William Pfaff
This week has seen the annual ritual by which the Left in
Competitive claims are made concerning how many marched on Tuesday in denunciation of President
This year, the main issue was the character, personality, activity, policies and ultimate failure of Sarkozy -- denounced with enthusiasm by most of the demonstrators.
Sarkozy is a strange fellow, for a politician. He doesn't search for popularity or love. He has constantly skirted the risk of making people hate him for his arrogance, brashness and material ambition (one of his first acts as president was to more than double the presidential salary -- if only up to general European standards of income, but it was the gesture that counted).
The night of his election, he flaunted his connections with some of
He nonetheless seized
He has made a serious effort to reform the neglected university system, and to correct foolish tax excesses.
His current unpopularity, three years on, is self-created, the product of a vanity that inspired him recklessly to ignore the constitutional structure of de
The constitution places a French president in a position of reserved overall policy direction and arbitration, and defense of the principles and institutions of the nation. It provides him a prime minister to conduct the day-to-day business of government, a parliament to debate and vote upon policy.
Sarkozy wanted to do it all, because that placed him fully in the limelight, where he daily invented national policy and inconsistently commented on national affairs as things caught his eye. He consistently humiliated his prime minister, even though he depended on him. His taste for wealth and display alienated him from the public, who expected from the state the formal symbols of power and authority, and had always been tolerant of the greed of ordinary politicians, but would not accept Sarkozy's apparent change of political sides from that of defender of the citizen, whose votes had given him his mandate, to collaborator of the rich, powerful and insolently privileged. This is what has done him in.
As a distinguished centrist political figure, Jean-Louis Bourlanges, recently wrote, de Gaulle made the chief of state in
The second subject of anger in these demonstrations was anodyne rather than apocalyptic in implication -- although there was a trace of the latter. It was a proposed legislative rise in the national retirement age, which is all but certain to be adopted. It is the same issue that generates controversy in most of the advanced democracies, given the world economic crisis and lengthening life spans, immigration and accompanying demographic trends -- even in
In
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(C) 2010 William Pfaff