French President Nicolas Sarkozy is well aware that next year, 2012, brings both a presidential and parliamentary election in France. Currently he has serious competition to his right and to his left.
Competition from the Right
To the right, he faces a modernized and resurgent National Front led by Marinne Le Pen. Sarkozy's law and order approach managed to marginalize the National Front when he took the presidency in the 2007 elections. Now the polls on first round preference show him at 23% separated by a scant 3% from Ms. Le Pen at 20%.
Everybody remembers the 2002 elections when Ms. Le Pen's father, Jean Marie Le Pen came in 2nd after the first round, eliminating the Socialist candidate Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, as the left fragmented on the first round. In French presidential elections, the 2 top vote-getters in the first round advance to the 2nd and final round.
Now the reverse could happen and Marine Le Pen could eliminate Sarkozy on the first round if her momentum continues. The National Front candidate has been helped by the turmoil in the Arab world. The Tunisian refugees may have landed first on Italian soil, but everybody is aware which European country hosts the largest Tunisian population. France, as well as other European countries, fear a refugee tsunami and the National Front, rightly or wrongly, appears the party most capable of stemming it.
The National Front has also benefited from the European backlash against multiculturalism, as now the big three-the UK's David Cameron, Germany's Angela Merkel and Sarkozy, have criticized multiculturalism as a failure. For the National Front this is simply a matter of 'we told you so'.
To ward off the National Front challenge, the French president has called upon his party to debate the role of Islam in French society, including calls to prayer by muezzins and Muslims praying on the streets. Sarkozy, who once toyed with the idea of creating a French Islam and included an attractive North African woman in his cabinet, has abandoned the idea and now poses as the guardian of the French secular tradition, although he himself is staunchly Roman Catholic.
Le Pen claims to be delighted by this attempt to compete with the front. She believes that it will only serve her party as the voter will prefer the authentic item to the copy.
Competition from the Left
To the left, the possible Socialist candidate and according to the polls the strongest one, is Dominique Strauss Kahn (DSK), a former finance minister and now the head of the International Monetary Fund. He was appointed to the job by none other than Sarkozy, who hoped in this way to get rid of a serious rival. Strauss Kahn leads Sarkozy in the polls on the first round and in a hypothetical 2nd round between the two, DSK demolishes the incumbent by 22%.
Sarkozy hoped that DSK would become enamored of the IMF post, but his wife let it be known in an interview that she pines for Paris in her Washington exile. Last weekend, DSK came home for a visit and a prime time interview.
Sarkozy's UMP had already sensed that the undeclared candidate would eventually become a declared one. They therefore tried to portray him as out of touch with French developments. A representative from a rural district claimed that DSK was not close to the French soil. Many viewed this as an innuendo at DSK's Jewish origin. DSK's fellow socialists even accuse the government of harking back to France's worst anti-Semites and to the collaborationist Vichy government of World War II.
Another hope of Sarkozy supporters is that they French left has a habit of shooting itself in the foot and knocking off its strongest candidate. DSK will not get the nomination on a silver platter; he has to win a primary. The government therefore also insinuated that DSK represented the caviar left and was out of touch with normal people. While it is doubtful that government spokespersons believe the charges themselves, they knew that it would play well in the French left. DSK is considered there somewhat of a centrist a dirty word on the French left.
In his prime time interview, DSK brushed off the criticisms from the right and claimed that what bothered them bothered him. "There are no better things for the elected leaders to do than to solve peoples' problems. This is the reason for which they were elected. "As to being removed from the plight of the average man, DSK claimed that he was concerned that a quarter of the salaried workers earned less than €750 a month and it was necessary to fight this and come up with another "more active policy to put an end to the social crisis". In other words, DSK was positioning himself to take on the left wing of his party and demonstrate that his heart was in the right place.