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Catfight On TV!

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Featured Stories | Foreign Affairs — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Last night, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal had their only debate prior to the May 6th elections that will determine the identity of France's next President. Those who thought that the debate would be a sedate affair turned out to be disappointed.

Read on . . .

He accused her of losing her cool. She accused him of lacking compassion.

Nicolas Sarkozy on the right and Ségolène Royal on the left went after each other Wednesday evening in the kind of vivid confrontation that has disappeared from the American scene, where the candidates avoid one another as much as possible.

The two-and-a-half-hour televised debate could determine the outcome of the French presidential election on Sunday.

At times, the candidates seemed like they were more in a local race than vying for the presidency of a nuclear power with the sixth-largest economy. Iraq and France's relationship with the United States, for example, never came up. Domestic issues, like the wisdom of the 35-hour workweek, public spending for the police and hospitals, and fighting crime took up much more time than France's place in the world.

Mr. Sarkozy, 52, the son of a Hungarian immigrant with minor aristocratic roots, and Ms. Royal, 53, the daughter of a career army officer, faced different challenges. Mr. Sarkozy had to avoid looking like a sexist bully; Ms. Royal had to prove herself presidential.

Mr. Sarkozy, the former interior and finance minister, had to fight off the demon that has tormented him: his image as an authoritarian figure with a volatile temper. For Ms. Royal, the debate was her last chance to turn around polls that consistently put Mr. Sarkozy in the lead.

The two candidates are competing for the nearly seven million voters who chose the centrist third-place candidate, François Bayrou, in the first round. Mr. Bayrou has refused to endorse either candidate.

Another variable is whether the nearly four million voters who voted for the far-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in the first round will heed his call to "abstain en masse," a move that could pull votes away from Mr. Sarkozy.

Ms. Royal, aware that this was her chance to prove that she is of greater substance than her critics paint her, was on the offensive from the start, repeatedly interrupting Mr. Sarkozy with the line, "Let me finish."

Mr. Sarkozy kept his temper in check, speaking more slowly and in a more modulated voice than usual.

Toward the end of the debate, Ms. Royal became agitated during a discussion of educating disabled children. She argued that the right had undone the good work that the left had been trying to do, and cast Mr. Sarkozy's position as "the height of political immorality."

She accused him of playing the compassion card even though his government had not delivered needed services, indignantly telling him he had described the plight of handicapped children "with a tear in your eye."

Mr. Sarkozy grabbed the opportunity to bore in on his point that she could not lead France in such a temperamental fashion.

"Calm down," he told her.

"No, I will not calm down," she replied.

"Do not point at me with this finger, with this----" he said.

"No. Yes," she said.

"With this index finger pointed, because frankly----"

"No, I will not calm down," she said. "No, I will not calm down. I will not calm down."

"To be president of the republic, you have to be calm," he said.

She responded: "Not when there are injustices. There are angers that are perfectly healthy because they correspond to people's suffering. There are angers I will have even when I am president of the republic."

In the middle of her sentence, Mr. Sarkozy tried to stop her, asking, "Madame Royal, would you allow me to say one word?" But she ignored him.

His voice took on a patronizing tone. "I don't know why the usually calm Madame Royal has lost her nerve," he said.

Zounds! I saw a fair amount of the debate and witnessed the testy exchange described in the excerpt. Even with the relatively calm voices of the translators talking over the actual voices of the two candidates, you could cut the tension with a knife.

Opinion--as the Times piece makes clear--is split on whether Sarkozy or Royal won, which means that Royal failed to land anything resembling a knockout punch and Sarkozy likely profited the most from the exchange by at least holding his own. Polls taken in the aftermath of the debate appear to bear this out and the Economist notes that the electoral war is being fought on a battlefield that generally favors Sarkozy.

Aned finally, those who haven't yet had enough of coverage concerning the French Presidential elections will want to check out this comprehensive article on Sarkozy's writings and thought. The following passage deserves to be highlighted:

Testimony, the first of Sarkozy's books to be published in English, is partly an unapologetic charm offensive aimed at a U.S. audience. Most of it is a translation of Témoignage, a best-selling proto-manifesto published in French last summer; the rest includes chapters from Libre, a chronicle of Sarkozy's political awakening from his student days onward, as well as some fresh material. Two elements in the book startle. The first is Sarkozy's stated admiration for the United States, which is unorthodox for a French politician. The second is his equally unusual candor about France's failings.

Sarkozy's respect for the United States was already explicit in Témoignage; in Testimony, it is forthright from page one: "I have no intention of apologizing for feeling an affinity with the greatest democracy in the world." On a trip last September to New York, where he commemorated 9/11, and Washington, D.C., where he joined President George W. Bush, he stunned French commentators -- and French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin -- by criticizing "French arrogance" over the war in Iraq. Sarkozy called for a "new era in transatlantic relations" and declared that it was "unthinkable for Europe to forge its identity in opposition to the United States." French ambivalence toward, or even suspicion of, the United States, he asserted, in addressing Americans, "reflects a certain envy of your brilliant success."

In Testimony, Sarkozy further warms to this theme. France and the United States, he argues, cannot afford to be anything but firm friends. They are intimately linked by a shared revolutionary history, based on individual liberty and republicanism. France owes a debt to the United States for its liberation of France from Nazi occupation in 1944. Today, the two countries face common challenges: terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and the rise of China, India, and Brazil. To these historical and strategic ties, Sarkozy adds a personal affinity: a visceral anticommunism, inherited from his father, who settled in France in 1948 after fleeing communist Hungary. Rebuilding trust between France and the United States, Sarkozy argues, would preclude neither frank exchanges nor disagreements. He readily criticizes the failures of U.S. environmental policy, for example, but does not want such differences to spiral into a damaging diplomatic fallout.

As I have argued, Nicolas Sarkozy is by no means the perfect person to lead France. But he is far better than the alternative presented by Royal and he could pave the way for a significantly improved candidate to someday succeed him.