French politics. Nicolas Sarkozy and the reform of France

The tale of a man who is now at the centre of France's government

HE IS an old-style interventionist, but a free-market critic of the 35-hour week. He is a defender of national champions, but has pushed the commercialisation of the state electricity utility. He tries to control prices by negotiating with supermarkets, but uses competition to do the job in telecoms. Part meddler, part economic liberal: who is Nicolas Sarkozy? The French finance minister, and his warfare against President Jacques Chirac, mesmerises France. This week a job vacancy opened at the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), the party Mr Chirac created, when Alain Juppe stepped down as chairman, having been convicted of political corruption. Despite Mr Chirac's best efforts, the man ready to take over is Mr Sarkozy.

Most UMP deputies - 80-90%, says one backbencher - back Mr Sarkozy for the job, which could be a springboard for a 2007 presidential bid. Asked by Ifop, a pollster, 49% of voters prefer Mr Sarkozy to 41% for Mr Chirac. Among right-leaning voters, the gap is 62% to 33%. The man whom Mr Chirac has distrusted ever since he backed a rival, Edouard Balladur, in the 1995 presidential election, is riding a wave of popularity that may end in confrontation. These days “Les Guignols de l'Info”, a satirical television show, shows Mr Sarkozy burying Mr Chirac alive. This week, Mr Chirac again said he would not let Mr Sarkozy run both the UMP and the finance ministry.

In many ways, Mr Sarkozy's appeal is that he embodies everything Mr Chirac is not. The president is of an older generation, trained at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) to believe in a well-run state, the primacy of the Franco-German relationship and a version of neo-Gaullism that draws heavily on anti-Americanism. He was first elected in rural Correze, and is still beholden to farmers. His wife Bernadette is a French aristocrat who stands loyally by her man. He is a baby-hugging campaigner in the populist mould, but, after nearly ten years as president, has perfected la langue de bois, a form of bland political evasion. A survivor not a reformer, Mr Chirac is a classic product of French technocratic tradition.

Mr Sarkozy, by contrast, is all flashy modernism. Aged 49 to Mr Chirac's 71, he did not go to ENA, but trained as a lawyer. He came of age politically in the Thatcherite 1980s, when statist policies went out of fashion. He treats Germany as no more privileged a friend than any other, and works hard at alliances with Britain, Spain and America. Where Tony Blair and Mr Chirac clash, Mr Sarkozy is close to the British prime minister and to Gordon Brown, his chancellor. (Mr Sarkozy's stepdaughter is at university in England.) As interior minister, he resisted the ban on the Muslim headscarf in state schools, embracing instead Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism. He admires America's social mobility.

Also unlike Mr Chirac, Mr Sarkozy's political life began far from rural France, in Neuilly, a bourgeois Paris suburb of which he was mayor. With his high-profile wife, Cecilia, who works in his private office, they form a power couple more in the Blair or Clinton mould. The son of an aristocratic Hungarian immigrant, he has an outsider's drive. What he lacks in height he makes up in hyperactivity, expecting long hours from his advisers and blowing up at any slip-ups. He is often photographed cycling or jogging, as if to ram home the contrast with an older president.

Above all, Mr Sarkozy rejects old excuses for not reforming France. “The obstacle to change in France is a lack of political courage,” he says, relaxing on the ministerial jet back from a recent trip. If you explain what you are doing, and why, he argues, the French will change. Look at how his policy of pushing speed cameras moderated breakneck driving. A child of the television era, with a taste for showmanship, he knows how to use the media: he gets a far better press than the unpopular prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin. Hence his weekly trips to factories or supermarkets, the point being to popularise change. He presents reforming the 35-hour week in terms of putting more money in workers' pockets; budget cuts as just good housekeeping. Tellingly, he admires Bill Clinton.

If Mr Sarkozy is so keen to modernise France, though, why his nationalistic noise over bailing out Alstom, a French firm, or insisting on a French merger partner for Aventis, a Franco-German drugmaker? This looks like incoherence, if not political weakness. Even turning Electricite de France (EDF), a bastion of Communist-backed unionism, into a company ahead of partial privatisation was sweetened with concessions. An explanation advanced by his aides is that Mr Sarkozy must tread a delicate path between symbolic populist gestures, such as saving jobs at Alstom, and unpopular reforms, such as commercialising EDF. “You don't get elected in France by praising markets,” comments one adviser. In other words, populist concessions earn him the credibility to press on with more liberal measures elsewhere. “I do what works, what makes things move,” says Mr Sarkozy, dismissing efforts to pin labels on him.

Aware that brutal reform has buried past ministers, Mr Sarkozy picks battles pragmatically. The next will be the forthcoming budget. He wants to prove that the French can keep their word, and bring their deficit below 3% of GDP in 2005. He has re-opened a debate over the 35-hour week, and he wants to make the European Central Bank more transparent and accountable. Strikingly, he has just appointed a free-market economist as an adviser. Yet the balance of evidence so far is not in favour of Sarkozy-as-liberal. A test will be whether he can stick to his word on the budget, and also pull off labour-market reform. The spending round will be tough, given Mr Chirac's new fondness for “social” programmes. But that, as Mr Sarkozy concedes wryly, is probably why he was offered the job.

Much depends on how long he stays at the finance ministry. If Mr Sarkozy stands for the UMP chairmanship, which he must do by mid-September for a vote in November, will he defy the president and keep both jobs? Mr Chirac was once prime minister, head of his party, and mayor of Paris. Would Mr Chirac really fire his most popular minister if he refused to go?

For all the sense that Mr Sarkozy represents a refreshing alternative to Mr Chirac, high office might yet temper his reputation. The media circus that surrounds him, his insistence on the pomp of office, his hunger for the presidency: perhaps the pair are not so different. In the 1980s, an upcoming young politician on the right, whose energy wowed the French, yearned for the presidency. He talked powerfully about the need to modernise France, liberalise the economy and bring in change. He was dynamic, worked long hours and persuaded ordinary people he was on their side. In short, he was like Mr Sarkozy. His name? Jacques Chirac.

Major feature on Nicolas Sarkozy, Finance Minister of France, and the political rivalry between him and President Chirac.

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