Ségo and Sarko: not so different

25 November 2006

Sarkozy is becoming something of a pin-up among conservatives outside France. They point to his reformist talk about the need for a ‘break with the past’ and a recent high-profile visit to Washington to pay his respects to President George W. Bush. Given the nannyish instincts of Ségolène Royal, it might seem obvious that Sarko is the man to back, assuming the two come head to head in the presidential elections.

If only it were that easy. There is much evidence that Sarkozy believes in a powerful, interventionist French state, just as Royal does. As finance minister, he organised a state bail-out for the engineering giant, Alstom, and imposed price controls on large supermarkets.

Sarkozy recently rejected calls to scrap France’s wealth tax, levied on any fortune over about £500,000, declaring that he was ‘in favour of taxing those with the most money’, though he has agreed to consider excluding main residences from the tax. He has called for increased protectionism, saying that protection is a word that does not ‘frighten’ him.

It is just that Sarko’s France is not a nanny state like that dreamt of by Ségo, chirping around saving cheeses and nagging people to lag their pipes. Sarkozy stands firmly in the French tradition of the daddy state, if you will — the dark France of ferocious ambition, political feuds and those scary buses full of CRS riot police parked around the back of every other public building.

Both versions of the state are fully French. Some of France’s most successful politicians — Mitterrand comes to mind — have arguably incarnated both the nannyish version of France and the dark patriarchal version at once.

Assuming the election is between Royal and Sarkozy in the end, those two Frances will be divided between two candidates — and for good measure, a man and a woman — of matching ambition. Don’t hold your breath for major reforms or an end to egregious public works, but it does promise to be psychological drama of the highest order.

David Rennie is Europe editor of the Daily Telegraph and contributing editor of The Spectator.