By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, June 25, 2006
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?
But Sarkozy fought back. In a departure from politics-as-usual here, he acknowledged to broadcast interviewers that there was trouble in a marriage he wanted to save -- and then shut up. The French media recently reported that the Sarkozys have reconciled.
But Villepin and Sarkozy soon locked horns in the media again when the respected daily newspaper Le Monde splashed sensational accounts of a secret inquiry by a government intelligence agent into kickbacks and bribes supposedly laundered through Clearstream accounts. The agent, who reported outside his chain of command directly to the prime minister, obtained a list of accounts with code names. Two of the names were meant to be easily linked to Sarkozy.
An inquiring magistrate quickly established that the accounts meant to be traced to Sarkozy never existed. They were inserted on an authentic list of accounts -- by operatives close to Villepin, according to Le Monde and other news reports.
Villepin and Chirac deny any involvement in the attempts to smear the interior minister. But the disorder of the Clearstream affair, now being investigated for possible criminal activity, appears to have derailed Villepin's candidacy.
Polls now show that only Royal, the Socialist, could beat Sarkozy if the election were held today. She has surged ahead of the "elephants," as the more familiar male Socialist would-be candidates are known, by espousing a program of family values and spotlighting her experience in setting family policy. She ignited controversy within the party this spring by saying she would like to emulate British Prime Minister Tony Blair and adopt New Labor-style reforms.
Royal also grabbed headlines by suggesting that juvenile delinquents should be exposed to a military environment to correct their misdeeds and by saying that their parents should receive schooling on family discipline. She has been adept enough not to explain either of these socially muscular, controversial ideas in detail. But like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Royal is determined to show no weakness in occupying the electorally profitable center in a party dominated by left-leaning activists -- including party leader Francois Hollande, her common-law husband and father of their four children. His campaign has withered as hers has bloomed, apparently affecting their relationship.
The toothpaste is now out of the French privacy tube: Marital and family problems that were shunted off to a satirical, quasi-investigative weekly tabloid now glitter in the mainstream media. (See the handling of Francois Mitterrand's illegitimate daughter while he was president.) The same is true of the Clearstream scandal. These changes have been taking shape gradually over the years. But they surface with new force in the unsteady fin de reign that grips France. France's elite faces a time when, as Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci said in other circumstances, the old is dying, the new is not yet born and in the interim morbid phenomena appear.
Jim Hoagland is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.