Sarkozy’s last stand

The man who promised to reform France looks set to become a martyr to the euro – and his own abrasive personality

Paris
Nicolas Sarkozy chose an unpropitious week to tell the French public he wanted to be their president for another five years. As Sarko was granting a semi-official interview to Le Figaro, addressing the nation on television and planning his campaign’s first rally for the weekend in Marseille, the bad news kept rolling in. Qantas found cracks in the wings of an Airbus 380 superjumbo jet, and European aviation officials ordered them to be recalled for tests, dampening the spirits of French jet engineers. Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse, a landmark of French modern architecture (albeit one that no one would wish to live in), caught fire in Marseilles. Moody’s warned that it would cut France’s credit rating. The agency also put Britain and Austria in its sights, giving Sarkozy and David Cameron something else to talk about during Cameron’s visit to Paris this week.

You see more people sleeping on Paris’s pavements nowadays, and meet fewer people in its bars who have a kind word for their president. A Harris Interactive poll this week showed Sarkozy would win 24 per cent in the first round of the upcoming presidential elections, which are to be held on 22 April. That puts him four points behind his Socialist challenger, François Hollande, and four points ahead of Marine Le Pen of the newly salonfähig National Front. In a one-on-one contest he’d lose to Hollande by 57 to 43.

Ordinarily, it would be foolish to count out the only politician on the European centre-right whom friend and foe describe as a ‘magical’ campaigner. What is more, Sarkozy has reassembled the same savvy team of ideologues and wordsmiths who worked the magic last time. There is the interior and immigration minister, Claude Guéant, thrower-down of gauntlets to the politically correct, and the speechwriter Henri Guaino.