‘I want Sarkozy to be right’

Theodore Dalrymple, who lives in France, says that the presidential frontrunner faces an awesome range of problems — unsettlingly similar to those that will confront the Prime Minister unlucky enough succeed Gordon Brown

Les Vans

During the height of the Dreyfus affair, a cartoon appeared depicting the setting of a bourgeois dinner party before and after it had taken place. Afterwards, the room was wrecked, as if a platoon of marauding soldiers had passed through it. The problem was that the guests had talked about the affair.

The current French election is a little like this. The word Sarko is enough to raise the temperature and the heart rate at any family gathering. He is the best of men; he is the worst of men. He is a true patriot; he is an unscrupulous opportunist. He is the only hope; he is a dictator in the wings.

The word Ségolène, on the other hand, has the opposite effect, a little like the tranquillisers that the French take in larger doses than any other nation in the world.