Bling Bling vs. A
French waffle
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
Nothing focuses a politician’s mind like staring at
oblivion, and reluctantly contemplating himself at
the center of that dark and dreary place. Though it
may be too late to save himself, Nicolas Sarkozy is
scared contrite and humble, a remarkable precedent
for a French president.
On the eve of Sunday’s voting, he offered an apology
for his “mistakes,” telling a television interviewer
that when he was elected he did not “immediately
understand the symbolic dimensions of the
presidency.” This might be loosely translated from
the French as, “I didn’t have a clue to what I was
doing.” Hardly a confidence builder.
The 57-year-old President Bling Bling, as the
newspaper and television correspondents, ever eager
for hot copy, call him, appears to be on his way to
looking for work unless he can figure out a way to
survive a run-off election against Francois Hollande,
also 57, the Socialist. Only rarely does an
incumbent anywhere survive a run-off, especially if
he’s the runner-up in the first round. He’s the
first incumbent to run second.
Nevertheless, M. Sarkozy, written off a week ago,
surprised everybody with a close finish, polling 27
percent of the vote, just barely behind M.
Hollande’s 28.2 percent. The stunner was Marine Le
Pen, 43, of the far right National Front, who won
about 18 percent and finished a very respectable
third.
Trying to plumb a foreign election for clues to what
might happen here is foolish business, particularly
when that foreign election is in France, but the
evident similarities may be more than coincidences.
President Obama, like M. Sarkozy, has also had
difficulty understanding “the symbolic dimensions of
the presidency.”
A lot of Frenchmen, surveying a sick economy, rising
taxes, the worst unemployment rate (at 10 percent)
in 12 years and waves of Muslim immigrants, many of
them illegals, vow they’re “mad as hell and aren’t
going to take it anymore.” This may sound familiar
to Americans.
M. Hollande, like any good Socialist – it’s not a
libel to call a man a Socialist in France –
prescribes confiscatory taxes as the proper medicine
for a sick economy. He, like another president we
know well, doesn’t understand that trying to dig
yourself out of a hole only makes the hole deeper.
He promises “growth over austerity,” but it’s not
clear how taxing millionaires at 75 percent of their
annual income, which he proposes to do, will
encourage growth.
President Bling Bling prescribes stiff medicine,
cutting spending and services, to avoid making
France over in the Greek model. This is never
popular with anyone, particularly in France, where
the free lunch is an institution, like “liberty,
equality and fraternity.” President Bling Bling is
not exactly the perfect physician to prescribe this
medicine, since M. Bling Bling and his wife, the
glam ex-model and pop singer Carla Bruni, are paying
now for living the high life and putting it on
public display.
The French chattering class – and nobody does
chatter better than the French – have all but
written off M. Sarkozy. One prominent pollster, Eric
Bonnet of the BVA polling firm, sounds as he has
already been to the future. “Eighty percent of [the
far left vote] will go for Hollande and only 35
percent will be reaped by Nicolas Sarkozy.” Pundits
are already picking the Hollande cabinet, with
assurances to their readers and listeners that the
new president will not make the mistake of Francois
Mitterand, nationalizing banks and taking Communists
into the government. Francois Hollande, in this
calculation, is a Socialist, but a Socialist with a
freshly laundered shirt and clean fingernails,
skilled in making vague promises and the political
art of the waffle. Nevertheless, says another
observer, “all things being equal there’s no way for
Sarko to win.”
But in politics, in France as everywhere else, all
things are never equal. Sarko, as the French press
calls him, campaigned at a decided disadvantage in
Round One. French law requires television to give
equal time to all candidates, and this created a
piling on effect, with each of the Sarkozy opponents
vying to say the sharpest hostile things about him.
In Round Two, it will be man to man, Bling Bling
against the Waffle.
The big imponderable in Round Two will be the role
of Marine Le Pen and her 18 percent. Many of her
followers sneer at Messrs Sarkozy and Hollande as
equally eager to preside over a permanent decline of
France, reduced to a mere cultural presence,
stripped of political and military prowess. May 6 is
D-Day.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The
Washington Times.