LETTER FROM PARIS: Super Sarko
Harriss, Joseph A.
LETTER FROM PARIS Super Sarko by Joseph A. Harriss N ICOLAS SARKOZY’S ELECTION NIGHT featured celebratory fireworks, French style. Gangs of hooded thugs from the hate-filled Paris suburbs...
...S PEEDY SARKO,” or “the hyperpresident,” as an awed French press delights in calling him, exudes nervous energy to the point where rumors fly that he must be sniffing something potent...
...As when he borrowed a friend’s private jet for a few days’ vacation aboard a 60-meter yacht off Malta belonging to one of France’s wealthiest businessmen (think, if you can, George W. and Laura frolicking with Donald Trump in Jamaica...
...A society where, mirabile dictu, effort and individual initiative would pay off, work would be more financially and socially rewarding than living on handouts...
...Partly the reaction was just an extension of France’s usual weekend fun and games—vandals burned over 50,000 cars last year—and partly it was because Sarkozy had previously had the temerity to call these people scum that he intended to clean up with a high-pressure hose...
...People don’t like JOSEPH A. HARRISS France’s sense of self-importance.… France is not liked Gulf and Straits of Hormuz...
...But there was also fear mixed with the resentment, and not only in the Paris suburbs: Sarkozy was threatening to create, like it or not, a modern France...
...Such a detached view of French foibles could only come from an outsider...
...As Le Figaro put it, “There’s something of Kennedy about him, a touch of glamour, a whiff of modernity...
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...There is hardly an ideology we don’t have a theory on,” she told the National Assembly...
...gratuitous, knee-jerk anti-Americanism Well now...
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...Café intellectuals from SaintGermain-des-Prés to Montparnasse, en garde...
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...W HETHER HE WILL IN FACT be as pro-American as many policymakers and thinktankers are predicting is another matter, even if several Atlantique-2 French maritime patrol planes are now providing some cover for U.S...
...Gangs of hooded thugs from the hate-filled Paris suburbs descended on Place de la Bastille to throw paving stones at gendarmes, while others throughout the country welcomed the new president with smashed shop windows and over 700 torched cars...
...Sometimes he oversteps the bounds of good taste into a tacky nouveau riche mode...
...For the millions with a vest46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2007 ed interest in the status quo of France’s blocked society, this is scary stuff...
...Certainly the days of Jacques Chirac’s gratuitous, knee-jerk anti-Americanism are over and good riddance...
...Neither did he take the consecrated elite route to the Élysée Palace, studying law rather than attending the École Nationale d’Administration that produces the country’s professional functionary/political class...
...A couple of years ago she took off to America for several months with a boyfriend...
...Even in the land of pourquoi pas...
...He likes to be photographed tieless in shirtsleeves—quite a change from Chirac, who once stuffily refused to remove jacket or tie at an informal summit where all the other heads of state were dressed casually...
...He will be achieving nothing less than the defeudalization begun in 1789...
...This is already ruffling feathers in Brussels and self-satisfied, or pretentious...
...Bush phoned him shortly after his election victory and afterwards called him “a very engaging, energetic, smart, capable person...
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...On the other hand, given the fierce, ingrained French resistance to change, it could be just another case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose...
...And his sojourn in New Hampshire this summer made him the first French president in living memory to spend a vacation in the U.S...
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...LETTER FROM PARIS Super Sarko by Joseph A. Harriss N ICOLAS SARKOZY’S ELECTION NIGHT featured celebratory fireworks, French style...
...Even for a cynic like your correspondent, long inured to the Great French Bluff, it is hard to avoid the impression that Sarkozy’s arrival marks a watershed in the history of modern France...
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...As an indication of how far this could go if Sarkozy has his way, his new minister of the economy, Christine Lagarde, a former chairman of an international Chicago-based law firm, says work—get this—might actually be more important than ideas...
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...Then on election night she conspicuously failed to show up for Sarkozy’s acceptance speech...
...Once asked where she would rather be if she had her wish, she replied, “Jogging in Central Park...
...Things like this: “France’s reputation abroad is not good these days...
...He is constantly in motion even when standing still, rolling shoulders, shifting weight, compressing knife-blade lips, hooded eyes flicking right and left...
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...If he can put France back to work, alter its self-image, and guillotine prancing pre-are over and good riddance...
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...I will restore the status of work,” he declared in his inaugural speech, “along with authority, standards, respect and merit...
...Both are teetotalers, bike riders, and risk-takers...
...The man has a vision of where he wants to take the country and the ego, charisma, and pragmatism to have a decent shot at succeeding...
...The overall image, presumably calculated, is American...
...The events...
...The first Legion of Honor medal Sarkozy awarded as president he pinned on Barbra Streisand’s ample bosom after a Paris concert...
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...At the June G8 Summit, Bush invited him to the U.S...
...He is also the first French president to be born after World War II, and the first not to have known Charles de Gaulle...
...Worse, from the stone-throwers’ viewpoint, new immigrants would have to respect the law and even learn the rudiments of the French language, or be sent back to where they came from...
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...An initial tension along with Gallic fixation on the glorious past, Sarkozy will be more than simply a new president...
...Joseph A. Harriss, a Paris-based American writer whose latest book is About France, will not miss Jacques Chirac...
...Underlying such aspects of bringing France kicking and screaming into the 21st century is Sarkozy’s clear-eyed view of what’s wrong with his country, starting with some basic and unpleasant verities...
...Historic times may be coming to France...
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...Even if it meant instilling foreign, indeed dreaded, Anglo-Saxon notions like optimism, discipline, and a can-do attitude...
...How far will this go to improving Franco-American ties...
...Sarkozy’s credentials in that regard are impeccable, starting with the fact that he is the son of a Hungarian immigrant...
...Which should not dampen a new rapport with the White House...
...But the glass is also half empty: 47 percent, or the equivalent of over 28 million of the general population, voted against...
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...it was a spectacular faux pas—tasteless exhibition of money and bling being perhaps the last French taboo, with exception made for show biz—that set tongues wagging and ink flowing...
...It didn’t quite have the ring of “Ask not what your country can do for you…” but the clarion call for a major shift to the right was clear...
...So much taller than Sarkozy that she has to wear flats while he is in his elevator shoes, photographers have to get the right angle so she doesn’t tower over him...
...Condoleezza Rice gave every sign of getting on well with Sarkozy’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner...
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...And it’s not just his bold plans to effectively scrap the debilitating 35-hour work week, make generous unemployment benefits rarer, cut high inheritance, wealth, and business taxes, and prune back the bloated civil service, important as those are...
...Sarkozy is George W. Bush’s kind of guy—brash, tough-talking, and nakedly ambitious (he once declared, “I don’t want to be president, I have to be president...
...That’s why I would like to tell you: that’s enough thinking, enough prevaricating...
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...W ITH A SOLID MAJORITY in the National Assembly, Sarkozy theoretically has the political capital he needs to push through his reforms...
...Let’s just roll up our sleeves...
...No conventional first lady, Cécilia’s erratic behavior keeps the French guessing what her next antic will be...
...After all, 53 percent of the French voted for him and his program...
...When his political enemies really want to smear him, they call him “Sarkozy the American,” a label he says he is proud to wear...
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...On key foreign policy issues like Kyoto Protocol/climate change, American missile defense sites in Europe, Turkish membership in the European Union, the International Criminal Court, and France’s military role in Afghanistan, long-established French positions are unlikely to change in Washington’s direction...
...Arnold Schwarzenegger spent a half-hour at the Élysée and came away praising Sarkozy’s position on climate change, his inclusion of other political tendencies in his government (Kouchner is a Socialist), and the fresh blood he is bringing to French politics...
...But Sarkozy is a pugnacious because it’s not likable enough...
...Not least, he is the first to openly admire things American, from the work ethic to upward mobility, Hemingway to Sylvester Stallone to Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive...
...With soulmate Tony Blair now departed, Crawford may ring with cries of “Yo, Sarko...
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...The Kennedy comparison is furthered by Sarkozy’s tall, willowy wife Cécilia, a former sometime model for Schiaparelli, who, according to breathless French media, “has the class of a Jacqueline Kennedy...
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...His first day on the job Sarkozy headed out of the Élysée Palace in shorts to jog in the Bois de Boulogne, his trailing security guy wearing an NYPD Tshirt...
...Navy ships in the Persian string of American visitors to France hints at a new atmosphere...
...He even castigates France’s “useless nostalgia about the past,” its Certainly the days of Jacques Chirac’s “arrogance and verbosity...
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Vol. 40 • September 2007 • No. 7
