The Sarkozy Phenomenon by Nick Hewlett

Author:Nick Hewlett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: France, French politics, French presidency, Sarkozy, autocracy, de Gaulle, government, parliament, Socialism, Napoleon, Bonapartism, populism, modernization, progress, extreme right, democracy, Europe, political leadership, Marx, Gramsci, nationalism, economics
ISBN: 9781845408244
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2017
Published: 2017-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

The extreme right

I hope to have shown that there are clear Bonapartist characteristics in the way in which Sarkozy constructed a particular image and managed to persuade a broad electorate to support him. I have dwelt long on Sarkozy as an individual politician because one of the principal characteristics of Bonapartism is of course the promotion of one person whom their supporters argue is exceptionally suited to leading the nation in what are seen as unusual circumstances. This does not signify the absence of political and economic agenda. Quite the contrary. As we have seen, Sarkozy came to power with a far-reaching, largely neo-liberal agenda, overlaid with patriotism, emphasis on law and order, together with populist nods towards a fairer lot for the ordinary working person, including acknowledgement of the need for state protection.

It should also be said that there are, in René Rémond’s (1982) terms and highly schematically, both counterrevolutionary and Orleanist - that is extreme right and liberal-right - tendencies in Sarkozy’s recipe for success, although these are less pronounced. Sarkozy was successful in undermining the electorate of the FN in both presidential and parliamentary elections, which was arithmetically a key element in his success. Sarkozy and the UMP were attempting to do - albeit far more rapidly - to the FN what Mitterrand had done to the PCF; just as in the early 1970s Mitterrand stated publically that, in his view, out of five million Communist voters three million should be voting Socialist, during the 2007 election campaign Sarkozy declared:

Yes, I want to attract Le Pen voters. Who could blame me for bringing these people back into the republican fold? I will even go and find them one by one - I don’t mind that at all. The Front national made progress and that means we on the right did not do our job properly. (In Fourquet 2007: 1)

In a highly revealing article by Jérôme Fourquet, we see that in the areas where Le Pen was strong in 2002, Sarkozy made real gains in 2007 over candidates of the mainstream right in 2002. The increases were particularly large in the Mediterranean departments and Sarkozy’s highest score anywhere in France was in the normally FN-sympathetic Alpes-Maritimes, with 43.6 per cent of votes. In a large-scale survey, Fourquet found that Sarkozy’s tough reaction to clashes between youths and police at the Gare du Nord in Paris in March 2007 encouraged former Le Pen voters to vote Sarkozy instead of Le Pen, as did Sarkozy’s more general positions on what might broadly be termed delinquency. Given the choice between various different aspects of his policies, they were particularly impressed by the president-in-waiting’s views on law and order: Fourquet notes that a quarter of what he describes as the most faithful, ‘hard core’ FN supporters had even more faith in Sarkozy’s views on the key theme of sécurité than in Le Pen’s. (Fourquet 2007: 5).

Sarkozy has also, of course, certain characteristics of the Orleanist liberal-right, which arguably largely characterised the politics of Giscard d’Estaing in particular and also, in part at least, François Bayrou.

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