BLBG:Sarkozy Will Seek French Re-Election Playing Euro Crisis Leadership Card
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is set to unveil today his plan to seek a second term, betting Europe’s debt crisis will bolster his bid.
Sarkozy, 57, has promised to be a “captain in the storm,” joining with Germany’s Angela Merkel to find an exit from the economic slump caused by the European financial crisis that began more than two years ago in Greece. With 68 days to go before the first round of voting, Sarkozy’s 36 percent approval rating makes him France’s most-unpopular incumbent president.
Trailing in the polls behind Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, a lawmaker from central France and former party chief who has never held a Cabinet post, Sarkozy risks becoming the eighth euro-area leader to be ousted since 2010, following those in Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Spain, Slovenia and Slovakia. A defeat would make him the second French president after Valery Giscard D’Estaing to lose a re-election bid.
“Sarkozy has to stress his presidential standing, that he’s one of two European leaders leading the response to the euro crisis,” said William Keylor, a professor of modern French history at Boston University. “Hollande has no international stature at all.”
The president may also turn to a formula that served him well in the 2007 elections, courting the partisans of the National Front, the nationalist party of Marine Le Pen, with a hardening stance on immigration and a push to stem the decline of manufacturing jobs in France.
‘Fine Line’
“Sarkozy has to tread a very fine line,” Keylor said. “On his right he has a very invigorated National Front so he has to try to win back some of those votes. But he’s up against a moderate Socialist so he can’t scare the center.”
The president is set to announce his intention to run on TF1 television tonight, with his Twitter account saying he’ll appear on the channel’s news program at 8:00 p.m.
“Only now do we enter the real campaign and see the real debate begin,” Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on France Info radio today.
Hollande has a 5.5 point lead over Sarkozy in the April 22 first round and would get 57.5 percent against 42.5 in the May 6 second round, according to a poll published Feb. 9 by Ifop. The first round’s top two candidates face off in the second.
Sarkozy has trailed frontrunner Hollande, 57, in every poll since the Socialist declared his bid in March, with a gap as wide as 20 percentage points. Le Pen, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who made it to the second round in 2002, is running third. The race will have 38 declared first-round candidates. A final list will be published between March 19 and 21.
Sarkozy’s Record
At the start of his first term, Sarkozy was France’s most popular leader since General Charles de Gaulle, World War II hero and founder of the Fifth Republic.
A lawyer by training, Sarkozy took office pledging to make a break from the past, instilling a work-hard-get-rich ethos in a country that has an uneasy relationship with wealth.
He weakened the 35-hour-workweek instituted by the Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, limited taxes on France’s wealthiest and let universities forge partnerships with businesses. Sarkozy also implemented a legal minimum service for public transport, including air-traffic controllers, train and bus drivers and cut military costs, closing 83 defense sites.
To reduce the government’s budget deficit, he pushed through a two-year increase in the retirement age to 62 and cut business taxes to encourage investment.
Economic Woes
“When Sarkozy was elected, he talked a lot about purchasing power and working more to earn more,” said Bruno Cautres, an analyst at Cevipof, a political research center in Paris. “But people haven’t seen their situation improve.”
His efforts were stymied by the global economic crisis that took hold almost immediately after he took office. His mandate began on May 16, 2007, three months before Europe started coping with the fallout from the U.S. subprime crisis. That was followed by the emergence in 2009 of Europe’s debt crisis.
Standard & Poor’s stripped France of its AAA credit rating for the first time on Jan. 13, saying European policy makers hadn’t done enough to address the “systemic stresses in the euro zone.” This week, Moody’s Investors Service said it may downgrade France’s top Aaa rating.
Although the markets shrugged off the S&P cut, it has hurt Sarkozy’s credibility. His leadership has become a harder sell even though France has weathered the economic malaise better than countries such as Spain, with its 23 percent unemployment.
German Ties
“The French economy isn’t doing as badly as Greece or Spain, but growth is very anemic,” said Boston University’s Keylor. “When the economy is bad, it trumps all other issues and the people in power are held responsible.”
France’s economy has slumped, with jobless claims jumping by 5.6 percent last year to a 12-year high of 2.87 million. Its debt has risen to 1.69 trillion euros, or 85.3 percent of gross domestic product, from 64.2 percent just before Sarkozy was elected. France’s trade deficit was a record 69.6 billion euros last year, up from 42.5 billion euros in 2007.
To revive growth and jobs, Sarkozy last month announced measures, including an unpopular increase in the country’s value-added-tax to compensate for cuts in labor charges, emulating German efforts in the past decade.
Sarkozy has forged stronger ties with Merkel to navigate the region through the debt crisis. Over the last two years, the two have held dozens of meetings. Merkel this month said she supports the French president “at every level.”
Foreign Policy
Hollande, meanwhile, is critical of the austerity plans advocated by Germany, saying they stifle growth. He has vowed to renegotiate a German-inspired treaty tightening budget rules endorsed by 25 European Union leaders last month.
“There are two things that appear to be scaring investors about the prospects of a Hollande victory: what he’s saying and the implications for the Paris-Bonn axis,” Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York, wrote in a note this week.
On foreign policy, Sarkozy has bolstered France’s profile on the world stage, returning the country into NATO’s military command structure, sending combat troops to Afghanistan, ordering commandos into action against Somali pirates, and leading the charge to intervene militarily in Libya.
In his first speech to France’s ambassadors in 2007 he opened a new chapter for the country’s Mideast policy. He called himself a “friend of Israel,” a position never openly stated by a French leader.
Afghanistan Difference
Initially misjudging the Arab Spring movement that began in Tunisia, Sarkozy has pushed for sanctions against the Bashar Al- Assad regime in Syria. He has also backed increasing sanctions against Iran.
The two candidates differ on the timetable for bringing French troops back from Afghanistan. Sarkozy says he’ll gradually pull France’s combat troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2013. Hollande wants to bring them home earlier, saying last month he’d start bringing troops home immediately.
Sarkozy’s actions on the international stage have done little to diminish his unpopularity at home, which stems at least in part from his governing style.
In the summer of 2006, before his election, Sarkozy wrote that his predecessor Jacques Chirac viewed the president’s role to be one of an “an arbitrator, bringing people together and appeasing.” Sarkozy wrote for himself: “I see him as a leader who decides, inspires and takes responsibility.”
Governing Style
He also earned the nickname “President Bling-Bling” in the first months in power, spending the early hours after his victory at a five-star restaurant on Paris’s Champs-Elysees with chief executive officers of some of France’s biggest companies, including Henri Proglio, now CEO of Electricite de France SA.
He later took a break from the months-long campaign on a yacht belonging to billionaire businessman Vincent Bollore.
He was the first president to get divorced while in office. Shortly after splitting from Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz, he married former Italian model-turned-singer Carla Bruni at the Elysee presidential palace in Feb. 2008.
His life provided fodder for celebrity magazines in a country where the private lives of presidents are kept private. Hollande often refers to Sarkozy’s “behavior” in his speeches.
Sarkozy has attempted to tone down his image, becoming more discreet about his private life. In October, he and Carla kept the birth of their baby, Giulia, out of the media spotlight.
With about two months before the first round of the elections, Sarkozy has his work cut out for him, said Boston University’s Keylor.
“All the polls show that he’s behind, and the French election campaign is so short that he can’t rely on some event to rally his support,” he said. “It would be a surprise if he pulls it off.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Helene Fouquet in Paris at hfouquet1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net
