SAKOZY LOSES ELECTION RACE

SARKOZY DEBATES NOTHING AND LOSES THE ELECTION RACE

Andrew McKillop

Outgoing president Sarkozy of France has only a few days to go before his come-uppance. This got more certain and no longer just likely as the press, media and analysts leafed through his debating gambits from the 2 May, two-and-a-half hour TV debate with challenger Francois Hollande. Hailed as likely to be a dogfight or cockfight, the debate was in fact somewhat tepid and low key – explaining why an estimated 2 million less French viewers tuned in to this debate, than the same final debate preceding the 2007 presidential race, that Sarkozy won.

One main reason for this was Sarkozy himself, destroying his own remaining credibility on primetime, seemingly unaware that his one-liners are born losers.

Barring a miracle, pollsters say he is beaten by Parti Soialiste candidate Francois Hollande, but much more than a personal humiliation and a disaster for Sarkozy’s fragile UMP party, a victory for Hollande will signal huge challenges for the “only possible policy” that Sarkozy has pursued, in his own erratic and stumbling way for 5 years. Today, that of course focuses IMF-style austerity and letting mass unemployment widen its deadly reach, the controlled collapse of public services, higher taxes, faster delocalisation of businesses, and more debt. On each and every one of these issues, Sarkozy denied that was either the intention or the result of his politics, but forced on the rest of Europe by German chancellor Merkel, with Sarkozy obediently in tow, this neoliberal chaos policy has already had disastrous economic and fiscal impacts – let alone the massive social damage – in Greece, Italy and Spain, other PIIGS countries, and soon across the majority of Europe’s 27 member states.

Sarkozy pursued the mix-and-mingle of neoliberal policy planks that guarantee failure – either in growth or in recesssion – and during the long debate even said he was surprised things turned out so bad, but neoliberalism is above all reliable. Discussing and dissecting this flabby set of laisser-faire slogans and economic horse medecine has become daily fare in French media, throughout the long presidential compaign, but during the final debate TV debate, Francois Hollande hit hard with the simple facts of what Sarkozy did, with his laisser-faire Do Nothing politics. Sarkozy’s apparent or real de-linkage from the real world, his airs of still believing in the only possible policy and that things have to work out alright, sometime, have almost certainly radicalized the French voting public and intensified hostility to “Mrs Thatcher’s purulent fantasies of 30 ago”, as one leading anti-Sarkozy candidate, Jean-Luc Melanchon describes neoliberalism.

The attack by Hollande hammered home the message that now is really not the moment to Do Nothing. His PS party and a string of left, extreme left and communist parties and movements – and the ever more powerful extreme right National Front in France – on neoliberal austerity cure is already triggering revolt through every branch of the EU’s institutions. Restoring growth and employment is the real “only possible policy”. The wallowing absurdity of the “euro crisis”, where a country with 2.2% of the EU’s total population, Greece, is sacrificed at an open air festival of casino capitalism, where its youth are advised by the government to quit the country – to get a job – and whose debts have spiralled to insane extremes even as the country is sacrificed, has often figured as the major topic in anti-Sarkozy meetings. As many as 25% of French now simply want out of the euro, nothing less or more.

WHO DECIDES ?

For Sarkozy it is of course “the markets” but Hollande says otherwise: “It’s not for Germany to decide for the rest of Europe,” although that is putting it mildly compared with how extreme right Marine Le Pen of the FN, or extreme left Melanchon put it. While Hollande is committed to “changing Europe’s construction”, around 35% of French voters in the first round of presidential voting, on 22 April, supported candidates who want to take much more nuscular action than that. When or if France goes down the Spanish road – to neoliberal collapse driven by a suicidal austerity programme “because there is no alternative” and of course because “the markets decided” – Hollande will be facing a lot of opposition in parliament, and inside his own PS party.

Hollande of course said, and therefore can be challenged to deliver on this, that France is not just any country and “we can change the situation”. Sarkozy claimed this was socialist grandstanding and Europe didn’t allow such things – except for Germany. Similar sized Italy could not change the situation, and Hollande drove that point home by asking why Sarkozy’s friend Berlusconi turned out to be not such a wonderful leader. Austerity cure was rammed down the throats of the British, also, without even the pretence of this being needed “to save the euro” or to bail out Greece to the profit of bond traders huddled at their playstation consoles playing futures and options: greed is good, only.

Much closer to the meat and explaining Merkel’s personal and shameless interference in French national politics – doing an entirely partisan election time TV interview side by side with “her friend Sarko”, and by refusing to meet Hollande – Europeans are waking up to the possibility of fighting neoliberalism’s so-called “middle class policies”. Far from being the No Alternative it is a disaster doctrine, hollowing out the economy of any country stupid enough to go down that road. Hollande’s long list of French economic decline since Sarkozy took power got no quick sidesteps from a president that many French now call “Le Prince de l’Esquive”, the dodger and wangler. Even Austria has distanced itself from giving total and supine support to Germany’s austerity drive – - which Merkel and Sarkozy claimed must be applied in all 26 non-German member states of the Union.

Francois Hollande now has little choice but go for growth, and said so, made even more certain because of the extreme polarization of French politics that sorceror’s apprentice Sarkozy wanted, and got. Hollande plans an EU-wide process of renegotiating Europe’s failed treaties, starting with the Nice and Lisbon treaties, and the crop of punitive “stability pacts” mostly made in secret and never fully disclosed, by the Merkel-Sarkozy duo, with chosen European Commission powerbrokers and the ECB’s hardline neoliberal shocktroopers. Underneath the “financial stability” rhetoric, these pacts can only destroy the euro, which is of little real importance but much more real these pacts also mean the end to all hopes of a normal life for several hundred million Europeans. Long-term austerity and mass uenmployment is the Final Solution. Being neoliberal and based on permanent social injustice, this austerity cure can only incite Europe-wide political revolt: as Hollande made clear, while Sarkozy winced and tried to change the subject.

WHY EUROPE’S POWERBROKERS WANT SARKOZY

Markel, in the past few days has formally told Hollande “the treaty” cannot be renegotiated, a handy way to frighten some French voters and perhaps make them vote Sarko, while also not saying exactly which pact or treaty is in question. Much more critical to Europe’s economic survival than the Nice treaty for application through 2003-2014 and Lisbon treaty (after 2014), the host of “secret pacts” since 2008 which only seek to bail out bond traders and hedge funds, and the banks which own them, must be struck down. Hollande used the term “fully renegotiated”.

One of Hollande’s potential candidates for finance minister, even prime minister, Arnaud Montebourg has made this theme his ‘cheval de bataille’, his warhorse.

The game plan of “grand capitalism” is almost nakedly clear. Prising the greedy hands of casino capitalism off Europe’s jugular vein has become one of the more moderate calls of the straight majority of French presidential candidates in the 22nd April first round of voting. These candidates will be in the new French parliament that is voted in June. Some will be in government, too. This then is the birth of a new anti-neoliberal Euroland growth bloc with well over 200 million people and a commanding majority vote in the European Council. Showing which way the wind blows, Mario Draghi at the ECB is quickly bending to the new political momentum in Europe, and like the ECB, the Commission will also find ways to “extend deadlines” on fiscal targets. Neoliberals are strong on rhetoric and when they have the power have no problems putting in the boot – but when exposed to massive democratic rejection they quickly back off.

The Merkel-Sarkozy duo ran riot in cobbling their unratified pacts and proposed future treaties, but the only bottom line was to force neoliberal horse medicine down the throats of the vast majority of Europeans, chase them into the unemployment lines, and the gutter. The call is now that these pacts and treaties “aimed at stability”, most certainly can be renegotiated, or simply struck down. Binning the BS of unelected Financial Europe is one of Francois Hollande’s themes – the real enemy is casino finance – and his opposition is becoming easier. Merkel’s “christian democratic” wheedling scantily covers the rabid neoliberal greed that is enthroned by these rotten treaties – which Mrs Merkel cannot push through the Bundestag without the Social Democrats, who are warming rapidly to Mr Hollande.

Her almost certain but never disclosed goal, cooked up with Sarkozy, was to force all EU states, not only the Eurozone-17 to pay for the total failure of euro-based “monetary union”. Due to casino capitalism, debts of all EU states have spiraled to such extremes this is simply not possible.According to Sarkozy, nothing happens, everything will arrange itself.

Making the worst possible combinations of all kinds – political, ideological, economic – Merkel and Sarkozy fondly imagined there could be some kind of Bismark Europe. There would be complete and total economic hegemony by Germany – because it has a trade surplus – but each national economy would be ‘ruled’ by neoliberal chaos and anarchy, injustice, waste and greed. This would the best possible solution in the best possible of all worlds ! Dream on !

Ending the TV debate, Hollande gave a long list of how his presidency will be different from the 5 lost years with Sarkozy: among these changes there would be no remaining legal immunity for French presidents. For Sarkozy and his henchmen and women this is not an empty threat, and itself is enough to make Sarkozy emigrate – possibly to Benghazi !

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