It looks like Sarkozy is inching up to a possible victory in the forthcoming elections - by taking the low, low road (some would say gutter) of politics.
"Clomp! CLOMP! Clomp! CLOMP!"" That's the sound of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's high-heeled boots as they grow closer, closer, closer to Francois Hollande, the gentle lamb offered up by the hapless Socialist Party in next month's presidential election. Six months ago, Hollande lead Sarkozy 39 percent to 24 percent in the polls. Four months ago, it was 31.5 percent to 26 percent. And earlier this week, it was...Sarko, 28.5 percent, Hollande, 27 percent. Hollande still holds a strong lead in a hypothetical run-off between the two men, but Socialist partisans are beginning to tremble. Last week, the president debated Laurent Fabius, a leading Socialist standard-bearer, on television. "Sarko destroyed him," a leftist policy intellectual said to me grimly. Clomp!
Much of the press attention here has been focused on Sarkozy's utterly shameless courtship of France's xenophobic voters, most of them followers of the far-right National Front. In the debate with Fabius, Sarkozy said that France has too many foreigners, and repeated a proposal he had made to cut the annual number of legal immigrants almost in half. After National Front leader Marine Le Pen made the absurd suggestion that all meat in the Paris region was being slaughtered according to Islamic rules, known as halal, Sarkozy declared, with a straight face, that "the biggest concern of French people is halal meat." The New York Times accused Sarkozy of taking "the low road" in a way that will be "damaging to French society," if not necessarily to his own electoral prospects.
But the low road is where Sarkozy lives. He made a name for himself in 2005 by calling immigrant rioters racaille, or "scum," and more recently proposed deporting gypsies from France. Sarkozy is, in American terms, a little bit of Rudy Giuliani and a great deal of Richard Nixon. "The French recognize in him something that is in them, too," says Marc Weitzmann, a French novelist whose work captures modern political life. "That's why the French vote for him, and hate him at the same time."
FP reports:
Much of the press attention here has been focused on Sarkozy's utterly shameless courtship of France's xenophobic voters, most of them followers of the far-right National Front. In the debate with Fabius, Sarkozy said that France has too many foreigners, and repeated a proposal he had made to cut the annual number of legal immigrants almost in half. After National Front leader Marine Le Pen made the absurd suggestion that all meat in the Paris region was being slaughtered according to Islamic rules, known as halal, Sarkozy declared, with a straight face, that "the biggest concern of French people is halal meat." The New York Times accused Sarkozy of taking "the low road" in a way that will be "damaging to French society," if not necessarily to his own electoral prospects.
But the low road is where Sarkozy lives. He made a name for himself in 2005 by calling immigrant rioters racaille, or "scum," and more recently proposed deporting gypsies from France. Sarkozy is, in American terms, a little bit of Rudy Giuliani and a great deal of Richard Nixon. "The French recognize in him something that is in them, too," says Marc Weitzmann, a French novelist whose work captures modern political life. "That's why the French vote for him, and hate him at the same time."
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