Roeland Keunen07 juni 2007 – 16:50

His themes have been national decline and moral
decadence, intended to prepare voters for liberal shock treatment and a break with the past; he proposed action against leftist dogma, which he claimed had paralysed the economy and stifled public debate; he wanted to reinvent the right on the lines suggested by Antonio Gramsci, so that Sarkozy can show off his multimillio-naire friends, and their yachts. He has redefi-ned the social question — it is no longer about
the division between rich and poor or capital and
labour, but an internecine feud between two sections of the proletariat, those who won’t work and those who will; he claims to speak for the persecuted silent majority and wants to mobilise them. Overall, he means to take an aggressive political stand against a ruling
elite that has thrown in the towel.

Spokesman of the people ?
That says it all. Sarkozy, who presents himself as a perennial outcast, was mayor of Neuilly, one of the richest boroughs, when he was 32. His feelings about himself may be the result of the flood of psychological jargon that threatens to engulf French politics. Just a few weeks ago he said he had been making his way since 2002 outside a system that did not want him as leader of the UMP, rejected his ideas when he was minister of the interior, and contested all his proposals. But the poor boy had triumphed.

It is difficult for a candidate to present himself as the spokesman of the people when he has the employers’ support and campaigns on a programme that promises to slash income tax, cut or abolish death duties and reduce corporation tax. Reagan and Bush almost managed it in the US. They performed brilliantly in the Democratic strongholds of Michigan and West Virginia, hard hit by industrial crises, where their successes depended on appeals to national and patriotic feeling, to anti-communism (and later anti-terrorism), to the small taxpayer’s resentment of the big tax collector. They also appealed to traditional moral values, opposition to abortion and homosexuality, and rejection of a lax legal system held to be responsible for violence and crime. Sarkozy’s approach is much the same, without the explicit references to religious values; however he considers that spiritual matters have been much underestimated compared with social issues. Nicolas Sarkozy did not use any new and magic formula. On the contrary, he keenly studied all the political skills used in the United States for the last 40 years.

The popular success of the right in the US and France is not attributable to electoral strategy and good spokesmen; the right has benefited from the attrition of militant workers’ organisa-tions, because of which many poorer electors now relate to politics and society in a more individual way. Talk of choice, merit and the value of work appeals to them: they want to choose schools and where to live to avoid the worst conditions; they feel they have merit and are not rewarded for it; they work hard and do not earn much more than the unemployed or immigrants. The privileges of the rich are so remote that they are not concerned about them.

There is nothing new about this. In the US in the late 1960s, international competition and a fear of losing social status transformed Rooseveltian leftwing populism – optimistic, victorious, and egalitarian, with shared aspirations for a better life – into a rightwing populism that exploited electors’ fear of being overtaken by those who were even poorer. That was the moment when the Republicans managed to introduce a new dividing line, not between rich and poor, capital and labour; but between people in work and people on welfare, between whites and ethnic minorities, workers and scroungers.

Reagan in the 1970s used to tell an untrue story of a welfare queen who had 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards whose tax-free income alone is over $150,000. By the 1980s the Republican strategy was so clear that one of its architects, Lee Atwater, described it openly. Of the National Enquirer, a scandal sheet sold in supermarkets, he said: There are always some stories in there about some multi-millionaire that has five Cadillacs and hasn’t paid taxes since 1974. (The Democrats do not now tell such stories for fear of accusations of fomenting class war.) Atwater went on: They’ll have another set of stories of a guy sitting around in a big den with liquor, saying so-and-so fills his den with liquor using food stamps. The Republican party pounced on such stories.

Sarkozy promised that he will not allow people who don’t want to do anything – people who don’t want to work – to live on the efforts of those who do get up early and work hard. He contrasted France’s early risers with people on welfare, but left those on private incomes out of the equation. Sometimes, like his US counterparts, he added an ethnic and racial dimension, especially when there was electoral advantage to be gained.

This speech at Agen on 22 June 2006 won him his best ovation: And to those who have deliberately chosen to live on the work of others; those who think the world owes them something but they don’t owe anything to anyone; those who want everything, all at once, without doing anything in return; those who won’t take the trouble to earn their living but prefer to search the pages of history for an imaginary debt the country owes them but has failed to pay; those who prefer to dwell on past wrongs and demand compensation from some fictitious debtor, rather than make an effort, work, and try to integrate; those who do not love France; those who demand everything from France but give nothing in return; to them I say that they are under no obligation to remain here.

The US right has used these tactics since the
presidency of Richard Nixon and need learn nothing from Sarkozy, who took up the most effective arguments of recent US Republican presidents, embellishing them with references to Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum and Guy Môquet.

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