‘I want Sarkozy to be right’

Theodore Dalrymple

28 March 2007

Theodore Dalrymple, who lives in France, says that the presidential frontrunner faces an awesome range of problems — unsettlingly similar to those that will confront the Prime Minister unlucky enough succeed Gordon Brown

Bayrou excites no emotions: his very absence of high profile may yet prove his greatest asset. I remember a Peruvian peasant’s reply when asked why he had voted for Fujimori in the most important election in the country’s history: I voted for him, he replied, because I don’t know anything about him. This implies a rather pessimistic view of the moral qualities of politicians in parliamentary democracies, one that is now almost universal in countries where elections are held with any kind of regularity; but it makes Bayrou a distinctly possible future president.

As for Le Pen, the word is virtually unmentionable, at least in decent company. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who admitted to voting for him, and can therefore only conclude that the French electoral system in its counting is massively rigged in his favour.

Sarko promises a break with the past, as if he were a new man who had no connection with that very past, though actually has been around almost half as long as Chirac, which is saying quite a lot. (My wife, though late-middle-aged like me, can’t remember life without Chirac.) His posters claim that ‘Together, everything is possible’, though this is not really a proposition that has much empirical content, or bears much examination. What, after all, is its contrary? That divided, everything is impossible, or only that some things are impossible?

Ségolène, on the other hand, set out to prove that she was not the cold, calculating and shallow person she is portrayed as being, even by her own supporters, but that most monstrous invention of the modern world, a caring person. At the very outset of her campaign, she swore not to forget a single Frenchman, all 60 million of them, as if she were some kind of Christ figure. But what, one wants to know, was she going to do for the xenophobes, the racists, the misogynists, the multi-millionaires, the prisoners, the drug dealers and so forth? During a televised question and answer session with members of the public, she walked over to and put her hand on the shoulder of a woman in a wheelchair, as if she were touching for the King’s evil. This spectacle of conspicuous compassion, which was enough to make good men gag, was subsequently discussed as if it demonstrated her human side. It is as if, in this least Catholic of Catholic countries, politicians thought they had to expose their hearts as Christ did in the religious iconography of old. Is this a correct estimate of the public mood? Give me the peasants in Maupassant any time!