Sex and Politics, a la Francaise

PARIS Love, sex and marriage have long been taboo subjects in France's intensely ideological politics. In the land of Balzac and Bardot, what happened in and around the family stayed in and around the family.

But the privacy zones of the two leading challengers to succeed President Jacques Chirac in next May's election are shrinking rapidly as serious campaigning breaks out here (the early start being another U.S.-style innovation in French politics). In Chirac's 12th and final year in power, France has mentally moved beyond a leader known both as "le bulldozer" and "le brother-in-law" for relentlessly striving for power and then failing to use it for durable accomplishments.

In this interregnum, the troubled marriage of the right's most popular leader, the effervescent Nicolas Sarkozy, has sparked lively gossip in cafes and circumspect but tantalizing accounts in the media. On the left, Segolene Royal has left in the dust other contenders for the Socialist nomination, including her common-law husband, whose exasperation with his mate's more centrist politics, and more successful campaigning, shows in public.

These two emerging political melodramas, and the attention paid to them, stem not only from a vacuum of authority, but also from a changing of political generations. Sarkozy, 51, and Royal, 52, have climbed to the top of polls by breaking with the old politics and old politicians of their morally and physically exhausted parties. The idea that a woman could become president of France for the first time adds to Royal's air of representing something new.

Chirac, 73, has endured one of the worst years in recent French political history.

It began on May 29, 2005, with the defeat of Chirac's referendum on the European Union's draft constitution. The loss of the 2012 Olympics to arch-rival Britain, urban riots, widespread student and labor unrest and abuse-of-power scandals that carry echoes of Washington's Watergate era have shredded Chirac's ability to govern. Having sunk to 20 to 30 percent approval in polls, he is preparing for his final July 14 address to the nation as the lamest of ducks.

So the intense if somewhat premature interest in who will succeed him comes naturally. But the new scrutiny is also shaped by deeper global trends that bring the French closer to what they see as the sordidness and superficiality of contemporary Anglo-Saxon politics, where the sex lives and personal foibles of politicians are fair game for foes and ratings -- and circulation boosters for the media.

Being French, they still handle marital soap opera and dynastic dysfunction with more style and discretion than Americans grant to the Bushes, Clintons, Kennedys and other political families. But the "familization" of politics has crossed the Atlantic. Voters here increasingly rely on brand names and buzzwords such as "family values" to guide them in the early stages of political contests that no longer turn on ideology or concepts of national glory but on personality.

France thus joins the era of intrusive 24/7 media, of voters focusing on "character issues" instead of debating Marxism and welfare state policies, and of image crafting done by political consultants. Uproar over a presidential affair ? la Lewinsky is still unthinkable in France. But there is no guarantee that will last. After all, the French said Watergate could never happen here. But it is.

This abuse-of-power scandal is called Clearstream, the name of a financial clearinghouse in Luxembourg. The complex web of accusations and admissions lumped under that name can be understood only by considering the "family" ties of the protagonists and the rivalry between Sarkozy, currently the interior minister, and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, to whom Chirac clearly hopes to bequeath the presidency. A Gaullist, a poet and a grand romantic, Villepin, 52, is the son Chirac never had.

Sarkozy, too, was once close to Chirac and worked with his daughter Claude on the president's political staff. When Sarkozy abandoned the Chiracs to support a rival conservative for president in 1995, "Chirac seemed to feel that the intimacy of his family had been betrayed," said one person who knows both men well.

So Sarkozy's camp was quick to accuse Chirac, Villepin, or both, of spreading reports about Sarkozy's private life, especially when his wife abruptly moved out last year and was seen in public with another man. The political question du jour became: How can you manage France if you cannot manage your marriage?