American Paris-based photographer Thomas Haley has been following the French presidential election campaign with a series of reports posted on his Mediapart blog. This weekend he followed the crowds that turned out for incumbent candidate Nicolas Sarkozy as he held his last make-or-break rally in central Paris, competing with a simultaneous mass open air meeting held by his main rival.
It was the battle of crowd figures, rhetoric and TV attention, and the last of the major rallies in the run up to the presidential elections that begin next weekend. In the Left corner, Socialist Party candidate François Hollande held his open air meeting at the Château de Vincennes in the south-east suburbs of Paris while, ten kilometers away, on the Right, incumbent candidate Nicolas Sarkozy addressed a crowd of tens of thousands at the Place de la Concorde in central Paris, the city’s largest square, a stone’s throw from the National Assembly buildings and the Champs-Elysée avenue.
The Place de la Concorde, where Sarkozy held his victory rally after the elections in 2007, and where King Louis XVI, the country’s last monarch, had his head chopped off four years after the 1789 revolution, has become a favourite venue for mass meetings of the French Right. While Thomas Haley reported it to be just half-full on a cold and windy Sunday afternoon, Sarkozy’s campaign staff, eager to counter the turnout for Hollande, questionably claimed the tricolour flag waiving crowd, totalled more than 100,000.
Based on a detailed account of the size of the square, photographs of the crowds present and the space unoccupied, Mediapart calculated that the true figure was closer to 25,000.
The president brought forward his speech by 35 minutes in an effort to compete for TV coverage with Hollande, who he said had adopted “solutions from the past” which would “ruin the middle classes”. Sarkozy called on the support of “the silent majority, those who don’t smash up bus shelters, who ask nothing other than the permission to be able to work, who love their families, who love their homeplace, who love their country”. The reference to a silent majority – supposedly one which will ensure his re-election - was the theme of the rally, his supporters holding banner-posters reading “Nicolas, the silent majority is here”.
“I have always thought that France is the name of a civilization,” said Sarkozy, echoing the words of his interior minister Claude Guéant who in February caused controversy after he opposed “superior” civilizations to others, in an apparent reference to the differences between those of the West and the Arab world. Sarkozy repeated his intention, if re-elected, to strengthen controls on illegal immigration and to withdraw France from the Schengen open borders zone in Europe unless it introduces greater restrictions on free movement. “If European frontiers are not protected against uncontrolled immigration, against unfair competition, against dumping, there will be no new French model and there will no longer be a European civilization,” he proclaimed, standing on a podium with a grand photo backdrop of the National Assembly.
“We have made the mistake, these past 30 years, of forgetting nations, because it is they who make history,” he said.
He promised to open a debate with eurozone partners on the role of the Central European Bank, calling for it to provide support for growth. “If Europe chooses deflation, it will disappear,” he said. "It's our duty to reflect on this issue. We cannot have taboo subjects."
The cheering crowd, regularly chanting “Sarkozy President”, was, according to a report by the AFP news agency, largely “white, and apparently well-off, many wearing expensive clothes”. One of them, 42 year-old Michèle Chambron, wearing a T-shirt with ‘The young with Sarkozy’, told AFP: "If ever he isn't elected, it will be catastrophic, it will be France's ruin. I would weep." Another, Gaelle-Marie Le Chapelain, 38, told the news agency that if Hollande were to win the elections, as predicted by opinion polls, "in six months we'd be in the same position as the Greek people, I'd think about leaving France”.
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- Thomas Haley was a photographer with the Sipa Presse agency from 1983 until its sale in 2011. Based in Paris for the past 35 years, he covered international conflicts and humanitarian crises before turning his focus on French political affairs beginning with the presidential elections in 1995. His blog on Mediapart, which includes a wide range of reportages on the current presidential elections, can be found here.