(St. Tropez, France) –
Not only in America did a presidential election cycle kick off this
past week, but also in our alter-ego, France.
There were no grand debates about war and peace, however. No
questions raised about this candidate trying to disguise his Muslim
upbringing by joining a mainstream Christian church. No huge gambles
over the fate of the free world.
This is France, after all. So the biggest “news” of the
presidential campaign – just three months from the first round!
– was the grammatical error Socialist Segolene Royal made
during a trip to China. Or again, an offhand comment she made in
Paris this week in support of a visiting separatist leader from
Quebec.
France has become a profoundly frivolous nation, dedicated to
pleasure, and that suits many French men and women very well.
In St. Tropez this week, the movie stars and the sun-bathers have
gone home. Now as the mistral whips the port into a chilly
froth, the local clothing boutiques are well into their annual
half-price sale, and nearly everyone one of them is staffed by
wannabe teenage beauty queens or by ever-tanned women in the 50s who
can still wear skin-tight jeans and boots and look stunning..
Disco Volante of James Bond fame looked positively tiny parked
down the quai from two 135 foot Mangousta yachts registered in Nassau
and the Cayman Islands (one of them called, appropriately, Don’t
Touch!). How many of you have ever seen a 135 foot yacht?
It’s the maritime equivalent of a ten carat diamond. –
and about as expensive.
The biggest gripe among locals this week was the outrageous price of
fresh truffles. Alas, they’ve quadrupled from last year and are
going for 1,000 euros a kilo – that’s $650 a pound. What
is the world coming to?
Nicholas Sarkozy is widely touted as the front-runner for president,
and that is good news for America. He is smart, he is conservative,
and he understands that the protector of French prosperity is in
Washington, not Brussels.
No French president is going to increase French defense spending to
the level where the French could actually deploy an army overseas any
time in the near future. Unlike the other candidates, however,
Sarkozy doesn’t just know this, he says it openly with realism
and clarity.
He came to Washington this past autumn – none of the locals
there noticed him much, but his visit was widely commented upon here
in France. Sarkozy the pro-American, his enemies call him. And to his
credit, he finds that title just fine.
Sarkozy began his political career three decades ago as the
protégé of Jacques Chirac. At one point, he was even
dating Chirac’s daughter. He fell out first with one, then the
other, and became a fierce critic of Chirac’s silly (and at
times, dangerous) anti-Americanism during the Iraq war.
Two years ago, Chirac was hoping to put an end to Sarkozy’s
career once and for all, as allegations floated in the media that he
had a secret (and illegal) overseas bank account. This perfidious
deed came to light when a list of these secret accounts, held with
Clearstream in Luxembourg, surfaced in the French press.
To Chirac’s surprise, Sarkozy didn’t just bow down and
surrender; he fought back, filing a civil lawsuit for defamation.
That turned the matter over to a French investigative magistrate, who
bit by bit began interrogating witnesses under oath until –
mince, alors! – he discovered that the whole business
appeared to have begun in 2004 ¬Ýin the private
office of Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin, Chirac’s
swashbuckling foreign minister.
Sarkozy came out the winner, and it was Villepin’s career that
took a fatal tumble. Instead of rushing to battle on his white
charger, a fanion with Napolean’s eagle waving in the breeze,
the overwrought Prime Minister plunged to his political death at
under 20% in the polls. He recently pledged fealty to Sarkozy, for
the few centimes his support is still worth.
A very pleasant man named François Bayrou has also joined the
presidential steeple chase, and the press is falling over themselves
to push him forward. He hails from the centrist party of former
president Valery Giscard d’Estaign, and is a very sensible,
honorable professional politician.
But French politics can get serious, and it can get ugly. And it can
have a decided negative impact on the United States, as the 2002
election showed. Faced with neo-fascist leader Jean-Marie LePen in
the second round, Chirac rallied the left and won the run-off with a
resounding 82% of the vote. That led him to believe –
mistakenly – that he had a mandate to transform France into
America’s strategic adversary and save the Middle East for
French banks, oil companies and arms merchants,
The press would love Mr. François Bayrou to become the
spoiler, and knock out Sarkozy in the first round so their real
favorite, the Socialist Segolene Royal, will face the ageing LePen in
the run-off.
That’s the scenario, folks. And unlike America’s
elections, we’ll know how it plays out soon enough.
Meanwhile, the French have begun to see the downside of a weakened
George W. Bush. Just last week, political commentator Bernard Guetta
was reviewing the Latin American tour of Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, where he was squired around by Hugo Chavez of
Venezuela.
The two of them pledged to try to convince OPEC to lower production
quotos, so oil prices would return to record highs. Ah, but why didn’t
America do anything about all this, Monsieur Guetta wondered. What
did this mean? He knew the answer (after all, he is French).
“It means we are seeing the weakening of America,” he
moaned.
When America is too strong, too self-confident, and too rich, the
French worry they will become insignificant and do everything they
can to hold us in check (as Chirac did in Iraq).
But when America becomes weak, the French start to fear for their own
safety.
America is still the guarantor of freedom in this fallen, imperfect
world of ours. And we should never forget it.
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