Date
Author
Кирилл ПРИВАЛОВ; Париж--Москва
Source
Preserved copy
Translated material
Hyper-President Sarkozy
The motley government will leave after parliamentary elections
A campaign campaign for elections to the National Assembly (lower house of parliament) has begun in France, which will be held in two rounds, on June 10 and 17. This is the second election this year after the presidential one, which was won by the candidate from the ruling neo-Gaullist Union for a Popular Movement (UNM), Nicolas Sarkozy, in early May. The SND approaches the battle for parliamentary seats in a more advantageous position than the left opposition. Great job administrative resource!The famous French political scientist Marcel Gaucher, editor-in-chief of the magazine Debat, emphasized to Vremya Novostey that Nicolas Sarkozy not only formed an “open” government with the participation of centrists and defectors from the socialists , but did it very successfully: “One may wonder whether whether such a motley government will be effective and manageable. But the main thing is that the idea of an “open” government is so advantageous that it gives the right a tangible advantage. To gain an absolute majority in the National Assembly, they need an alliance with the centrists. By demonstrating the eclecticism of the left, the right attracts voters from the center. After the elections, the current government will most likely resign. The new cabinet will be made up of people belonging to Sarkozy’s team and exclusively loyal to him.”
The right has armed itself with the principle “the ends justify the means.” The times of the triumph of ideas - Gaullist, communist, nationalist - are a thing of the past. Nowadays rationalists are winning in politics. According to recent polls, 41.5% of voters are ready to vote for the right in the first round of elections, and 28.5% for the socialists. In this situation, if the right and the centrists unite, the Sarkozy camp will get from 365 to 415 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly. This will be enough to reduce the opposition to the position of political extras.
To win on all fronts, the ambitious son of a Hungarian immigrant will only need control over the city hall of Paris, now run by socialists and “greens.” Elections to the capital's council are scheduled for 2008, giving Sarkozy time to prepare. “The right is still far from complete victory,” says Master Gaucher. -- Now the opposition, led by the socialists, controls at the local level 20 of the 22 regions of France, more than half of the general councils and the mayor's office of the two main cities - Paris and Lyon. And in the Senate, traditionally more conservative than the National Assembly, the right does not yet have an absolute majority.”
Prime Minister Francois Fillon, who heads the SND election campaign, calls on his comrades to put an end to this situation. The other day, he gathered the deputies of the presidential majority for a cocktail in the garden of his residence, the Matignon Palace, and announced to them the need for “total mobilization” and that he would personally participate in the election campaign as one of the parliamentary candidates. According to Fillon, he is driven to this by “morality and political courage.”
Socialists immediately assessed the prime minister’s demarche as “not at all moral.” Elisabeth Guigou, an opposition MP and ex-minister, called the use of Matignon and the Elysee Palace as political campaign headquarters “completely scandalous” because “nothing like this has ever happened in France.” But what can you do - times change. The socialists, who continue to work in the old way, have not yet realized that with the advent of Sarkozy, the time has come for a “total” inter-party struggle.
“There is a collision of two political logics - the old one, still imbued with the maxims of Marx and Engels, and the new one, victoriously rationalistic and using any means to achieve the goal,” says Marcel Gaucher to VN. “An opposition that does not have a clear leader cannot resist a well-oiled fighting machine, at the helm of which is Sarkozy.”
There have already been significant changes in the leadership of the SND. Instead of Brice Ortefe, a friend of Sarkozy, who headed the new Ministry of Immigration, Patrick Devedjian was appointed secretary general of the party. Previously, this son of an Armenian refugee applied for the post of Minister of Justice, but in the end he preferred a party post. Apparently not in vain. An experienced lawyer and a charming person, Devedjian will be useful in negotiations with centrists before the second round of parliamentary elections.
According to the law, to win in the first round, a candidate for deputy must receive at least 25% of the votes. If none of the applicants succeeds, candidates who receive at least 12.5% will advance to the second round. This is where the losers begin intense bargaining with the winners in order to get them the votes of their voters more profitably. Greens and communists traditionally associate with socialists, and neo-Gaullists with republicans, centrists, right-wing radicals, and sometimes even nationalists. Preliminary bargaining is already underway. One can imagine its scope if a few days ago 7,600 candidates entered the race for parliamentary seats at once!
Socialists are also not asleep. Former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, a former favorite of President François Mitterrand, was the first to wake up from the knockout that Sarkozy's victory sent the Socialist Party into. “We have to get rid of our complexes,” Fabius said. - There are many problems within the party, but they need to be resolved after the elections. If we don’t do this, we will go against them completely helplessly.” Fabius, who quickly turned from an apologist for socialist morality into a pragmatist “without complexes,” can be understood. The current Gaullists, a party of concrete actions with a broad program of economic change, cannot be overcome by nostalgia for the era of the Popular Front, when communists and socialists dominated the country. The opponent is too strong. It is not for nothing that it was Fabius who coined a new term to describe Sarkozy's rule - hyper-presidentialism.