In 1958 de Gaulle inherited a situation of crisis in which the institutions of the Fourth Republic had failed. By the time Sarkozy hit the presidential campaign trail in 2007, a sense of crisis had been building for the best part of a decade, illustrated by the success of the far right with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s second place in the first round of the presidential elections in 2002, heightened by the French voters’ rejection of a draft constitution for the European Union in the referendum of 2005, and finally, literally exploding on the streets of France in the autumn of that year, in acts of violence not seen since May 1968. While de Gaulle was responding to a system that was broken, in 2007 Sarkozy put himself forward as a leader capable of responding to a system that was clearly dysfunctional. But whereas the abiding images of de Gaulle are of stubborn immovability as the embodiment of France’s eternal interests, Sarkozy cultivated the image of permanent movement under constant scrutiny, to the point of allowing one of France’s new generation of writers to pen an intimate portrait of his life on the campaign trail (Reza, 2007). De Gaulle’s style was an emanation of his deeply held conviction regarding his mission to defend a ‘certain idea of France’ (de Gaulle, 1954: 11). Sarkozy’s style expressed his adaptation to the modern requirements of a successful presidential campaign, and his idea of France was rooted in the opportunities of the moment.

From the moment of his election victory, there were attempts to situate Sarkozy in terms of a political legacy that was preponderantly influenced by the Gaullist affinity with the Bonapartist tradition in politics (Hewlett, 2007), according to the classic typology of French right-wing politics established by René Rémond (1982): a cult of authoritative leadership, a strong centralised state, the pursuit of national unity underwritten by direct democratic consultation with the people, the defence of national independence and grandeur on the global stage. But as Rémond himself has argued, de Gaulle was far more inspired by the republicanism of Third Republic figures like Léon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau, than by the imperial pretensions of Bonapartism (1982: 324). The similarities between Gaullism and Bonapartism stemmed from a pragmatic adaptation of historic traditions such as centralism and Jacobin populism to the economic and political needs of post-war France. Sarkozy’s Bonapartism, however, was widely perceived as superficial and equally widely caricatured, stemming from a similarity of stature and an appetite for self-aggrandising publicity (Rambaud, 2011).

The lack of a substratum of genuinely Gaullist philosophical conviction about the nature of the presidential mission can be viewed as a factor leading to what has been described as Sarkozy’s ‘theme park’ politics: a Bonapartist leadership style, an admiration for money reminiscent of the Orleanist regime, and an accommodation with religion evocative of the Bourbon legitimists (Marlière, 2009). None of these characteristics, however, form a coherent vision, but appear punctually as a matter of political expediency dictated by any given set of circumstances. In contrast to the evolution of France’s history and the development of the enduring values that impregnated de Gaulle with a sense of ‘la France profonde’, a kind of spiritual connection with the nation’s soul that seeps through books such as La France et son armée (1938), Sarkozy was most enamoured of the image of himself as a self-made man. History was used, frequently and eclectically, to embroider the narrative of a self-motivating presidential persona, rather than portrayed as the indispensable force shaping and legitimising that persona. For Sarkozy, the conquest of power by rising to France’s supreme office provided the ideal context in which to exercise his desire to ‘build, act and solve problems’ (Sarkozy, 2006: 1). Whereas de Gaulle’s pragmatism was anchored by a sense, however mythical, of national destiny, Sarkozy’s accession to the presidency was characterised by a much less complex sense of opportunity, and this enabled him to make radical choices that app...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1  Nicolas Sarkozy: End of the Republican Monarchy?
• 2 ‘Sarkozysm’: From Political Ambivalence to Hard Right
• 3 Sarkozy’s Political Leadership and the Institutions of the Fifth Republic
• 4 Sarkozy and Europe: Back to the Future
• 5 ‘A Piecemeal Approach with No Vision’: French Policy Towards Africa under Nicolas Sarkozy
• 6 The Sarkozy Years: Attempting to Define a New Paradigm for Diversity Governance in France
• 7 Pension Reform under Sarkozy: A Quantitative Rather Than a Qualitative Change
• 8 Culture and the State under Sarkozy
• Conclusion
• Index