This fall, France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy was briefly imprisoned in a criminal case involving alleged corruption and illegal campaign financing by Muammar Gaddafi. Sarkozy’s three weeks in a Paris jail were a major political event — the first instance of a French head of state being imprisoned since the collaborationist Marshal Philippe Pétain’s conviction after World War II.
Now Sarkozy has written a book about the experience. He used the moment not just to talk about prison life but to declare an end to the cordon sanitaire that has informally proscribed mainstream parties from allying with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN). If conservatives long pledged opposition to this party’s fascist heritage and politics, they are now weakening this stance.
“When the time comes, I’ll take a public position on the subject,” Sarkozy writes in Le journal d’un prisonnier (Prisoner’s Journal), calling for an end to the “artificial” cordon and emphasizing that the RN is not a danger to the Republic.
After Sarkozy’s conviction and imprisonment, right-wingers of all flavors jumped to the former president’s defense. They insisted that the prosecution was the fruit of a leftist witch hunt against Sarkozy, who remains a potent symbol of the mid-2000s counterrevolution led by a muscular French conservatism.
“That a former president, who has appealed his conviction, finds himself subject to a deferred detention order which is being executed [in advance], as normally used in cases of possible recidivism or threat to public order, appears to me to correspond to a desire to humiliate the former president,” the RN’s party president, Jordan Bardella, commented.
On general grounds, Sarkozy may have had a fair case against being imprisoned before his appeal. A court ultimately accepted his argument that he could be expected not to flee the country or intimidate witnesses. Yet many of those bewailing Sarkozy’s ill-treatment are also hypocritical. Some 58 percent of penalties in criminal case come into effect immediately; for prison sentences of over five years like Sarkozy’s, that’s true 85 percent of the time. Sarkozy himself made tough-on-crime rhetoric a centerpiece of his political career. If it’s true that a prisoner can’t fairly prepare their defense from prison, that’s true of everyone. Sarkozy’s special treatment is an example of how the French justice system is deeply distorted by class.
During Sarkozy’s first night in prison, a video went viral of prisoners insulting the former president through the bars of their prison cells. They cried promises of vengeance for Gaddafi, who was killed after a French plane shot his fleeing convoy.
“I have no doubt that certain people will rejoice at this situation,” Le Pen reacted. “But I would hope that millions of French people, like me, feel disgust.”
In his new book, Sarkozy praises Le Pen for publicly supporting him and says he called her to talk while he was imprisoned.
Sarkozy insists that, while he welcomes Le Pen’s principled support, they remain political enemies. But he is also quick to mention that while he was leader of France’s conservative party (today renamed Les Républicains), no candidate of Le Pen’s party ever made it to the second round of the presidential election.
“Many of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s current voters were by my side when I was active in politics,” Sarkozy says proudly.
That certainly wasn’t by accident.
One of Sarkozy’s closest advisers was the late Patrick Buisson, a popular reactionary essayist still oft-cited by young French right-wingers. Buisson was often painted as Sarkozy’s master of the dark arts, and his background in neofascist groupuscules added to this toxic but seductive reputation. But his approach wasn’t so complicated: he believed that Sarkozy could reinvigorate French conservatism by tapping into the forgotten lower-middle-class voters to whom the RN appeals. Sarkozy did this through forthright reactionary rhetoric. One representative anecdote, always repeated when discussing Sarkozy’s conservatism, was his promise to “clean up” the working-class suburbs where many immigrants live using a pressure washer.
In that statement was the kernel of both Sarkozy’s and the RN’s vote: their voters believe that France is being dirtied and defiled by lazy immigrants, benefits-scroungers, and the cultural and institutional left that supports these groups. Voting for the RN now, or Sarkozy then, is a vote against these people and a mark of self-identification for those who see themselves as hardworking and virtuous and define themselves against a lazy underclass.
Buisson also pushed for Sarkozy to launch a referendum on immigration in 2012 — a longtime RN campaign promise. The fascistic pundit Éric Zemmour would later criticize Sarkozy for refusing to go ahead with it because — Zemmour said — he worried too much about being liked by the Left.
In 2007, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s presidential election campaign was hobbled in part by Sarkozy appealing to those voters, charging to a first-round score of 31 percent. Where five years earlier Le Pen had shocked France by making it to the presidential runoff, this time about a quarter of his previous voters said they’d vote for Sarkozy in the first round. Their ideological motivations hadn’t changed, but many saw Sarkozy — the eventual winner — as having more presidential qualities.
“Part of the loss of appeal, in the case of the Front National, was linked to the borrowing of their programme by their opponents,” researcher Aurelien Mondon wrote in 2013. “Thus an electoral defeat proved an ideological victory.”
Throughout his career, Sarkozy showed a consistent openness to adopting far-right ideas and rhetoric.
“We need to react, and I will lead the reaction,” Sarkozy said in one speech in Toulouse in 2003. One of Sarkozy’s most enduring legacies was his success in transforming what is considered commonsense in French political life, shifting it far to the right.
Sarkozy was by no means the first conservative politician to makes appeals to the far right and their themes. Yet “none did so in such a consistent and open manner as Sarkozy,” Mondon writes. Sarkozy was the prototypical representative of the mainstream “Right that would do everything required to reclaim the [FN] electorate.”
Buisson played a critical ideological role here as well as a practical one. In 2008, he conducted 134 opinion polls for Sarkozy, and on this basis crystallized a pitch based on reactionary appeals to workers’ feelings of a loss of status. It focused on the damage done by multicultural dogma and ongoing economic decline. Such polling was, according to Buisson, Sarkozy’s way of staying connected with the common man. He not only tried to reflect popular sentiment but also helped mold it.
Many onetime conservative voters, mostly now rallying behind Le Pen’s RN, adopted harsher opinions on questions of racism and immigration under Sarkozy. As discourses of multiculturalism and tolerance have receded in conservative circles, Sarkozy played a critical role in granting legitimacy to hard-line ideas that were previously outside the mainstream.
While Sarkozy once campaigned against Le Pen’s party as a political adversary, he adopted its common sense — a worldview extremely familiar to anybody paying attention to French media today. Sarkozy pitched himself as a president who would protect and defend those who worked hard from those who didn’t, who could be open to outsiders willing to become French and subscribe fully to its unique civilizational values, and completely closed and actively exclusionary to those not grateful enough to accept them. An excess of empathy toward criminals would be excised from his France. Uncontrolled immigration and — even worse — immigrants unwilling to assimilate had France “facing one of the most serious crises of its history.” Action was needed to stop it.
Buisson cherished the idea of a pact among all right-wing forces — l’union des droites. It was in this vein that he backed Zemmour’s 2022 presidential run, which called for an alliance between the bourgeois right and the more working-class parts of Le Pen’s electorate. While Zemmour couldn’t achieve that, such an alliance is closer than ever to coming to fruition.
In the ideological field, there is little difference between the policies of the mainstream conservative parties and the RN. Indeed, mainstream conservatives have in recent years tried to differentiate themselves from Le Pen’s party by claiming that the RN is to their left on economic issues.
The shrinking margins of victory for Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and 2022, when he was elected almost solely as a rejection of Le Pen’s party, is a clear illustration of the disappearance of the cordon sanitaire. More and more conservative voters backed Le Pen.
This is also evidenced by personnel defecting from the one camp to the other. The trajectory of Sébastian Chenu, another RN leader who wrote to Sarkozy while he was in prison, illustrates this well.
“We were no longer involved in the habitual confrontation between members of opposing political formations,” Sarkozy writes as he recounts good memories of Chenu, who was a member of Sarkozy’s party when he was its leader.
Chenu campaigned for Sarkozy in 2007 and 2012 and was a leading figure for the conservative party in the Paris region. It was after the former president stopped being leader, Sarkozy himself notes, that Chenu left for the RN.
Excluding RN and people like Chenu from political life, Sarkozy argues, would be a mistake.
“They represent so many French people, they respect the results of elections, and they participate in the functioning of our democracy,” Sarkozy says. Evoking the threat of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), as he does often in the book, he says that he won’t demonize these voters like the Left does.
“The French people find it more and more difficult to bear the outrages of LFI and the phony ‘cordon sanitaire’ around the Rassemblement National, which does not constitute a danger to the Republic,” Sarkozy declares definitively.
In Chenu’s letters, Sarkozy says, the RN parliamentarian asks him not to turn his back on politics, and on France. “We need your experience,” Chenu concludes.
Sarkozy doesn’t say no.
Outside the Lamartine bookstore in Paris in the beginning of September, I talked with Sarkozy supporters who’d come out to meet him and get their books signed. Why was Sarkozy now so open and gentle with the RN, I asked, where he’d once campaigned hard against them?
It was “maturity,” said one woman who had come to Paris for the occasion — and a recognition of the fact that coming together was the only way for the Right to win.
Was it Sarkozy who had changed, or the Rassemblement National, I asked others. A few agreed that it was Le Pen’s party that had changed its spots.
But one man, whose son had brought a Swiss watch to gift to Sarkozy, said it was neither.
“It’s France that’s changed,” he said, then repeated: “It’s France that’s changed.”
Great Job Marlon Ettinger & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
