It was a very public execution. The elimination of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy in the first round of the primary election to choose the 2017 presidential candidate for the Right and centre (see Mediapart's coverage here) is far more than simply an electoral defeat. Here was the ex-head of state brutally sacked not in the context of a traditional clash between Left and Right, but by his own side, by an electorate of the Right that for the last 15 years had always chosen him as their leader. It is thus a letter of dismissal – perhaps even a letter of proclamation – that the Right has sent to the man who had set his sights on retrieving, with impunity, the presidency he had lost to François Hollande in 2012.
While the old adage is that you are never dead in politics, the humiliating blow that has been inflicted is so great that it is hard to imagine how Nicolas Sarkozy can ever again put together a winning political formula. The defeat is made even more notable and cruel - for Sarkozy – because it came from a large-scale democratic experiment carried out by the Right for the first time; a primary election to choose its presidential candidate. It has been an indisputable success, with around 4 million voters taking part in the first round on Sunday – which contrasts with the 2.7 million who participated in in the Left's first primary in 2011 – in an election that cannot be contested, save for a few administrative snags.
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We knew that Nicolas Sarkozy had very strong misgivings about a primary whose potentially fatal risks he himself foresaw, before being forced to accept it. For since his defeat in 2012 the former head of state has been constructing a political Potemkin village, accompanied by the unquestioning conformism of a media and opinion poll bubble. First of all there was the myth that Sarkozy was not 'really' beaten in 2012 and that given another two weeks of campaign he would have defeated Hollande in that election. Then his political comeback in the summer of 2014 was staged as if he were some kind of Marlon Brando/Don Corleone-style figure returning to calm down the tearaway kids and bring unity back to a political family that had been torn apart.
Unimaginative political commentators automatically set out a narrative that had been constructed by Sarkozy himself. But this time the story was an empty one simply because the man who had until 2012 endlessly brutalised his own side, entourage and allies, had been beaten – by François Hollande. After that nothing could ever be the same again as from then on his rivals on the Right were determined to rediscover their freedom, with former prime ministers François Fillon and Alain Juppé, the men who eliminated Sarkozy on Sunday, at the forefront.
Nicolas Sarkozy made the strategic error of stopping the clock and kept on behaving just as he had always done. Ellen Salvi, who has covered the political Right for Mediapart, has for some time chronicled the political Potemkin village that Sarkozy had sought to build. This revealed how he barely had a political entourage, how he had a slapdash political programme, how his electorate was limited to a fan club; and how he still showed a frantic and mistrustful certitude towards anyone in his own camp who put forward contrary points of view.
Did Nicolas Sarkozy really think he could become the Right's candidate with a team such as former interior minister Brice Hortefeux, senator Pierre Charon and MP Éric Ciotti, with a fan club consisting of pensioners from south-east France, with a manifesto that was an appalling mixture of promises of referendums, rampant xenophobia and anti-Muslim hysteria, and with a campaign slogan that amounted to “double portions of chips all round” and “we are Gauls”? His ability to influence the bosses of the main media and some political commentators and his undiminished campaigning ability created the illusion inside the media and opinion poll bubble that he could. The voters on the Right decided otherwise.
It is yet another lesson for our political “elites” who are stuck in outdated approaches, in political manoeuvring that no one is interested in and in a static and constrained relationship with society. Did former minister Bruno Le Maire, who finished far behind even Sarkozy in Sunday's vote, plough the terrain for four years as he kept telling us? If so he clearly learnt nothing from it and was intent on building another Potemkin village of which he was the sole hero. Even more than the others Nicolas Sarkozy simply did not want to understand the changes in a society suffering from ten years of financial crisis and from mass unemployment, that had been hurled into terrorism and regional wars.
The mediocrity as well as the dangerous nature of the responses that Sarkozy sought to offer worried a right-wing electorate that had already been hit by the consequences of his time in office, from 2007 to 2012. His lofty disdain for the justice system, the fact that he was put under formal investigation by judges, the repeated scandals and the numerous political-financial affairs all ended up discrediting him. In this way the voters on the Right are just like any other citizens: clear-eyed, fully aware what has gone before, and dismayed at the impunity sought by a former head of state. So in this sense this is good news. We are catching up with the standards of virtually all other European democracies who prefer their defeated leaders to withdraw from public life.
Fillon's great liberal economic 'shock'
The primary is also fascinating for what it tells us about the current state of the French Right. What one might call the Patrick Buisson agenda – he was Sarkozy's hard-right advisor at the Elysée – which involved attempts by the former president to stir up issues of national identity and Islamophobia has been rejected by his electorate. François Fillon's first-round victory shows that a traditional hard right that is rooted in the regions has now gained the upper hand. Since working with the late right-wing politician Philippe Séguin at the start of the 1990s, Fillon has moved a great deal on a number of political stances. But he has remained an ideologue who has always developed precise political programmes and who is solidly anchored in an extremely conservative Right.
Fillon's plans for a major liberal economic “shock” borrows directly from the Thatcherism of the 1980s. His determination to break the unions, to send in the gendarmes against those who obstruct and to pursue family and social reforms that are backed by the Catholic Right frankly have little to do with the social policies of Gaullism. Any reference to Gaullism – if that expression still has any meaning – must be reserved for Fillon's foreign policy stances; an extreme mistrust of the European Union and a determination to build a new alliance with Russia.
François Fillon, who was Sarkozy's prime minister for five years from 2007 to 2012, has largely avoided carrying the can for the impact of that period, despite the fact that he was so closely involved. Very quickly and astutely he reviewed that period in government and criticised it, managing to claim credit for those reforms that were popular with the Right (on university and pension reform) while blaming Sarkozy for the crushing failures, such as the war in Libya and a 600 billion euro increase in the country's debt.
Since then he has primarily sought to address the conservative, regional and economically liberal Right, determined that he will lead the charge to carry out reforms to the bitter end. That is one of the reasons why he has come top in the first round of the primary election. It is also worth noting that he was supported by the largest number of right-wing Parliamentarians, another important factor that was ignored by the main media outlets and opinion polls.
There is another indirect victim of Sarkozy's stinging defeat and that is the current president François Hollande. The entire electoral strategy put in place at the Elysée over the last two years has now collapsed. This strategy was to favour a Sarkozy candidacy on the Right, as the head of state was convinced that if there were a return match he would win in 2017 just as he won in 2012. This approach was not just outlined in a spate of recent books in which Hollande has spoken with journalists. For a whole series of political decisions can also be explained by Hollande's desire to take it easy on his opponent.
It explains, for example, the constant silence of François Hollande about his predecessor's foreign policy actions: on the consequence of the disastrous war in Libya in 2011; on the crisis in French intelligence in the face of terrorism, a crisis born out of Sarkozy's calamitous 2008 reform which led to the creation of the internal intelligence agency the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur, the DCRI (now the DGSI). Finally, a French president is supposed to keep watch over public ethics. Yet Hollande has said and done nothing about the numerous scandals that have engulfed Nicolas Sarkozy and his former staff. Even though he could have done so without impinging upon the independence of the judicial system.
By ripping up the political plans that had been patiently worked out by both the Sarkozy and Hollande camps, the Right's voters have now confirmed that nothing will go as forecast in the presidential election next year. Such is the breadth of the crisis in representative politics, the crisis of the parties, the rejection of leaders, that the electorate seems to have decided massively in favour of a new order of things. That is more good news after this final defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter
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