LETTER FROM PARIS: Style Is the Man, Alas
Harriss, Joseph A.
ll ee T T T T ee RR f f RR oo MM P a P a R I R I ss Style Is the Man, Alas What a difference a year makes. by Joseph a. Harriss It seems only yesterDay that Nicolas Sarkozy was handily...
...Mirabile dictu, he has even made Jacques Chirac look good in retrospect to many who a year ago were sick of him...
...Unfortunately, in the process he has managed to—in no particular order—tarnish the image of the august French presidency, alienate most of those who swept him into office, revive the prospects of the languishing Socialist Party, dent the FrancoGerman special relationship, and incidentally become an inter national laughingstock due to his harum- scarum love life...
...Concern about Sarkozy’s stability has also built due to his hair-trigger temper...
...He got off to a promising start...
...With a bad case of divorce-rebound, he took Bruni to the same places where he had courted Cécilia, such as the pyramids and the pink ruins of Petra in Jordan...
...Visiting the Vatican, he was 18 minutes late for an audience with Pope Benedict and surreptitiously consulted text messages on his cell phone while in the holy presence...
...So unpopular is he that in the recent municipal elections, many candidates in his own UMP party actually asked him to stay away from their campaigns and deleted the party logo from their leaflets...
...Sarkozy’s erratic, tone-deaf style has been not only wrong, it’s been obliviously self-destructive...
...But taking up so soon with a supermodel and luxury rock chick, flamboyant former mistress of a string of conquests with names like Trump and Jagger, self-styled man-eater on record as preferring polygamy and polyandry...
...T i c n i d e m l fi a — d n a h i h e k a s o t s e s f e r o h w n a m w o n k l r o w e h t n i y r n e z i i c c i a r c o m d b e ound F t rench t as about Sarkozy...
...Add to that a soap opera mix of offspring from three marriages, on-again, off-again romances, and catty comments by former wives, and the Sarkozy presidency looks like something out of Baywatch...
...But replacing that with the nonstop Sarko Show of luxury vacations, millionaires’ yachts and private jets, jogging shorts and worn jeans, fancy sunglasses and fancier wristwatches, a sudden divorce followed by a quick, furtive marriage to a trophy wife of disconcerting background—it’s all enough to give the French a bad case of political indigestion...
...They lost 38 of France’s largest towns and cities to the Socialists anyway, in what was clearly a rebuke to Sarkozy...
...Private presidential hanky-panky is fine with the broad-minded Gauls, but flaunting it as he has done with Carla Bruni offends their well-developed sense of hypocrisy...
...As no longer see it in him...
...WDNA-splashing Bill Clinton in the Whit g i l b b o - t u n g u o n h i e W hat m ha g PP t e i ne d D u ? l ge It a ’s d the h style g , stup n id e , . House, but in the land of the phrase le style c’est l’homme, the wrong manner can be disastrous...
...Can he incarnate France a member of the far-right, politically incorrect with dignity and legitimacy...
...Aides say he is now making “adjustments” to the behavior that has squandered so much of the political goodwill needed to push through that reform...
...No sparrow falls but he leaps to take charge: quickly on the scene of every disaster, praising the gendarme wounded in the line of duty, commiserating with the fireman injured while retrieving granny’s cat from a tree, comforting the upset granny herself, stroking the errant cat...
...His flashy style, the hugging/back slapping/ cheek kissing inflicted on foreign leaders makes them cringe (Germany’s severe chancellor, Angela Merkel, let it be known she didn’t want to be touched and the two now have a cool relationship) and traditional French elites writhe in exasperation...
...M a y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 5 1 l e T T e R f R o M P a R I s evolving into the P. Diddy of the political world...
...wonders Dominique National Front party put it: “Is there any way we Moisi, a senior advisor at the French Institute for can take the nuclear button away from him...
...They could have felt sympathy after the departure of his second wife, Cécilia, which by all accounts left him distraught...
...B d ut every s rising fuel co u sts...
...France’s usual remote, condescending, monarchical governing style has no place in the 21st century...
...He made some initial moves toward ending the country’s ludicrous, hamstringing 35-hour workweek...
...Sarkozy lighting a huge cigar...
...His official trips abroad leave eyes rolling at home...
...And whereas hostility to this most conservative president in recent memory was expected in leftist enclaves, now it festers in bourgeois living rooms from Paris to Perpignan, Brest to Bordeaux...
...He did the same during a meeting with the Chinese premier in Beijing, horrifying the diplomatic corps...
...He storms out of an interview with CBS after a question he doesn’t like...
...Soon we were being treated to photos in the people press of Sarkozy in shirtsleeves, feet on desk, amid the gilded trappings of his palace office...
...by Joseph a. Harriss It seems only yesterDay that Nicolas Sarkozy was handily elected president of France on a wave of popular enthusiasm...
...The cocky son of a Hungarian immigrant, so obsessed with his quest for the presidency that he thought of it every morning while shaving, missed the transition to life in the Élysée Palace...
...But replacing that with the nonstop Sarko Show is enough to give the French a '''23)%*+,(4.//"*!$5".2)+1 bad case of political indigestion...
...With his sound conservative program, nervous energy, and raw pugnacity, the hope was that he would lead, prod, and cajole a torpid France out of its slough of politico-socioeconomic despond...
...Fully 4 (sic) percent of the French said the marriage improved his image...
...In foreign policy he ended France’s knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and brokered a treaty to replace the misbegotten European Union constitution...
...A group of citizens suffering from Sarko fatigue vainly petitioned for a Non-Sarkozy Day on which no story about him would be published...
...He would “break with the ideas, the habits and the behavior of the past...
...Lash h es out “ s Get lost, a--hole,” at a r e v o n o i a r t s n o m e a g n r u d n a m r e h s fi a s n e t a e r h T rue, all this may say as muCh about the hideBerates his staff as cretin i s, im d beciles, an t d w orse - . “presidential” class when it sees it, and many French dent that immediately circled the Internet world...
...It didn’t help that one of his first moves in office was to double his salary to $360,000 as the French grappled with a slumping economy and soaring inflation...
...Reversing the usual order of things, he deliberately exhibited his pre-marital trysts, which most people in our latitudes, especially politicians, tend to keep quiet, only to marry clandestinely in a quickie ceremony at the Élysée Palace...
...But can he...
...We should have known that someone as physically jittery—the constantly shifting shoulders, the compressed lips, the need for perpetual motion— would be emotionally unsteady...
...He faced down, as no previous president had, public sector workers who went on strike over his reform of their unduly generous retirement benefits...
...This International Relations...
...Sarkozy’s pet Chihuahua (ever so cutely named Big...
...with reality, surrounded as he is by a court of media At stake is much more than the dignity of the courtesans...
...The newsmagazine L’Express has a simple solution: “He needs to put a little more de Gaulle and a bit less Tom Cruise into his cocktail of presidential modernity...
...5 2 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a y 2 0 0 8 Joseph a. Harriss is an American writer in Paris whose latest book is About France (iUniverse...
...ll ee T T T T ee RR f f RR oo MM P a P a R I R I ss Style Is the Man, Alas What a difference a year makes...
...The next day he and then-wife Cécilia took off in a businessman’s executive jet for the Mediterranean, where they spent a few sybaritic days on the friend’s luxury yacht—and appearances of a newly elected president accepting expensive favors be damned...
...Try to imagine de Gaulle gallivanting with a Folies Bergère cancan dancer and you get an idea of how Sarkozy’s ostentatious love life has gone over...
...French presidency: the country direly needs his reform agenda...
...Thus it is that for the first time in the 50-year existence of the Fifth Republic, indeed in the country’s multi-millennial history, the leader of this paragon of taste has— I know, France’s usual remote, condescending, monarchical governing style has no place in the 21st century (had none in the 20th, for that matter) 5 0 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a y 2 0 0 8 quelle horreur—no class...
...Sarkozy’s popularity plunged within months from a record high 67 percent to a record low 37 percent...
...In permanent photo-op mode, this jack-in-thebox president pops up everywhere, with media crews just happening to be on hand...
...Polls ranked him the most pop ular president since Charles de Gaulle 40 years ago...
...Also troubling was Sarkozy’s bizarre courtship manner...
...The French people have chosen change,” he declared on his victory night last May...
...As for presidential demeanor, the evening of his election triumph Sarkozy shunned the customary celebration with political cronies and spent the night at a ChampsÉlysées watering hole with a collection of celebrities from rock stars to the fine fleur of France’s new- 257865D01 money billionaires...
...Has he already lost touch impulsiveness is getting worrying...
...You simply cannot do that sort of thing...
...The important thing was that the French were so ready to believe it, accustomed as they are to his unpredictable antics (“Cherie, guess what he’s done now...
...It became moderately easier to hire and fire employees...
...With four years to go on his term, there is still time for him to change style and grow into the job...
...Sarkozy’s bedroom with its immaculate linen...
...There she sported the same heart-shaped diamond ring he had bought Cécilia, from the same shop...
...J o s e P H a . H a R R I s s and good riddance...
...It’s embarrassing and extremely discourteous,” later commented a French diplomat sotto voce...
...As one curmudgeonly British observer put it, “Sarkozy seems to be rapidly !"#$%%#&"'#()%*+,(-$#(*%#$.//"*!+-0#".*#!*""/$#1"0...
...It hardly mattered whether the report was true that days before wedding Carla he had texted Cécilia, “Come back and I’ll call it all off...
...That pushed Gallic tolerance to the breaking point...
Vol. 41 • May 2008 • No. 4
