The surprise announcement this week by Alain Juppé, mayor of Bordeaux, one of the longest-serving veterans of the French Right, a former prime minister who has also held five ministerial posts, that he is to run to become his conservative UMP party’s presidential candidate was a political move equivalent to an uppercut on the chin of his main rival, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Out of the blue, and amid the traditional August holiday lull in France, the man once dubbed ‘Amstrad’ in a reference to the 1980s home computers and his own supposed powers of synthesis, has taken, at least temporarily, the lead in a future dogfight that will be crucial for both the UMP and Sarkozy’s political comeback.
For until this week, and throughout the summer, the focal point for the French Right has been about when, rather than whether, Sarkozy would announce his return to full-time politics with a bid for the presidency of the UMP, the largest mainstream opposition party which is in a state of disarray from corruption scandals, internal rivalries, massive debts and the electoral ground it has lost to the far-right.
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The crisis within the party led to the exit in June of its former president, Jean-François Copé, engulfed in allegations of illegal funding and cronyism, leaving it in the temporary hands of a triumvirate leadership of three former prime ministers – Juppé, François Fillon and Jean-Pierre Raffarin. Party members are to vote for a new leader in November.
Sarkozy’s still undeclared candidature for the UMP leadership was expected for later this month or in September, and with a hard-core base of support within the divided party he is considered a potential favourite for the post. But taking control of the UMP is regarded as the first step in his longer campaign to claim back the French presidency in elections due in 2017. With that aim, he undoubtedly hoped to avoid a potentially dangerous primary contest by locking down the party and placing close allies in key positions, allowing him to be directly designated as the presidential challenger.
But this week Juppé scuppered this, delivering a major blow to Sarkozy’s ambitions. “I have decided to be a candidate, when the time comes, in the primaries for the future,” wrote Juppé, 69, in a lengthy post published on his internet blog on August 20th. “There remains less than two years to organize them (because common sense would be that they are held in the spring of 2016)”.
For Sarkozy, 59, the move places numerous future obstacles along his path to regain power, and adds to others already in place. Juppé has, at least partially, deflated the hype of the build-up to Sarkozy’s much-awaited announcement of his return to the political arena. Already weakened by multiple ongoing judicial investigations into corruption, one of which saw him detained and questioned by police earlier this year, Sarkozy can no longer escape primary elections and a testing public confrontation with Juppé and others now likely to throw their hats into the ring, including François Fillon, who served as Sarkozy’s prime minister.
Beyond this, Juppé, who last served in government as Sarkozy’s foreign minister, has switched attention away from the UMP’s leadership race this autumn and onto the “primaries for the future” and the 2017 presidential elections. Whoever becomes head of the party, their principle subsequent role will be that of managing the one major event that lays ahead, namely the primaries to choose a presidential candidate.
Sarkozy, whose political allies were distinctly silent after the surprise announcement, faces a rough ride in primaries, when his rivals will have no shortage of ammunition to aim at him. His record will be questioned, when his economic, diplomatic and social policies, not to mention his personal life, will come under the spotlight. Already in 2012, shortly after his electoral defeat by François Hollande, his former minister Roselyne Bachelot led calls within the party for a critical “inventory” of the five-year Sarkozy presidency, which Fillon has already begun sniping at.
A chequered, and criminal, record
It has long been the case among the parties of the French mainstream Right that their leaders - from Charles de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac and eventually Sarkozy himself - have been all-powerful figures who enjoyed the adoration and will to serve from party militants, so long as the leader is a winner, or can promise victory ahead.
This has been true of the UMP as much as its predecessors, the RPR and the UDR. For while de Gaulle was adulated for years, support among the grass roots of his party turned to Georges Pompidou following the May 1968 turmoil. Chirac was hugely popular among the Gaullist movement for more than two decades, but as his future and health waned that support moved en masse to Sarkozy, the rising, promising, anti-Chirac star of the UMP.
But now, Sarkozy, who was UMP leader for three years before his election as president in 2007, faces the threat that his dimming popularity in public opinion polls could be reflected in the primary vote. If he takes a knock in the primary debates, and if his popularity among the wider public is weakened there is every chance the party militants will turn to whoever offers a more realistic promise of defeating the Left.
But while Juppé’s declared bid on Wednesday has undoubtedly thrown a spanner in the works of Sarkozy’s plans, there is uncertainty that he is himself a credible candidate for the presidency. If he has chosen the tactic of upstaging his rivals before they announced their own bids, it’s because he has a number of handicaps.
Arguably, the first among these is his age. In May 2017, when the presidential elections are due, he will be aged 71 years and nine months which, if ever he was to win the poll, would make him the oldest president elected to a first term in office in French history.
However, this could also be turned to his advantage. Beyond the likely PR presentation of him as a man with all his energy intact, he has the benefit of an image of a politician who is highly experienced and stable. His entourage have already set the tone, letting it be known that Juppé believes the French want a safe pair of hands after the agitated presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy and the wayward term in office of François Hollande, especially in face of the increasing temptations to rally to political extremes. The same Juppé allies argue that within such a context a wise and experienced figure would not only be accepted as a candidate, but would even be a hoped-for one. Juppé, they claim, would attract a centre-left vote attracted by his image as a moderator.
Whatever, it remains that Juppé, who in his lengthy blog post on Wednesday called for greater political dialogue, was responsible for a major period of social unrest in 1995 when, as prime minister, his blunt attempt to reform the French welfare system prompted massive street protests and strikes which brought France to a standstill, forcing him to abandon the move.
It was also when he was prime minister that Juppé, during a television news interview in 1996, declared that French state-owned electronics company Thomson, which he wanted to sell to the South Korean group Daewoo, was worth no more than 1 franc, and underlined the point by waving a coin in the air. Thomson went on to become a successful major player in French industry, and the gaffe remains stuck to him today.
His record also includes a criminal one. For this calm and self-virtuous candidate was also convicted in 2004 of misusing public funds for his role in a fake jobs scam at Paris City Hall where he served as deputy to Mayor Jacques Chirac. On appeal, Juppé received a 14-month suspended jail sentence and was stripped of his right to stand in an election for one year.
Juppé’s long history of serving under Chirac, at Paris City Hall and in government, has left him exposed to being labelled as a permanent ‘Number Two’. The man who Chirac once described before RPR party militants as “probably the best among us” is derided by Sarkozy allies as having no bottle. Ridding himself of this counter-image of a person who cannot be a leader and who has no will for a fight may also have contributed to his decision to take the lead this week.
By publicly declaring himself a candidate for the presidency this week, and confronting Sarkozy, allows no turning back, and Juppé undoubtedly above all wanted to make clear that he was decided on his course ahead. This Caesarion of French politics has finally crossed the Rubicon, revealing the vivacity of a spirit of conquest found after 38 years in active politics. Either that or it is his last shot left.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse