Sarkozy Doing France's `Dirty Work' Means No Scapegoat as Popularity Falls
By - Oct 25, 2010 3:31 AM GMT+0530
When Nicolas Sarkozy was running for president, he promised to be a new type of French leader: more involved and less aloof.
Once elected in 2007, he set up a Facebook page that details movies he’s seen and his comments on sporting events. He created a “war room” within his office to push for export contracts, even though the Trade Ministry is charged with that.
Now this hands-on style is backfiring. Sarkozy, 55, is taking the brunt of voter discontent over France’s wave of strikes and demonstrations against raising the retirement age, passed by the French Senate on Oct. 22, the country’s 9.7 percent jobless rate and a law limiting taxes for the wealthy.
“There is no prime minister or other minister who is out there on the front line for him,” said Nicolas Tenzer, a former member of France’s state planning board and author of a book called “France: The Impossible Reform?” “Sarkozy crystallizes all the passion and maybe the hatred on himself.”
His unpopularity -- almost seven in 10 disapproved of his performance in a recent poll -- is curbing his agenda. In March, after his party suffered losses in regional elections, Sarkozy was forced to scrap a promised tax on carbon emissions that would have raised 1.5 billion euros ($2.1 billion) a year. A promised “Marshall Plan” for France’s economically depressed and violence-plagued suburbs also never materialized.
The president’s poll ratings are as much as 26 points below those of his prime minister, Francois Fillon. Sarkozy doesn’t have the same buffers as predecessors Francois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, who fired unpopular prime ministers when times got rough.
No Buffer
“Traditionally in France, the prime minister did the dirty work, and when he stunk too much the president threw him out,” said David Bell, professor of French government and politics at theUniversity of Leeds in the U.K. “This time it’s different because Sarkozy has put himself out in front of the government.”
Sarkozy has announced all his government’s main policies himself, from the pension changes to a crackdown on illegal Roma camps. He travels weekly to provincial towns and lays out new policies dealing with education, agriculture or industry. On Sept. 24, he went to a work site near Paris to announce a new Metro line to serve a university campus under construction.
Sixty-nine percent of those questioned in a BVA poll published in L’Express magazine Oct. 19 said they disapprove of Sarkozy, making him the most unpopular president since the Paris-based institute started polling in 1981. The poll questioned 962 people and no margin of error was given.
Lowest Ever
A poll published yesterday by the Ifop firm commissioned for the newspaper Journal du Dimanche said his approval rating fell to 29 percent this month from 32 percent in September, the lowest since his May 2007 election. Paris-based Ifop called 1,828 respondents aged 18 and over between Oct. 14 and 22. No margin of error was given.
Sarkozy’s signature legislative measure, raising the minimum retirement to 62 from 60, has led to four national strikes in the past two months. Train service has been disrupted and as many as half of the country’s service stations have run out of gasoline. Unions voted Oct. 21 to call two more days of protests in coming weeks.
The export office also hasn’t been a big success. France lost a tender in December 2009 to sell nuclear reactors to the United Arab Emirates. London-based Eurostar Group Ltd. chose Germany’s Siemens AG trains over France’s Alstom SA.
Sarkozy personally announced the retirement measure on June 15, appeared in a television interview July 12 to defend it, and has spoken about it during his trips around the country. On Sept. 14 he spent 20 minutes explaining it to a group of construction workers south of Paris.
No Retreat on Pensions
The president has repeatedly vowed not to retreat on the bill. One out of 10 pensions is paid for through government borrowing and the state pension fund will lose 10.7 billion euros this year. The shortfall will reach 50 billion euros in 2020 without a change in policy, according to the Budget Ministry.
“This reform had been postponed for too long and the deadline couldn’t be pushed further anymore,” Sarkozy said at a press conference in Deauville on Oct. 19.
It may be too late for Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement party to win back swing voters ahead of elections in 2012, said BVA poll director Gael Sliman.
“His party’s traditional voters will stick to him, but all potential others are likely to go for whoever the other will be,” Sliman said. “This reform will certainly become a handicap.”
Sarkozy may still be able to rebound. The opposition Socialist Party is divided over whom to nominate in 2012.
Cooling-Off Period
In the near term, the government is counting on the Oct. 22 to Nov. 4 school vacations to cool the demonstrations, and on the behavior of protesters to turn public opinion against them: Strikers have blocked access to airports and youths have battled police and broken windows.
France takes over the presidency of the Group of 20 nations next month, giving Sarkozy an international stage to push issues popular with French voters, such as regulating financial markets and challenging the dollar’s reserve status.
Sarkozy advertised his approach to governing in a book, “Testimony,” published the year before he was elected. Mitterrand and Chirac, he wrote, “were statesman who focused more on history and French traditions than on reforming France. My focus as president will be on what I want to build.”
Such a style was always inherently risky if things went bad, said Jim Shields, who holds the chair in French at Aston University in Birmingham, U.K. “By maximizing his personal authority, he has also maximized his personal responsibility.” (bloomberg)
To contact the reporters on this story: Gregory Viscusi in Paris at gviscusi@bloomberg.net;Helene Fouquet in Paris at hfouquet1@bloomberg.net.
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