The Economist

French politics resumes
Tough-guy Sarko
Drowning in unpopularity and beset by scandal, the French president lashes out at some easy targets
Aug 26th 2010 | PARIS

AFTER a three-week holiday at his wife’s family villa on France’s Mediterranean coast, President Nicolas Sarkozy returned to work this week for what could be the most testing autumn of his presidency. Deeply unpopular—a poll this week found that 62% of the French do not want him to seek re-election in 2012—the president faces four sources of trouble in the coming weeks: pension reform, the budget, nationality law and the expulsion of Roma (gypsies), and an ongoing political scandal linked to Liliane Bettencourt, the heiress to the L’Oréal cosmetics empire. Mr Sarkozy’s management of them will set the tone for the remainder of his presidency.

The first two will test Mr Sarkozy’s reformist resolve. On September 7th parliament will start to debate his proposal to raise France’s legal retirement age from 60 to 62. The plan may not look revolutionary. But it breaks a cherished French pattern of progressively shortening the amount of time people spend at work. Trade unions are furious, and plan a series of strikes starting on the same date. The opposition Socialist Party is also against. But under the close watch of credit-rating agencies, which want to see proof of France’s will to control its public finances, Mr Sarkozy cannot afford to give ground.

For the same reason, the president needs his 2011 budget, due in late September, to look credible. He has pledged to curb France’s budget deficit from 8% of GDP this year to 6% next. But many doubt the government’s ability to see this through. Last week it cut its growth forecast for 2011 from 2.5% to 2%, a figure many analysts still find optimistic. Next to Britain’s drastic austerity budget, French plans look timid. But the government’s promises to prune spending and end tax exemptions worth €10 billion ($12.7 billion) will still draw strong opposition, as policing, teaching and hospital budgets are cut.

Mr Sarkozy needs to stand firm on both fronts if he is to restore his credibility. Yet he has a tendency to cede to populism, and not just in economic matters. Witness the way he has flirted with far-right politics on immigration and nationality this summer.

This theme first surfaced in July, after riots in a banlieue of Grenoble, a town in the French Alps, during which youths shot at police. Mr Sarkozy’s response was to blame “insufficiently controlled immigration” and to declare that anyone “of foreign origin” who deliberately endangered the life of a policeman would be stripped of French nationality. He also announced a clampdown on illegal Roma camps, and the expulsion of illegal Roma immigrants. This followed separate rioting by Roma in a small rural town, after police shot dead a traveller who had charged a checkpoint.

Since then, according to Brice Hortefeux, the interior minister, the authorities have closed 88 of France’s several hundred illegal camps, and deported 850 Roma, mostly to Romania and Bulgaria. The government says that most of them left “voluntarily”, having accepted €300 in resettlement benefit; yet those who decline are being expelled. From September, the authorities will fingerprint deportees to prevent any who return, which they are entitled to do under European Union law, from picking up a second “returnee” payment.

The government insists that it is acting legally. Although Romania and Bulgaria are EU members, transitional provisions allow France (and ten other EU countries) to limit the time people from those countries can spend on its soil. It also says the illegal camps are unhealthy, and that it wants to protect children from criminal bosses. Such repatriations take place regularly: last year, 10,177 Romanians and 863 Bulgarians, mostly Roma, were expelled.

The move has provoked outcry, not all of it reasonable: some on the left drew comparisons with the Vichy regime. Yet Mr Sarkozy’s tone and stage management of the expulsions have been nakedly political. Even figures on the right, including three former prime ministers, have voiced unease. One of them, Dominique de Villepin, who hopes to challenge Mr Sarkozy for the presidency in 2012, called the expulsions a “stain of shame” on the French flag. French Catholic groups have expressed unhappiness. François Fillon, the prime minister, who had kept studiously quiet, this week said that the struggle against illegal immigration “should not be exploited”.

Mr Sarkozy, a former interior minister, has always applied a tough-talking, zero-tolerance approach to illegal immigration and crime. He has been happy to play to xenophobic reflexes in order to court far-right voters, a tactic that robbed the National Front of votes and helped him to the presidency in 2007. In the past, though, Mr Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, has balanced this hard line with progressive talk about giving a voice to French Muslims and promoting black faces into government. All that now seems to have gone. Today, when Mr Sarkozy talks about stripping foreign-born criminals of French nationality, it just sounds nasty.

France certainly has a festering problem in its banlieues. “There is a very strong potential for explosion,” says one presidential adviser. Armed attacks on the police are becoming common. Drug gangs draw in ever-younger recruits. All of this calls for serious efforts on policing, education and youth employment. Not for directly linking crime to immigration.

Mr Sarkozy is betting that high-minded Paris opinion is out of tune with the average French voter; one poll this week found that 48% of the French support the Roma expulsion. But the affair leaves a sour taste, particularly after a series of mini-scandals that have raised questions about the president’s judgment. The biggest is the Bettencourt case, an alleged illegal party-financing and tax-evasion affair, which links Mrs Bettencourt and Eric Woerth, the labour minister, who happens to be in charge of pension reform. After a summer respite, judicial inquiries are resuming, and Mr Woerth will come under renewed scrutiny. Mr Sarkozy may have hoped his tough talk would eclipse the affair. Instead, it has looked like a shoddy attempt by a weakened leader to prop up his popularity.