Nicolas Sarkozy just wanted to prove he could win

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet believes that charm played but a minor role in the wooing of Carla Bruni.

Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy Photo: Getty

'Can this be how French lovers woo women?" my British friends ask, reading with appalled fascination about Nicolas Sarkozy's speedy dinner conquest (four hours over drinks, dinner, café and petits-fours) of Carla Bruni at the house of spin doctor Jacques Séguéla a little over a year ago. Bruni and Sarkozy then kissed; Séguéla told in his book, Autobiographie non autorisée, published yesterday.

The French know the tale already – the dinner party at which Sarkozy, barely weeks after his divorce from second wife Cécilia, had eyes only for his blind date. (Besides, Séguéla, who recently predicted that Sarkozy would never fire Rachida Dati "because she's the only star in the Cabinet", is, at 75, less than an irrefutable authority.) Everywhere other than in France, it seems, they are shocked.

"But it's so trite. So clichéd. So…" So successful?

"We expected poetry! Philosophy! Literary allusions! Panache! Not sniping about Mick Jagger's bony calves!" Sarkozy even had the class to lean over and whisper in Bruni's ear, "Bet you don't have the nerve right now in front of everyone to kiss me on the mouth".

Not that I can guarantee all Frenchmen in a romantic mood will spout snatches of Derrida and Baudelaire over a glass of Phélan-Ségur, but it's worth remembering at this stage that Sarkozy is an atypical president. He talks bluntly, he pounces on his objectives, regardless of collateral hurt feelings and he gets what he wants.

No one in France was particularly surprised to learn that this was also his romantic modus operandi.

For those taken aback by Sarko's demeanour, it's worth bearing in mind the general servility of the French in a court-type situation – the president, or the CEO, like King Louis XIV, is given free rein to behave as he wishes. At the Séguélas, the other six guests just sat back, piped down, and watched the Sarko and Carla show.

Your traditional French lover believes he is making an incomparable gift of himself when he pays attention to a lucky female. The natty suits, the sophisticated conversation, all this is part of the image; a pretty girl is merely the ultimate accessory. However, this doesn't apply to Sarkozy, who has nurtured feelings of inadequacy all his life, and compensated accordingly.

He was short, he had a foreign-sounding name, he was the son of a divorced mother and lived with his two brothers in comparatively shabby-genteel conditions in Paris's poshest suburb, Neuilly. His estranged Hungarian father told him he had no future in politics in France. Now look at him: he became mayor of Neuilly at 28, and president of France at 52. He's had innumerable girlfriends and been married three times. He does not drink, does not smoke (except the occasional cigar), runs every morning, and exhausts a crew of aides who're mostly 20 years his juniors. Sarko may come across in politics as over-confident, but he is still driven – Woody Allen with a success compulsion.

Now engineer a meeting with Carla Bruni, a kind of Liz Hurley with class, and watch the sparks fly. They were each other's dream – Sarko the ultimate bag for a big-game huntress; Bruni the woman too beautiful for a president who is still trying to prove himself. It's Sarko's sincerity, more than his words, which got to La Bruni. When he told her "We'll do better than Marilyn and Kennedy" (note the order), he did not think of adulterous liaisons, a pills overdose, minders cleaning out the suicide house in the small hours; but of eternal youth and legendary fame.

In many ways, Sarkozy has an overarching, Caesarean view of destiny. In love, as in politics, he believes victory trumps style. Perhaps his private life shows us that in a Sarkozy world, victory is style.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

Sarkozy's rainbow cabinet turns drab

Rachida Dati is just one of the victims as harsh reality saps the glamour from the French cabinet, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet.

Rachida Dati: charm could not save her Photo: EPA

You know there's a real recession on when glamour no longer saves your bacon in Paris. Justice minister Rachida Dati found this out last week, when Nicolas Sarkozy ordered her to give up her cabinet post and add some much-needed diversity to his party's Euro-elections list.

You can't fire the government's brightest star, Sarko was warned by his spin doctors. Oh yes I can, said the president, who had tired in equal parts of Dati's lacklustre performance as justice minister and celebrity turn as Dior model, Paris Match cover girl and mysterious single mother. More than a million people filled the streets on Thursday, striking against the handling of the economic crisis. It is no time to parade a cabinetful of smart, exotic women in couture pencil skirts over four-inch Louboutins.

Another widely tipped casualty is Senegal-born junior minister Rama Yade, 32, who was first to decline the dreaded Euro elections job, earning Sarkozy's lasting ire. She can no longer call the president directly, and her many letters and ingratiating gifts (including a heart-shaped giant box of chocolates) to Sarko haven't even been acknowledged.

Of Sarkozy's famed 2007 rainbow cabinet, there will soon remain only one: Fadela Amara, the 44-year-old French-Algerian urban affairs minister, who was seen early on as the one most likely to fail. Her aides were as inexperienced as she was, top mandarins sniffed. Ms Amara, a former Socialist alderwoman from Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne, is chiefly known for founding Ni Putes, Ni Soumises (Neither Sluts Nor Submissives), a feminist association fighting forced marriages, violence and gang rapes of women in France's most depressed areas.

There's a lot of gritty commitment, and the occasional flash of raw charm to Fadela Amara, but no glamour. She shops at H&M, cuts her hair in her own bathroom, and still lives in a working-class part of Paris rather than use her ministry's official residence near the Eiffel Tower. For long, Fadela Amara was the ungainly tortoise to her colleagues' elegant hares. Her protective colouring and native virtue seem to have paid off at last: even in Paris, 2009 will be the year of drab.

ŠThe demonstrators may have been out in force, but the so-called general strike was, in fact, practically unnoticeable in most parts of France. Metro trains were spaced by only a couple of additional minutes; buses ran normally; the post landed on my doormat as usual; even suburban trains were available at peak hours.

So who was blocking traffic in most high streets, singing Marxist anthems and demanding more jobs, more pay, bank bosses hanging from lampposts? Public sector employees, of course – those in the private sector are only too aware of how precarious their jobs are – and the swelling ranks of France's new far-Left coalition, led by a dapper Trotskyite former postman, Olivier Besancenot. The 34-year-old's clean looks and smile sit oddly with his militant rhetoric, but he is a firm favourite with Sarkozy: the more votes he polls, the more he splits the traditional Left.

* Only one person, it seems, can attend a star-studded dinner-party in top-to-toe YSL and sapphire-and-diamond jewellery on the very day of the strikes, and still escape criticism: Carla Bruni, of course, who enjoys cross-party, Obama-esque poll ratings. La Bruni presided with aplomb over the Aids charity Sidaction's traditional Fashion Week dinner. When the first lady's husband made a surprise appearance at the end of the evening to pick her up, she even got him a round of applause – certainly the only one Sarkozy earned that day.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

Rachida Dati left baby at home to save career

If you think France's most famous single mother, the justice minister Rachida Dati, had a choice when she returned to work just five days after delivering her daughter Zohra by caesarean section, think again.

Rachida Dati feared losing her job if she decided to stay at home with her baby. Photo: REUTERS

Pictures of the radiant mother in the Elysée forecourt, coiffed, made-up and manicured, in a severe but figure-hugging size eight black Yves Saint Laurent outfit and four inch heels, stirred debate across France.

Was the 43-year-old minister striking a blow for women's liberation or setting it back 40 years?

Could such a superwoman carry the standard for millions of working mothers, or was she shaming them into giving up hard-won advances, such as paid maternity leave and part-time employment?

Amid the clamour of competing opinions one important point can be easily overlooked: Miss Dati went back to work not from a position of strength but from a position of weakness. She feared losing her job if she decided to stay at home with her baby.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is planning a government reshuffle next week, is a notoriously impatient boss and his justice minister's competence has been called into question.

The purpose of her stage-managed picture opportunity was to ensure that nobody could possibly have thought of her as an unfit, over-the-hill mother left pregnant by a commitment-shy (and possibly adulterous) casual boyfriend.

In French politics, weakness is the cardinal mistake; image matters above everything. And women make it by being four times tougher than everybody else.

Miss Dati, was a highly-praised adviser to Mr Sarkozy, when he was interior minister. She was also an efficient presidential campaign spokesman for him 18 months ago when he won the highest office in the land.

However, no one could pretend she has been a successful justice minister. Given the task of making sweeping reforms to get more efficiency from France's creaking judicial bureaucracy, she antagonised magistrates' and prison wardens' unions – not least when they saw her modelling a Dior chiffon dress on the cover of Paris-Match the same week that she called for more budget cuts.

She has gone through more chiefs of staff at her ministry (conveniently located next to the Ritz on Place Vendôme) than Diana, the Princess of Wales, did at Kensington Palace.

Like almost every powerful woman in high office, she is said to be mercurial and bad-tempered, a charge rarely levelled against her equally Napoleonic male counterparts in France's political elite.

All the same, few ministers would have hauled a provincial judge out of bed after midnight to explain why a young thief had been sent to prison, where he subsequently committed suicide, prompting angry headlines.

Miss Dati had no such reluctance.

And fewer ministers, perhaps, would have chosen a tête-à-tête breakfast with Prince Albert of Monaco over a long-scheduled meeting with representatives from the prison wardens' unions, an incident said to have enraged Mr Sarkozy.

Significantly, he took it upon himself to announce yet another major, and potentially unpopular, reform of the justice system last week rather than waiting for his minister to return to work.

Any other minister would have been a foregone casualty in the projected cabinet reshuffle. Once an intimate of the Sarkozy couple – she and Mr Sarkozy's previous wife Cecilia called one another "sister" – Miss Dati has fallen from grace at the Elysée. She is a bête noire of the new Madame Sarkozy, Carla Bruni.

More significantly, she is not included in the Group of Seven, the seven ministers most appreciated by the president, who gather informally with him to plan the government's next moves.

However, it should be said that neither is the prime minister, François Fillon, who is nevertheless expected to keep his job next week.

For months, Miss Dati's job was saved by who she was: the primary face of Mr Sarkozy's rainbow coalition, the first Muslim in charge of a major cabinet post.

If not quite the most popular politician in the country, she is certainly the one whose face sells the most newspapers and magazine covers.

Young people like her. Women like her. Minorities like her. The Left pulls its punches when it comes to her.

Even her well-publicised spat with Mr Sarkozy's other high-profile cabinet minority appointment, the popular Senegal-born human rights secretary, Rama Yade, has failed to make a dent in her reputation. Her rival is in hot water with Mr Sarkozy, having refused to lead the Gaullist list in the European elections, prompting the president to call her a "spoiled brat".

But all this is predicated on one essential quality: Miss Dati must at all costs look like a winner. Let her stumble but once, and the thumbs will turn down in seconds. French politics is like a gladiator's arena: woe to the vanquished.

Her pregnancy could have finished her, and she knew it.

Hence the cameras outside the maternity clinic (positively restrained, the minister's friends will tell you, compared with the former Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, who held a photocall in the room where she had given birth to her daughter). Hence the YSL outfits and the make-up artist; hence the coy speculation, sometimes fuelled by the minister herself, about the identity of the baby's father.

The candidates include a Spanish politician, two chief executives of France's largest companies, a cabinet colleague, a television presenter and the president's brother.

Far from being a social reject, Miss Dati revelled in the celebrity spotlight. Mr Sarkozy saw his ratings plummet when he was tagged the "bling-bling president". But Miss Dati correctly assessed that making headlines, any kind of headlines, was better than fading into the background. Every newspaper article on her motherly qualities (or lack thereof), her feminism (or crass destruction of such) puts her firmly at the centre of attention.

Would you fire a woman triumphantly embodying the 21st century's contradictions?

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2009

Saakashvili Takes Paris

A president and an intello walk into a Left-Bank bar...

Paris As an exercise in diplomatic deployment, Mikhail Saakashvili had his French trip planned to near perfection. The French like you more if you've published a book. Check. Even better if the book is originally in French. Check two. And most of all if you've written the book with a card-carrying member of a dynasty of Nouveaux Philosophes. Check three. Thus it was that last Wednesday night, I was yakking away, glass of red in hand in approved Left Bank form, in a crowded Georgian restaurant at the heart of Saint-Germain des Prés, waiting for the president of Georgia and his co-author Raphaël Glucksmann, who in equally approved form were both late. Piles of Je vous parle de liberté (Hachette Littératures, 2008) awaited inscribing under the watchful eye of two Hachette publicists. Nobody was checking invitations. There was no visible security among the modish crowd jostling for spicy canapés inside the bar and only a small police van parked at the corner of rue du Sabot and rue de Rennes down the block. You could not have better telegraphed that Saakashvili--who, as he reminded everyone regularly during his 48-hour-trip, spent a year studying in Strasbourg and there met his future wife--felt at home in France, in the Sixth Arrondissement, and with this crowd. Saakashvili eventually arrived and gave a short, graceful speech in very good French--more family reunion than formal declaration--particularly saluting his co-author's father, André Glucksmann, the bowl-cut coiffed author of The Master Thinkers and famous as the reuniter of Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron (over the fate of Vietnamese boat-people in 1979). Glucksmann père floated above the proceedings looking like a gaunt but rather healthy mummy. He had read him while a student, Saakashvili explained, marvelling that someone understood the Soviet evil so well. He had not even known if Glucksmann were still alive, much less could he have imagined that he would one day meet the philosopher's son in a muddy park in Kiev during the Orange Revolution, that the two would become friends, and would write a book together. Everyone in the overcrowded room was smiling. After all, one could hardly do better in terms of well-connected tourisme engagé. (The French don't play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon but Six Degrés de Jean-Paul Sartre.) It was a perfect moment, one of the best of Saakashvili's whole tour. He was in France to make the case that Russia had violated the terms of the imperfect cease-fire agreements negotiated by Sarkozy in the name of the European Union on August 12 and September 8, and urge firmness. Saakashvili had even cadged an Elysée invite from Sarko just a day before the EU-Russia summit began in Nice with the French in the seat of the rotating EU presidency. Throughout his whirlwind tour, Saakashvili was careful to give credit to the Sarkozy-led EU intervention, but it was felt at the time that the Europeans had conceded too much, especially in treating as a fait accompli a Russian military presence in the two seceding Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Today, Europe is split between the established "engagement with Russia is necessary" line, peddled by Commission president José Manuel Barroso among others, and a resistance front let by the Baltic States, Poland, the Czech Republic, and a somewhat wobbly Gordon Brown, who argue that there should be no resumption of talks on EU-Russia commercial partnership before Russia pulls back the 8,000 soldiers she has on the ground --some as close to Tbilisi as 30 miles. Overall, the engagement line is winning. Nowhere could this be more strongly felt than on France Inter, the state radio, bright and early Thursday morning as Saakashvili sat in the studio as the guest of the 8 A.M. news program. We French still get our hard news and spin from radio throughout the day, only switching to television at night. France Inter is a kind of mass-market NPR, with a relentlessly po-faced liberal line that has only ever pleased, or sought to please, the Quai d'Orsay--as France's foreign ministry is known (the mandarins, not the minister himself, whose ideas are largely seen as irrelevant by his administration). They were awaiting the Georgian aventuriste loaded for bear. Introducing the guest, Bernard Guetta, the morning foreign affairs moderator, reminded us that Saakashvili's calling Europe's possible abandonment of Georgia a "new Munich" had "the support of the American right." Having painted the Neocon cross squarely on Saakashvili's chest, Guetta continued. Georgia had "provoked" Russia, which felt threatened by the suggestion of an "unnecessary and unfeasible extension of NATO" to Georgia and Ukraine, but "thankfully" the United States "had not moved" to defend its ally. Common sense and world stability dictated that Europe and the United States should abstain from "pushing Russia too far" and should instead consider her "offer of cooperation." Nicolas Demorand, France Inter's news editor, then brought out "independent evidence" that Georgia had attacked first. Even the listeners during the phone-in segment were hostile. Saakashvili, though, gave as good as he got. The OSCE monitor who gave the supposed "independent evidence" has since been fired, he countered. "There wasn't a single Georgian soldier on Russian soil at any time. It was our towns which were bombed, our territory which was invaded, our population which was pushed out or killed by the thousands, even after the EU agreement was signed." A town called Akhalgory was even renamed Leningory: "This in the 21st century." His hosts were dismissive and urged him to reconsider. Joining NATO was a pipedream. "America's support for Georgia weakens and will weaken even more under President Obama." In vain did Saakashvili quote the president-elect's words from the debates, or note Senator Biden's trip to Georgia during the summer war. "Don't you feel how the wind is changing in Washington?" he was admonished. The rest of the day, save for his 40-minute meeting with Sarkozy, Saakashvili spent giving print interviews, taping more television segments, and, finally, joining Raphaël Glucksmann on Le Grand Journal, a one-hour early evening news program on Canal+, France's premier pay-TV channel. This could have gone for or against Saakashvili. Glucksmann's presence and the duo's practiced, if slightly smug, allusions to their youth, clinched it. The Le Monde-quoting Saakashvili (with one more reference to meeting his wife in Strasbourg) was anointed as cool by both the studio audience and the show's regulars. These had decided to use the occasion to bash Sarkozy, always a well-received exercise. ("He campaigned saying that Putin had Chechen blood on his hands, and now they're best buddies! All he answered last summer when Putin said he wanted to have you 'strung up by the balls' was 'You can't do that, do you want to end up like George Bush?' ") Saakashvili smiled at the show's famous political puppets, at the generously décolletaged weather girl, and even during the short video segment showing him coming out of the Elysée meeting earlier in the afternoon and looking a little forlorn on the palace steps when Sarkozy turns away after shaking his hand. The Georgian president demonstrated the required sense of distance accepted as proper manners in the postmodern political discourse practiced by countries where the memories of foreign invasion has faded away. Throughout his French tour, Saakashvili gave his rather impressively sophisticated all and could only hope that it had advanced the cause of his beleaguered country on the European stage. © Copyright The Weekly Standard & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

Sarkozy has been played like a Stradivarius by Putin and Medvdev

November 19, 2008 6:00 AM | Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
Journalist; Executive Director, Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute
French Lessons For The U.S.

President-elect Barack Obama has lessons to learn from France's Nicolas Sarkozy, but they may not be what Sarkozy intended. When he greeted the visiting Democratic candidate at the Elysée last summer, the French president meant for a bit of Obama's cool to rub off on him (and his dwindling poll ratings.) He also wanted to play the elder statesman, bequeathing the wealth of his foreign-affairs experience on the freshman from far-away Illinois. As it turns out, it's Sarko who's been played, like a Stradivarius, by the redoubtable team of Russian president Dmitri Medvedev and his remote handler Vladimir Putin, at the EU-Russia summit at Nice last week-end.

Sarkozy, who as recently as 2006 peppered his ultimately successful presidential campaign with statements like "I'd rather shake hands with George Bush than with Vladimir Putin - Putin has Chechen blood on his hands," has of late experienced what can be termed a Damascene conversion in more ways than one. Russia, he believes, must be "engaged". (So must Putin himself, it would seem: at his first G-8 last year, Sarko was snapped lending his cell phone to the Russian strongman, so that he, Putin, could share a joke with his, Sarkozy's, wife.)

The French president built his political reputation on his willingness to personally engage any number of opponents. He made the cardinal mistake of thinking that he could successfully bluff his way among the autocrat leaders of an empire stretching over 12 time zones, who cut their political teeth in a totalitarian system punishing thoughtcrime with secret police, tanks, and a prison camp system second to none. Why not? the reasoning seems to have gone. It worked with union picket lines, angry demonstrators, even a hostage-taker threatening to bomb a primary school when Sarkozy was the 28-year-old mayor of a Paris suburb. Sarko has always trusted his gut, and most of the time this has served him well - together with his genuine physical courage.

But winging it, even with the best intentions, simply doesn't work in this case. For the sake of "engagement", Sarkozy, in his capacity as rotating president of the EU, abandoned beleaguered Georgia, and agreed to resume talks on EU-Russian economic partnership, event though Russia violates to this day even the favourable ceasefire brokered by that self-same Sarkozy last August in Tbilisi - there are Russian troops not only in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but as close as 30 miles from the Georgian capital.

To "help" Medvedev feel he was in congenial company in Nice, and - as he thought - get the negotiating ball rolling - Sarko didn't hesitate to state that the US plans to install an anti-missile shield against Iranian nukes in willing countries like Poland or the Czech Republic "would bring nothing to European security." (Only the week before, Medvedev, for his part, had shown no compunction to threaten to target missiles on EU and NATO countries.)

Sarkozy believes he can "mediate" between Russia and the West. He is wrong on several counts. The first is that no-one gave him a mandate. (He believes success will validate him after the fact, but his definition of "success" while bleeding advantages left and right should be unacceptable to the West and the United States.) The second is that he seems to forget what Ronald Reagan always knew (from his past as a tough union negotiator battling Communists in Hollywood): that for a certain type, which was Russian even before it was Soviet, everything that's theirs is theirs and everything that's yours is negotiable. The third is that you do not talk with an adversary who does not share your basic values without preconditions. It is strange that Sarkozy understands this about Iran, but won't see it when it comes to Russia. From all accounts, President-elect Obama does see this about Russia, but is still uncertain about Iran. Each of them should learn something from the other; but they should not be mistaken on what there is to learn.

© Anne-Elisabeth Moutet & Hudson Institute, 2008

The Euro Shoe-In

Here in Paris it is the bright sunny dawn of November 4th - “just the day,” interviewees tell you unselfconsciously on the morning news, “to start liking America again.” It doesn’t matter that the first US election results won’t fall until the small hours tomorrow (a day scheduled with rain.) The French have already elected - anointed - Barack Obama as The US President They Want.

For weeks now, neither newspapers nor radio or television channels have even bothered sending a reporter with the McCain campaign, which they view as best as an irrelevance, and mainly as a useful foil for the Tales of Barack. (Voters repelled by Sarah Palin’s anti-abortion stance? Check. McCain partisans guilty of racism in the voting booth? Check. Gun-totin’ embittered Joe Six-Packs shooting baby fawns from their pick-up trucks on the way to the megachurch? Check.)

Instead, reporters have been dispatched to Harlem to report on the planning of street parties tonight (France Info); to Dixville, NH for the first Democrat victory of the day (“the first since Humbert Humphrey’s candidacy in 1968,” France 2 TV adds helpfully); even to Hawaii for the coming funeral of Madelyn Dunham, the candidate’s grandmother (TF1 TV, which never thinks of mentioning how Mrs Dunham first entered the campaign rhetoric, as a useful comparison to Rev. Wright in terms of racial prejudice.) America, we are told, will finally set an example to the world.

And what if, in a surprise upset, this beloved screenplay is brutally rewritten?

“There will be riots,” pundits pronounce. Those riots, you understand, would be justified. America’s “visible minorities” will have been cheated of their victory. So will ours, who have no hope in the next decade of achieving anything like the US’s political integration. What few Muslims and French-African politicians occupy Cabinet jobs were high-handedly appointed by a right-wing president, Sarkozy, going against established habit and party power plays in apportioning the spoils. Not coincidentally, those same appointees have been the butt of most of the criticism levelled at the government by professional civil service leakers. Rachida Dati, the Justice minister, who is of Algerian/Moroccan origin, has been branded “incompetent”, “unqualified,” and, yes, “a diva.” Fadela Amara, the Housing Undersecretary, a French-Algerian feminist, is “disorganised and can’t run a team.” Sounds familiar?

In reality, we Europeans, who pride ourselves on our supposed forward thinking, respect nothing more than Establishment figures. In our reasoning, it is up to you, dear American voters, to provide us with the right Harvard Law School grad of the right colour, to simply start the wheels of change here (and to keep our restless minorities happy in the bargain.) How could you even consider disappointing us? What better motive can there be? Make the Paris MSM and French political party machines time-servers happy! Vote Obama!

© Copyright Hudson Institute New York & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

Old World Wiles

As the European press from L'Humanité to the Financial Times (what were they smoking?) endorses the Imminent Coming Of Saint Barack, we other Europeans are seized by a strangely familiar feeling. We have been here before. Namely in 1981, when 23 years of conservative (Gaullist, at any rate) rule in France finally ended with the election of the Socialist François Mitterrand. Mitterrand appointed four Communist ministers among his cabinet, and proceeded to nationalize the banks (sounds familiar?) as well as most large industrial corporations. France resolutely ploughed into the Reagan-Thatcher Eighties in deep contrarian denial: exchange controls, punitive redistributive taxes, a shorter workweek, legal vacation time raised from 4 to 5 weeks annually, a 10% raise on the minimum wage, etc.

Wealth had to be shared. The byword was solidarité: the new wealth tax went by the acronym ISF, Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune (it has never been abolished since all our successive presidents believe our Marxist-lite media-massaged public opinion wouldn’t stand for it.) Keynesian economics would inevitably provide jobs and prosperity. When newly-flush consumers had the bad taste to prefer Japanese-made VCRs to French-produced goods, stiff tariffs and regulations were slapped on faster than you can say WTO. The result was predictable: inflation; more, not less, unemployment; and successive devaluations of the franc.

It took Mitterrand’s sobered cohorts, minus the Communists who did not survive the first Cabinet reshuffle, less than two years to make a complete u-turn. By the mid-80s, France was dipping a collective toe in the uncharted waters of stock-market deregulation. By 1990, a nominally-Socialist Finance minister (later PM), Pierre Bérégovoy, prided himself on the success of Paris’s derivatives exchange.

It would be tempting to resign oneself to the likely election of Barack Obama as a coming moment of painful silliness, tinged with vainglorious ideology, to be endured for a relatively short time, before its more noxious side-effects can be reversed. Some points, after all, have to be made. The French wanted to show that the Fifth Republic was not the property of a single party. Americans would like to prove - to themselves first - that they have put behind them for good a past of racism and bigotry.

Mitterrand and Obama, both lawyers with little actual practice but ample oratory gifts, have a lot in common, foremost a burning ambition and far less ideological principles than their troops. The Obama who cites as solipsistic proof of his executive experience the very fact that he is running a large campaign, is not so far removed from the maneuvering Fourth Republic hack who showed an undistinguished but long career as evidence of his capacity to lead the Republic. Supporting in turn Vichy France and the resistance, French Algeria then anti-Colonialism, anti-Communists then the Socialist-CP alliance, François Mitterrand never failed to reinvent himself in the direction he felt would more advance his personal ambition. (The Socialist Party he remodelled to his own specifications ended up with a lot in common with the Chicago Democrat machine, too.) In throwing under the bus his pastor or his foreign adviser, Obama shows signs of a similar flexibility.

Yet the situation is hardly comparable. In an interesting reversal, a President Obama might well find himself the Leftmost head of State at any forthcoming G8 among the likes of Sarkozy, Merkel and Harper, just as the Socialist Mitterrand had to deal with Maggie and Ronnie. But the world was a far less interconnected place a quarter of century ago. Economic decisions in France affected the world economy even less than they would today. The leading position of the US, despite constant claims that it’s been overtaken by the New Tigers, means that a housing slump in North Dakota influences the Italian stock market - and an Italian stock market plunge destroys jobs in Detroit. The stakes today are higher, faster, riskier.

And, of course, there’s the rhinoceros in the room - foreign policy and the threat from Islamist extremism. For all his faults - he misread, and mistrusted, the collapse of Communism, and appointed as his last Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, the architect of codified international anti-Americanism - François Mitterrand fell on the right side of the fence at critical moments, such as when France sent troops to Beirut in 1982, or joined the first Gulf War coalition. The worst terrorist attacks on French soil occurred under Mitterrand, masterminded by Algerian Salafists or Pasdaran-commissioned Iranians. A Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 58 of our paratroopers at 6:20am on October 23, 1983, precisely two minutes after another hit 241 US marines at Beirut airport. An old man with a very long memory and an acute sense of the balance of power, Mitterrand would never have opened talks with Iran without stiff preconditions.

Obama has none of these old world wiles. Surrounded by superannuated Carter administration hacks, frisky neo-Marxists, and UN-admiring CFR alumni, he buys into the al-Jazeera image of the US and believes America can gain the world’s affection with the same charming techniques he employed to win a seat on the Illinois State Senate, or that his wife deployed to soften her image on The View. He may realize his error at the first lost round of negotiations, but by then it might be too late.

© Copyright Hudson Institute New York & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008

The French press play it cool over Rachida Dati

French journalists are keeping quiet about the father
of Rachida Dati's unborn child

The French press is hunting for the name of the father of (unmarried) justice minister Rachida Dati's unborn child. Well, the journalists write that they are. When you break Poilâne with them at chic dinner parties, they tell you they have known for weeks. The names being bandied about include a television show host, two millionaire chief executives, married former Spanish premier José-María Aznar and even Nicolas Sarkozy.

Twenty years ago, it was the same with François Mitterrand's mistress and her daughter. It was only the public, poor saps, who weren't supposed to know. It's always been the case with French journalists that they would rather be in the loop than have a scoop, which is why they don't really complain about the country's stringent privacy laws.

When the elegant Ms Dati, sporting a slightly rounded belly under a charcoal cashmere jumper, told inquiring hacks: "I have a very complicated private life, and that's where I draw the line with the press," they didn't push her. At any rate, she said, she was 42, which meant she was still at a stage where her pregnancy might not succeed. "If it happens, I'll be over the moon. If not, I'll be hugely disappointed, but I'll put on a coat of lipstick, and I'll carry this burden alone."

You might expect more than one French politician to seize this opportunity to brand Dati as another "pitbull with lipstick", using the best example of the breed, the US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. But Ms Dati is getting a cushy ride, from the Right-most wing of her party to the extreme Left. Single mother? Pregnant? Yawn. France, which encourages marriage and children with significant tax incentives and benefits, is not hung up on what people here won't even call "morality". Will she stay on as minister? "It's not an illness," Ms Dati snaps. Of course she will. This will make her the fourth pregnant French cabinet minister in office; before her, Ségolène Royal, Florence Parly, and Frédérique Bredin had babies while taking their boxes all the way to the maternity clinic. The unmarried Royal even invited a camera crew to her delivery room, which was rightly seen as the first step of her presidential bid.

* Mrs Palin is getting no credit in France for being a successful, savvy woman and an exciting new face in politics. If the US elections were held in France, Barack Obama would poll a Mugabe-esque 83 per cent of the vote. Palin is painted here as an ignorant religious fanatic, a gun nut, and proof positive that the American heartland is a more dangerous place than Anbar province.

She is also seen as irrelevant, and one more reason why John McCain's bid is doomed. Even the usually sharp-antennaed Sarkozy tilts towards Obama, whom, unlike McCain, he greeted on the Élysée steps and favoured with a high-profile joint press conference during the American's whirlwind French visit. It will be interesting to watch reassessments should the Republican ticket win.

* Long defined as a country of farmers, France is slowly seeing wimpy townie manners take over. The inhabitants of the Alpine village of Villaz (pop 3,000) are suing a local farmer, Michel Déronzier, because they don't like being kept awake by his herd of Pie Rouges' cowbells at night.

"It's only seven cows out of 70 who have a bell!" Déronzier protests. "It's necessary, because it helps the dogs locate them faster. And at any rate, there have always been cowbells in the country. If people don't like it, they should move to the city; they won't like the noise of cars there." So far, it's a standoff.