After his Libyan adventure

Despite his foreign-policy success, the French president looks down and out. But don’t write him off yet
PARIS

NICOLAS SARKOZY has had a good war. The armed campaign in Libya was the French president’s biggest gamble, the moment he put his reputation, judgment and leadership on the line. France, along with Britain, carried out the bulk of the air strikes. Unlike President Barack Obama, Mr Sarkozy enjoyed cross-party support for the campaign and popular backing at home. The fall of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi ought therefore to yield some domestic reward. Yet Mr Sarkozy’s poll numbers remain grim, and, little more than six months before France’s presidential vote, his chances of re-election do not, on paper, look good.
The Libyan air strikes were not Mr Sarkozy’s first armed campaign. He sent French soldiers into hostile territory in the name of democracy in both Afghanistan and Côte d’Ivoire. But his investment in the Libyan campaign was the most intensely personal. Before anybody else, and unbeknown at the time even to his foreign minister, he stuck his neck out and gave diplomatic recognition to the Libyan rebels, whose leaders he met at the Elysée palace at the urging of Bernard-Henri Lévy, a celebrity philosopher. Along with Britain’s David Cameron, he made a personal plea to a reluctant America to get involved. A president without personal experience of war (unlike all his Fifth Republic predecessors), Mr Sarkozy sent French fighter jets roaring into Libyan airspace before anybody else got airborne. By June he was dropping arms to rebels on the ground.
The reasons for Mr Sarkozy’s zeal are various. He was stung by criticism of France’s ties to discredited regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as his hosting of Colonel Qaddafi (plus tent) for a week in Paris in 2007. As Libyan forces advanced on Benghazi, he was haunted by past French failures, as Nathalie Nougayrède of Le Monde recounts, to intervene to stop massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda. Nothing if not pragmatic, Mr Sarkozy spotted the chance to do the right thing and restore France’s credibility—and his own image with it. Some American commentators at the time protested that he was dragging America into a faraway war for electoral ends.

If he was, it does not seem to have worked—or not yet, anyway. Libyans can be found with banners declaring “Merci Sarkozy” but the French seem less immediately appreciative. They may approve of his Libyan war—66% backed it at the start—but they still do not approve of him. Polls conducted after the fall of the unlamented colonel do not show a conclusive uptick in the president’s popularity. Mr Sarkozy’s poll numbers remain far worse than for any other Fifth Republic president ahead of a re-election bid.

The Socialist Party may have lost its best candidate, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (who returned to Paris this week, though not to public life, after charges of sexual assault were dropped in New York). Yet the polls suggest that either of the two front-running alternative Socialist candidates, François Hollande and Martine Aubry, would easily beat Mr Sarkozy in a second round run-off. Mr Hollande, according to one, would crush him by 59-41%.

Such sentiment is partly a personal rejection of the mercurial Mr Sarkozy: 68% told a Viavoice poll that they do not want him re-elected. But there seems also to be a positive appetite in France for the left, which has not won a presidential election since 1988. “Neither the ‘DSK affair’ nor today’s debt crisis have dampened the desire for the left to return to power,” notes François Miquet-Marty, of Viavoice. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front remains an added, unpredictable, threat. And, with economic growth flat in the second quarter, and an austerity drive under way, many voters seem to think that there is little to thank Mr Sarkozy for.

Despite all this, it would be a mistake to write off the president. “Everything is still to play for,” argues Adélaïde Zulfikarpasic, of LH2, a pollster. Over the past few months, she notes, Mr Sarkozy has undergone a strategy of représidentialisation, to fix past mistakes. There has been less frantic hyperactivity, less bling, more discretion, more delegation, less promotion of his private life. He has kept studiously silent about the pregnancy of his wife, Carla Bruni. He has criss-crossed France, visiting forgotten farms and factories. More important, he left it to his prime minister, François Fillon, to announce new austerity measures in late August, while he himself was busy with visiting Libyan leaders—a more traditional division of labour in French politics. It may not be a proper rebound, but his poll numbers seem at least to have bottomed out.

Whatever voters feel about him as a person, Mr Sarkozy’s bet is that they will still find him the most credible leader on offer. “He can tell them: OK, you don’t like me, but when there is a crisis I am there,” says one adviser. The Libyan campaign, say aides, was a model of tenacity in the face of adversity, which will register, however subliminally, with the electorate. They stress the lack of experience in high office of the would-be Socialist candidates, at a time when the euro-zone crisis is deepening. Undecided voters may find it safer to stick with the devil they know. And Mr Sarkozy, a formidable campaigner, has not yet officially declared he is running, let alone hit the trail.

There is a final reason not to write Mr Sarkozy off. Polls taken long before a presidential election have been wrong before. Mr Sarkozy, of all people, knows this. Six months before the 1995 presidential contest Jacques Chirac, who had first introduced the young Mr Sarkozy to politics, was written off as a no-hoper. Edouard Balladur, his centre-right rival, looked unbeatable. To Mr Chirac’s fury, Mr Sarkozy backed Mr Balladur—but six months later, it was Mr Chirac who won the race.

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