France was supposed to turn the page this spring. Two years since voters killed the European constitution and after 12 morose years under Jacques Chirac, the French were expected to pick a new younger leader who would haul them out of their malaise and put their nation back on the map.
Now, ten days from the first round, the generational change is assured. The three main contenders, Nicolas Sarkozy on the right, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist, and François Bayrou in the centre, are all in their early to mid-fifties. But the prospect of Gallic renaissance looks less certain.
After getting off to a roaring start last year with the near-magical rise of the Socialist Madonna, the long presidential campaign has gone soggy. All the candidates have cast themselves as reformers but none has stirred excitement; few big ideas have emerged and record numbers of voters, depite thirsting for change, are reporting themselves uncertain.
More than four in ten are telling pollsters that they have not yet decided among the 12 contenders. The field is weighted to the left, with no fewer than five anti-capitalist candidates and a Green to Ms Royal’s gauche. The most comical is surely Gérard Schivardi, a Trotskyite village mayor with a southwestern twang so thick that Parisians have trouble understanding him. Less amusing is that two million people plan to vote for Olivier Besancenot, a baby-faced postman and revolutionary.
A significant number — maybe as many as 18 per cent of voters — are preparing to blow a raspberry at the establishment by voting for Jean-Marie Le Pen. The far-right bogeyman who broke through to the final in 2002 is ready to pounce again and his sinister presence is colouring the campaign, especially Mr Sarkozy’s.
By the standards of other, more predictable elections, Mr Sarkozy, the boss of President Chirac’s neo-Gaullist camp, the Union for a Popular Movement, should walk into the Elysée Palace after the May 6 final round. Sarko has led every poll since Christmas. He has run the most professional show. He has stuck to his muscular creed of work, order and discipline and he has set the agenda in a campaign that has zapped through a catalogue of issues, often of the most trivial kind.
Ségo squandered her early lead with an erratic, improvised campaign that is the despair of her party colleagues. She has remained in second place but many have turned from her maternal, old-style socialism and switched to Mr Bayrou. The farmer-teacher is promising, like her, to reconcile the protective State with the free market, but without her implausible promises of wealth for everyone.
The contest for the most absolute executive power in any democracy does not follow the patterns of mundane parliamentary races or even US presidential campaigns. The French uncertainty stems from the tactics of two-round voting and the persistent belief that the election is about choosing someone not just to govern but to embody the nation. Who do voters want to see reviewing the Bastille Day parade and lecturing them on television from the heights of the Elysée? In this final stretch, many are wondering whether they can stomach the notion of this being President Sarkozy.
With his boundless ambition, harsh rhetoric and hot temper, the diminutive former Interior Minister, puts up backs among the young and those with the social-minded sensibility. Unfairly, he is still caricatured as a facho (fascist) and blamed for provoking with his rhetoric and tough policing the riots on the immigrant housing estates of 2005. In contrast, Ségo may be seen as flaky but she is also perceived as gutsy. Mr Bayrou is a nice guy with hazy ideas. Apart from Le Pen no candidate stirs antipathy like Sarko.
This sets the scene for an unpredictable second round that will be a referendum on Mr Sarkozy, who has not been making things easy for himself. To lock down his lead in the first round, he has moved into Le Pen’s territory. Angling for the working-class conservative vote, he is playing down his liberal, reformist side. Instead, he is posing as guardian of French identity in the face of immigration and globalisation. But by flirting with xenophobia and protectionism, he has limited his ability in the second round to rassembler, to appeal beyond party lines.
If his opponent is Ms Royal, many voters will see the Socialist, for all her flaws, as the less threatening option. She has already produced her strategy. On Tuesday she told colleagues that she would stand for la France calme against Mr Sarkozy’s la France excitée — hot-headed France. This, pollsters say, could create a new dynamic in the second round, giving the lie to countless surveys that show Ms Royal losing by up to six points. If Mr Sarkozy’s final opponent is Mr Bayrou, the antiSarko forces of Left and Centre would quite possibly put the amiable Pyrenean horse-breeder into the Elysée.
Under a President Royal, France would be guaranteed a revolution, with a woman in command of one of Europe’s most virile political worlds, but the country’s long-awaited reckoning with economic reality would once again be delayed. More realism could be expected from a President Bayrou, but his priority would still be rebuilding the strong state, not deregulating it and cutting taxes.
With his smooth-running campaign machine, Mr Sarkozy is sure that he can alter the chemistry between rounds. Darth Sarko will give way to the vulnerable, human Sarkozy. We can expect a return to speeches in which the Hungarian immigrant’s son proclaims “I have changed” and calls himself “a little Frenchman of mixed blood”. He may well succeed. If he wins, though, his victory will come with a mandate for an authoritarian, protective state as much as for la rupture, the liberalising economic reforms that used to be his credo.
Charles Bremner