‘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. Everyone, even those intending to vote for her, agrees that she is a nonentity, with not an idea in her head, even if she is an ambitious nonentity. These days, and not only in France, ideas and ambition are incompatible.

Bayrou excites no emotions: his very absence of high profile may yet prove his greatest asset. I remember a Peruvian peasant’s reply when asked why he had voted for Fujimori in the most important election in the country’s history: I voted for him, he replied, because I don’t know anything about him. This implies a rather pessimistic view of the moral qualities of politicians in parliamentary democracies, one that is now almost universal in countries where elections are held with any kind of regularity; but it makes Bayrou a distinctly possible future president.