Sarkozy, lessons for the Left
By
Ignacio Ramonet Read Spanish Version
Taken
from Rebelión
As
weeks go by in France, the incredible media fascination with
President Nicolas Sarkozy continues unabated. It is an admiration
beyond normal limits, reverential, ecstatic, obsequious, obscene. In
this country of revolutions, riots and insurgencies, about to
celebrate the 40th anniversary of the riots of May 1968, such
servility is unprecedented and nauseating. It has no precedent.
On
the international scene, it could be compared only with the
atmosphere of shameful domestication that enveloped Italy during the
years of "His Emittence" [Silvio] Berlusconi, owner of much
of the communications media, or with the period of abject surrender
of the media in the United States, after the attacks of Sept. 11,
2001.
The
peculiarity of the French case is that neither Sarkozy is an owner of
media (his friends are, though) nor the country has suffered
terrorist aggression. For that reason, the European rightist parties
are watching his stunning success with envy and are wondering what
his ideological prescriptions for success are.
Sarkozy
was elected president last May 6, defeating Socialist candidate
Ségolène Royal. The undeniable political talent he
demonstrated throughout the campaign, the mixture of voluntarism,
authority, personalization, provocation, nationalism and liberalism,
coupled with a brilliant oratorical art and a shrewd handling of
communications, along with the massive support of the media and
economic powers, allowed him to emerge victorious with a clear-cut
edge.
The left’s
principal ideological apparatus
Sarkozy
knows that the major communications media constitute the principal
ideological apparatus of the system today. And he is not unaware that
the new hierarchy of powers installed by globalization places the
financial power at the apex (as the principal power), followed by the
media power, which is a mercenary to the former. This duo dominates
political power, a power that — in our opinion-led democracies — is
obtained only with the compliant consent of media and finance.
Sarkozy
gained victory with a very high participation rate (83.97 percent)
and contrary to the law that has been verified almost throughout
Europe, to wit, a political majority that finishes a term is defeated
at the next election. Fearing that fatality, Sarkozy promised to
break with the line of his Gaullist predecessor, Jacques Chirac. But
the first social and economic measures he has proposed (the
elimination of the school map, modification of the labor contract and
the right to strike, a tax reduction for the very rich, a reduction
of the rates of succession, a reduction in social protection, a
postponement of the age of retirement) give a very reactionary
meaning to that purported break.
Most surprising has been the
intellectual aplomb with which Sarkozy has established the new
frontier that now separates the Right from the Left. Some analysts
wondered if that line was moved by the impetus of the neoliberal
globalization. Sarkozy ended the discussion. And through the
composition of his government, he demonstrated that the perimeter of
the Right now includes much of the Socialist Party, at least its
social-liberal wing.
The
Left and the neoliberal program
That
explains why he attracted important leftist leaders to his neoliberal
program. In his new Cabinet, several members (Bernard Kouchner, Eric
Besson, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Martin Hirsch, Fadela Amara) come from
the Left. He has also tapped some first-rank socialist personalities
(Jack Lang, Hubert Védrine, Jacques Attali, Michel Rocard) to
draft reports for him. And let’s not mention the old Mitterrandist
intellectuals (André Glucksmann, Pascal Bruckner, Georges-Marc
Bénamou) who have become boot-lickers of power.
All
this only makes us wonder about the Right-ification of French
society. A paradoxical Right-ification, because social suffering has
not ceased to spread and the struggles persist in a labor world that
has been battered by precariousness and outsourcing, uprooting and
unemployment.
Sarkozism:
French populism
For
that reason, Sarkozism represents a sort of French populism that
aspires to gather to its bosom all the rightists, from Gaullists to
social-liberals, seducing them by an illusion of movement and
aperture described as modern or progressive, whose principal source
of ideological inspiration is the Republican neoconservative model of
the United States — a model that by now has struck rock-bottom.
The
failure of the Left has been, above all, an intellectual defeat. The
fact that (through immobility or sloth) the Left has not produced a
renewed political theory to build a more just country, after all the
structures of society were transformed in the past 15 years, is a
suicidal act.
The
Left seems to have lost the battle of ideas. And that’s because its
government experience led it to freeze wages, close factories,
eliminate jobs, liquidate industrial basins and privatize part of the
public sector.
Throughout Europe, the Lefts are experiencing a
fatal attraction for measures that are genetically rightist: to
dismantle the regimes of social protection, denounce the welfare
society, accuse most poor people of being a parasitic class that
holds back the advancement of others. By thinking and acting thus,
the Lefts make the bed for the Rights because they accept a
historical mission that is contrary to their essence: to adapt
societies to globalization, to modernize globalization at the expense
of the wage-earners. That’s the origin of the Left’s current
intellectual weakness, a situation from which it can emerge only by
re-grasping the fundamental issues. And by laying down new
foundations.
Ignacio
Ramonet, a Spanish-French journalist and writer, is editor of Le
Monde Diplomatique.
