Libert?, Egalit? . . .
GURFINKIEL, MICHEL
Liberte, Egalite Sarkozy! by Michel Gurfinkiel Paris In the first round of balloting on April 22—against multiple candidates spanning the ideological spectrum—France's new president-elect...
...It was classic divide-and-conquer politics...
...But the real breakthrough was with the far right: While Le Pen himself remained neutral and scornMichel Gurfinkiel is executive chairman of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Paris...
...More than 1,000 cars have been burned by far-left and ethnic hooligans since Election Day—a disturbance without precedent in recent French politics...
...Apparently, Sarkozy calculates that this achievement is permanent, and that he now needs to win over more centrists and even as many disillusioned Socialists as he possibly can...
...George W. Bush was supposed to have entirely alienated Europe...
...In fact, many former Le Pen supporters had already happily deserted him for Sarkozy on the first ballot (thus cutting the far-right leader's showing nearly in half from his first-round performance in 2002...
...And that entails, in his opinion, appearing inclusive (especially in the context of renewed rioting in Paris and in other urban areas...
...She lost the presidential ballot, but won herself a name...
...It is rumored that both Claude Allegre, a former Socialist minister of education, and Hubert Vedrine, a former Socialist aide to Mitterrand and foreign minister with strong anti-American biases, have been offered positions in the cabinet...
...This was the case in particular in those areas, like Rouen in Normandy or Nice on the Mediterranean, where local politics have been dominated by a very conservative brand of centrism ever since World War II...
...Le Pen's National Front has been the curse of French politics for almost a quarter of a century...
...A former adviser to Royal, Eric Besson, has already joined the Sarkozy fold...
...In the final days of the presidential campaign, he hinted at the creation of a "larger majority," well beyond the conservative UMP party whose banner he carried...
...Add to this the 2 percent or so who had supported the arch-conservative Euroskeptic Philippe de Villiers on the first ballot, and you get the final 53 percent total...
...Where did he find the additional 22 percent...
...There were basically two constituencies to tap: the centrists, who had made a stunning 18.5 percent showing on the first ballot, under Fran-gois Bayrou...
...But first with Angela Merkel in Germany and now with Sarkozy in France, we see pro-American leaders at the very heart of the E.U...
...Two weeks later, in the head-to-head contest against runner-up Segolene Royal, he was elected president of France with a bit more than 53 percent of the total...
...Still unclear is whether Segolene Royal will lead the Socialist party in the parliamentary elections next month...
...by Michel Gurfinkiel Paris In the first round of balloting on April 22—against multiple candidates spanning the ideological spectrum—France's new president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy garnered a bit more than 31 percent of the vote...
...It is an odd thing...
...and Jean-Marie Le Pen's far right, a declining force but still pulling in 10.5 percent...
...The son and grandson of immigrants from Central Europe and the Balkans, half-Jewish on his mother's side, routinely targeted as an alien or a "Bush poodle" or a "Tel-Aviv puppet" by Le Pen and his cronies, the conservative candidate was in a unique position not just to address the taboo issues but to do so in almost the same terms as the National Front...
...She may be pathetic as a debater—in the momentous May 2 televised showdown with Sarkozy, she suggested that female police officers should be escorted back home when they go off-duty, as a precaution against street violence and rape—but she is charismatic...
...And her 47 percent of the vote in May can still translate into a series of local majorities in June, which is the key for a parliamentary victory...
...In the second round, the rest followed, almost to a man...
...In Paris, for instance, Sarkozy won on the second presidential ballot, but the left is poised to carry more seats in the parliamentary election...
...The scheme worked beautifully— until it was finally foiled by Sarkozy, who squared the circle...
...Sarkozy's victory will undoubtedly bring about a shift in the political balance of Europe...
...Moreover, any attempt from the respectable right to assuage and recover the voters it had lost to Le Pen—especially on issues like immigration and law and order—would be described by the politically correct media as a betrayal of democracy and only serve to further strengthen the left...
...ful, 90 percent of his voters switched to Sarkozy...
...France, Britain, and Germany, the three major countries in the E.U., are now in conservative or very moderate social democratic hands...
...Back in the 1980s, it was essentially the creation of Frangois Mitterrand, the Machiavellian Socialist president, who had been close to fascist circles in his youth and had retained many unsavory personal friends from those years, like Rene Bous-quet, the former top cop of the Vichy regime (and the man who delivered 80,000 French Jews to Adolf Eichmann...
...According to most pollsters and analysts, about half of the centrists supported Sarkozy on May 6, in spite of Bayrou's own flirtation with Royal, the Socialist candidate...
...This move is perhaps just tactical...
...A provocative movement of the far right, so Mitterrand reasoned, would freeze a sizable part of the conservative vote that might otherwise go to more respectable men of the right...
...In order to govern France effectively, Sarkozy needs to win the upcoming National Assembly elections, scheduled for June 10 and 17...
Vol. 12 • May 2007 • No. 34
