The anti-Sarkozy vote

FAR from the giant rallies and big-screen showmanship of the final days of a presidential campaign, the sleepy town of Donzy in Burgundy feels untouched by politics. The talk in the bars is of the local fête and fishing. Only one campaign poster, for a fringe anti-capitalist, has been pasted to the municipal noticeboard. Yet this bellwether town is a pointer to how the French will vote in the election on April 22nd and May 6th: at every poll since 1981, it has gone for the winner.

In 1981 Donzy backed François Mitterrand, a Socialist. In 2007 it swung behind Nicolas Sarkozy, on the Gaullist right. This time the little town, encircled by wheat fields and home to factories making plastic straws and umbrellas, looks likely to back François Hollande, the Socialist. “My bet is that Donzy will vote Hollande,” says Jean-Paul Jacob, the (independent) centre-right mayor. This is not out of enthusiasm for the man, as “people find him cold, there’s no fervour about him.” Rather, the mayor thinks, it reflects disappointment with Mr Sarkozy. “His personality”, he says wryly, “doesn’t leave people indifferent.”

Other locals concur. Cécile Rebeillard, a retired statistician, reckons the mood is “more a rejection of Sarkozy” than zeal for Mr Hollande. “I think Sarkozy will be beaten,” agrees Thierry Flandin, a farmer and (independent) councillor for Donzy and nearby communes. “Not because of his policies, but his attitude. People here were shocked by his behaviour, his vulgarity, all the mistakes early on in his term. It’s a rejection of the man.”

This year’s presidential election is set to be historic in more ways than one. If Mr Hollande wins, as the polls suggest, he will become only the second Socialist president in the Fifth Republic—and the party will have its first presidential victory in 24 years. If, against the odds, Mr Sarkozy pulls off a last-minute victory, it would be a miraculous feat for a candidate who has throughout campaigned from behind. But if the polls are right, and he loses, Mr Sarkozy will go down as only the second president—after Valéry Giscard d’Estaing—of the Fifth Republic to fail to win re-election.

It is perhaps natural that the French should want change. The Gaullists, under Mr Sarkozy and his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, have held the presidency since 1995. Right across Europe in the euro-zone crisis, incumbents have been unseated by disgruntled voters. The French are fearful and restless and want something different. But the prospect of Mr Sarkozy’s defeat is still a remarkable one, in many ways. Unlike Mr Giscard d’Estaing, who had to run against Mr Chirac as well as facing Mitterrand, he has no centre-right rival. And he can reasonably claim to be the sort of authoritative leader to whom voters might turn in a crisis. Indeed, polls suggest the French rate Mr Sarkozy more highly than Mr Hollande for most traits to do with leadership. He scores better for having “the authority of a head of state” (54%, next to 23% for Mr Hollande), for being “capable of taking difficult decisions” (49 to 23%) and for being “capable of taking the right decisions faced with the current economic and financial crisis” (41 to 27%).

The French also recognise Mr Sarkozy’s energetic efforts during the euro crisis. He has pushed through unpopular reforms to universities and a rise in the retirement age. And he has a decent foreign-policy record, from taking France back into NATO’s military structure to his intervention in the 2008 Russian-Georgian war and his joint leadership of the campaign against Libya. Next to all this, Mr Hollande, a Socialist hack who led a fractious party for 11 years and has never had a ministerial job, is a debutant: his biggest crisis was a 2005 party split over the draft European Union constitution. With his friends from the Mitterrand era, there is little fresh about him.

There is much frustration in the Sarkozy camp that his talent is not better appreciated. “Who is the candidate who has the solidity, the maturity, the experience?” asks Jean-François Copé, head of Mr Sarkozy’s party. “My bet is that common sense will prevail, and that the French know in their hearts who is in a position to guarantee their future.” Aides hope that such judgments will emerge after the first round, assuming that Mr Hollande and Mr Sarkozy go through, especially during face-to-face televised debates. “Our strategy is to get Hollande out of his fox hole and force him into a confrontation,” says Valérie Pécresse, the budget minister.

Yet the trouble for the president is that Mr Hollande has so deftly turned the campaign into a referendum on Mr Sarkozy himself. The Socialist’s strongest message, besides the promise of a (wildly popular) 75% top income-tax rate, is: do you really want this man to be in power for another five years? His campaign is clever, says Zaki Laïdi, at Sciences-Po university, because his “anti-Sarkozysm is not doctrinaire: it is criticism without violence.” He calmly ducks questions on TV before reverting to Mr Sarkozy’s record. At rallies, he mocks the president’s claim to be the steady hand in a crisis, asking who is responsible for soaring public debt and joblessness since 2007. The best Mr Sarkozy can do, Mr Hollande taunts, is to boast of a “decline in the upward trend” in unemployment.

More powerful still is Mr Hollande’s call for an entirely different sort of presidency. He talks often of the need for discretion and dignity. The brand damage done by Mr Sarkozy’s early blunders—celebrating victory in a fancy restaurant on the Champs-Elysées, cavorting on a billionaire friend’s yacht—has proved lasting in French minds, even though Mr Sarkozy has behaved with more decorum in recent times. If Mr Sarkozy is over the top, Mr Hollande is the bare minimum. Against Mr Sarkozy’s “look at me” showmanship, he offers studious modesty.

The strain in the Sarkozy camp is beginning to show. A poll this week gave him only 24% in the first round, fully five points behind Mr Hollande. Not one poll has had Mr Sarkozy winning the second. On the far right, Marine Le Pen could well do better than polls suggest, and come in ahead of both the Communist-backed Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the centrist François Bayrou, whose efforts to talk seriously about France’s dire public finances have won him little support.

Assuming there is no big upset, such as Ms Le Pen copying her father by breaking into the second round, the two front-runners will then need to tack back to the centre, while also trying to recapture the protest vote. This polls a total of 35%, more than either mainstream candidate. The task is harder for Mr Sarkozy, as the far-right vote will not swing automatically to him, whereas almost all of Mr Mélenchon’s will go to Mr Hollande. One poll has only 44% of Ms Le Pen’s voters backing Mr Sarkozy in round two, with 38% undecided.

Back in Donzy, the locals are resigned to a Hollande victory, but not thrilled. This may be because, deep down, they know that the next president faces difficult decisions and an empty public purse, whatever extravagant campaign promises he makes. “Hollande can say what he wants,” says Serge Rebeillard, who is retired, “but when he gets into office he won’t have any choice. The honeymoon will be very short.”

Original Article
Source: economist
Author: print edition