There’s nothing like a crisis to rescue an ailing candidate
Yes, he’s back. Just when the French Socialists thought that they were jogging into the Elysée Palace for the first time in 17 years, a discredited president has remounted his favourite war horse, a national security crisis, and with three weeks to go before the first round on 22 April, the left has a fight on its hands.
Ten days ago, most commentators agreed that François Hollande merely had to keep his head and events would take their inevitable course. Nicolas Sarkozy, a deeply unpopular president, was about to disappear into the wastepaper basket of history. The election campaign was regarded as ‘boring’ or ‘too technical’ by two out of three voters, and had deteriorated into a dry battle of economic statistics. And the polls persistently gave Hollande an eight-point lead over Sarkozy in the second round on 6 May.
Following the remark by Claude Guéant, the interior minister, that ‘Not all civilisations in the world are of equal value’ – a reference to Islam’s teaching on human rights and the treatment of women – Sarkozy was seen as ‘anti-Arab’. Meanwhile, Hollande was backing a call to remove the ‘r’ word from article 2 of the constitution, which ensures equality before the law, regardless of ‘origin or race’. In the view of his triumphant supporters, the mere presence of the word ‘race’ in an official document had become an incitement to racism. In short, everything seemed set for the joys to come: five years of ultra-correct progressive government.
On a tour of the outer-city housing estates of Strasbourg, Hollande noted that unemployment in the banlieues was twice the national average and up to 40 per cent among the young. He also taunted Sarkozy for his failure to deliver the ‘Marshall Plan’ for deprived urban areas that he had promised in 2007.
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