Nicolas Sarkozy is a victim of his own courage

The president should be applauded for his courage, hard work, plain-speaking and his love for France, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

 

A brave face: Nicolas Sarkozy faces an uncertain future at the hands of the French electorate Photo: Reuters

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

8:49PM BST 20 Apr 2012

I shall be sorry to see Sarkozy go. His defeat, if it truly comes to that in two weeks’ time – and nobody should entirely discount his dogged tenacity and sheer bloody-mindedness in the face of adversity – will have been a fiasco of style over substance.

 

Sarko campaigned five years ago by telling the French to their faces that he would not cosset them. Their standard of living would rise, he said, if they worked harder. Even before the financial crisis changed everything in 2008, you should have heard the screams and guffaws of the people who, early on, had decided he was an insufferable oik. It was simplistic. It was condescending. It was ridiculous.

 

For 12 years, Jacques Chirac and his successive cabinets, Right and Left, had carefully avoided any “courageous” (in the Sir Humphrey meaning of the word) decisions that might cause the French to strike and take to the streets. Note that by “the French”, I really mean that category of civil servants and state employees who have tenure for life, and can bring the country to a standstill with a handful of union members.

 

This was because, a couple of months after Chirac’s election in 1995, France’s public services, and therefore the smooth running of the country, ground to a halt for almost two months in protest at a pretty mild reform of the country’s generous, pay-as-you-go pension system. Even though the vast majority of privately employed citizens managed to get to their workplaces, sometimes by dint of astonishing physical effort, Chirac fired his PM and decided never to try to push an unpopular reform again.

 

It took Sarkozy to tackle, and pass, that pensions reform. He hammered on about the unvarnished truth: in 1945, when the system was mooted, eight workers paid for one retiree’s pension. Today it’s only two, and people live 18 years longer on average. For the past 40 years, France hasn’t known full employment. The mandatory pension age was lowered from 65 to 60 by another Socialist government, under François Mitterrand. The situation was untenable. Despite the usual moaning and groaning, the reform – which François Hollande, Sarkozy’s Socialist rival who’s leading in the polls, has vowed to reverse – was accepted.

 

Next to this, and other necessary measures – not to mention a willingness to act in Libya and the Ivory Coast among other places – do I truly care that Sarkozy has a questionable taste in women, wristwatches and restaurants? It takes the supercilious graduates of ENA, the incestuous elite government school that gives France most of her politicians, mandarins, top bosses, and a couple of star editors, to sniff at the “bling” appetites of an energetic immigrant’s son made good. (The difference between the taste of the London rioters and that of Sarko is more a question of degree than nature.) In France, the sociology of Left and Right has switched. Most of Sarkozy’s ministers come from humble backgrounds, which constantly get thrown in their faces, while the irony of this coming from the Parisian Left is never pointed out.

 

Although I come from a Socialist French political family, I liked and still like Sarko. He may not be as agreeable a man as François Hollande to spend a boozy evening with, but his values of physical and political courage, of hard work, of plain-speaking; his love for France; his sense of duty to our history, our allies and the values of the Resistance resonate far more with what I was brought up to respect than Hollande’s envious, hidebound, little-France rhetoric. But I understand I may be in a minority here.

 

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2012