Libya crisis may save him from electoral humiliation

The French president certainly needs something to prevent him coming third in next year’s election It would surely be poor taste to accuse Nicolas Sarkozy of leading France into combat for purely selfish political reasons – but that won’t stop some in the president’s inner circle wondering if Operation Odyssey Dawn might just save the skin of a man who, a matter of days ago, seemed destined for electoral humiliation. Ever so discreetly, they will be hoping Libya can do for Sarkozy what the Falklands did for Margaret Thatcher – anoint a successful war leader deserving of re-election. “The French do like to have their president play world statesman,” mused one diplomat in Paris last week, before France’s Mirage and Rafale fighter planes had taken to the skies. “A good crisis,” he added, might be just what Sarkozy needs. He certainly needs something. A week ago he was staring at polls so ominous some analysts wondered if he’d even make it into second place in next year’s presidential contest. One survey put Sarkozy behind both his most likely Socialist opponent and Marine Le Pen, the new leader of the far-right National Front founded by her father, Jean-Marie. Sunday’s cantonal elections were expected to bring more bad news for the president’s UMP party. Two cabinet reshuffles in quick succession produced no bounce, with the president’s numbers stuck stubbornly in the doldrums. He’s never quite shaken off the depiction by Les Guignols de l’Info, the French Spitting Image, as manic and hyperactive, constantly popping pills either to calm or lift his mood. A poster spotted in the fashionable Marais district of Paris has Sarkozy wearing a dunce’s cap, smiling gormlessly. The chatter among Parisian political types centres on whether the president would even make it to the second round in next year’s two-stage contest, with some suspecting he might choose to preserve his dignity and not seek re-election at all – talk instantly dismissed, it has to be said, both by aides and by more neutral observers who swear that Sarkozy is a fighter, not a quitter. But how did it come to this, that a man who crushed his Socialist rival in 2007 and who was hailed as an instant star on the European stage – complete with supermodel wife – is now fighting for his political life? The answer says much about the state of European politics after the crash of 2008, but rather more about France itself – in particular how a mentality presumed abandoned in the revolution of 1789 lives on. The immediate explanation is not complicated and it is one familiar to most world leaders. The French economy is stalling, with unemployment stuck at 9.6%. The deficit does not equal Britain’s, but its accumulated debt is just as heavy. The mood, says Socialist party spokesman Benoît Hamon, is despondent, especially among the young. “Graduates are doing jobs below their qualifications; young people owning their own property is unimaginable. They believe they will live less well than their parents and that the country is in decline.” Sarkozy’s allies hardly disagree. Housing minister Benoist Apparu told me that, according to comparative polling, “the French are the most pessimistic nation in Europe” – that they are, incredibly, more worried about their future than the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan. All incumbents will struggle amid this kind of crash-induced gloom, but it has hit Sarkozy especially hard. First, it has entirely derailed the programme on which he was elected. Out went the early, breathless talk of Thatcherising, or Blairising, the still-statist French economy, injecting a dose of neo-liberal Anglo-Saxonism. Whatever appeal that message might once have had vanished in the rubble of Lehman Brothers. Sarkozy, who at first dreamed big, has had to make do with more modest achievements – the signature one being his pension reform, raising the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62 in the face of a howl of protest. He promises tax reform is coming, but those on the right who yearned for red meat on crime or welfare feel disappointed. Other politicians might be able to survive on such a thin record, but it’s harder for Sarkozy, who started with such grand ambition. “He didn’t say, ‘I

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