Political couples

Back in the days of Charles de Gaulle, few people would have used the word "couple" to designate the General and his wife Yvonne. I can't imagine a neighbor in the Champagne-Ardenne village of Colombey-les-Deux Eglises phoning up Madame de Gaulle at La Boisserie and saying: "My wife and I would like to invite a few couples along to our place this weekend for a barbecue and a scrabble evening. Are you interested?" In any case, while Charles and Yvonne were of course a married couple, they were certainly not what you would call a political couple. According to a legend (maybe apocryphal), while the General was attending to the affairs of France, his wife spent most of her time knitting.

During the recent presidential election, we saw an extraordinary emergence of authentic political couples, the most famous of which was Ségolène Royal and François Hollande.

In spite of their electoral defeat, and Ségolène's decision to refrain from being a candidate in next month's parliamentary elections, the Royal-Hollande couple hasn't exactly gone into hibernation. On the contrary, they're on the front page of the news because of a book on Ségolène's recent campaign, called La femme fatale, which is about to hit the bookstands. More precisely, the Royal-Hollande couple is attempting to use judicial means to block the release of this book... which is naturally a godsend in unexpected publicity for the two authors: Raphaëlle Bacqué and Ariane Chemin. The bone of contention between the political couple and the authors would appear to be an anecdote concerning the possibility that François Hollande might have preferred Lionel Jospin, rather than his wife, as the Socialist presidential candidate. [Jospin was the man who was knocked out unceremoniously in the first round, in 2002, by the extreme-rightwing candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen.] According to the anecdote related by Bacqué and Chemin, Ségolène would have yelled out at her husband: "If you call upon Jospin to block me, I swear you'll never see your kids again." Nice story, particularly for the authors of a political saga, but a little bit too dramatic to be true. The book will surely be a best-seller.

In calmer waters, Jean-Louis Borloo, a political friend of Sarkozy, happens to be the husband of an excellent TV journalist named Béatrice Schönberg (who reads out the news on France 2)... who was axed for the duration of the elections.

Another victim of a similar kind was the brilliant young TV journalist Marie Drucker [I used to know her father back in my 1972 days at the Research Service of the French Broadcasting System], who had the misfortune of being madly in love with a minister of Chirac named François Baroin, who was actually called upon to replace Sarkozy when the latter stepped officially into the electoral arena.

One of the most famous political couples in France is composed of the Socialist ex-minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his journalist wife Anne Sinclair, who was for many years one of the most popular women in France.

At the present moment, of course, the most famous couple of all is Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Cécilia.

Nobody really knows (maybe not even Nicolas) whether Cécilia is prepared to step into the role of the First Lady of France. Personally, I would bet that she won't. In other words, I don't believe that Nicolas and Cécilia constitute a political couple. I don't see Cécilia staying at home, knitting like Yvonne. Nor do I imagine her collecting small coins for charity, as Bernadette Chirac has been doing for years. Sarko has promised us that, with his election, things are going to change, no doubt in a surprising manner. I'm convinced that one of the biggest surprises that awaits us is finding out what the hell Sarko's going to do with his wife.

The simple life

The morning after his election, Nicolas Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa jumped on a private Falcon jet with his wife Cécilia née Ciganer-Albeniz, their 10-year-old son Louis and a few bodyguards, and headed for the Mediterranean island of Malta, where they immediately boarded the 60-meter yacht Paloma. The aircraft and the boat belong to a French millionaire named Vincent Bolloré, who's the brother-in-law of Sarkozy's close counselor Gérard Longuet. Paparazzi had to hire an aircraft to obtain photos of the family outing.

Certain politicians in France were irritated by the ostentatious style of the start of Sarkozy's reign. Nobody actually used the expression "nouveau riche", but it seemed to be hovering on their lips. Curiously, although many wealthy French people lead lives of luxury, there's a tradition of doing so in a restrained non-glitzy manner. I have a scary feeling that, sooner or later, Nicolas Sarkozy is going to run into big problems with certain profound French conventions. Either that, or he'll explode...

A new page opens in France

An encouraging aspect of the final round of the French presidential elections was the massive turnout of voters (in a nation where voting is not compulsory): some 84% of eligible citizens. Clearly, few people heeded the instructions of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme rightwing ex-candidate who had asked his followers to abstain from voting.

The left, behind Ségolène Royal, was soundly thrashed. Most people who voted for François Bayrou in the first round did not choose the Socialist candidate in the second round. Will the left succeed in getting its act together before the parliamentary elections in five weeks' time? This is not at all obvious, because many Socialists will be tempted to blame Ségolène Royal for the present defeat, and this will tend to destabilize the left during the forthcoming campaign.

As for Sarkozy, he'll be literally going out of circulation from now until his investiture on 16 May. His speech this evening, after the announcement of his victory, was forceful and relatively reassuring, in that he underlined the need for national reconciliation and union. In words addressed to the USA, he insisted upon the fact that humanity's major challenge is the planetary combat against global warming. He also referred to the interesting theme of a Mediterranean Union, which would be a link between Europe and Africa.

In 1983, at the age of 28, Sarkozy became the mayor of Neuilly, an upper-class residential suburb to the west of Paris. Ten years later, by which time he had become an elected parliamentarian, Sarkozy broke into the news for his courageous role in handling negotiations with a crazy armed guy, calling himself Human Bomb, who had entered a kindergarten in Neuilly and taken 21 kids as hostages. I remember listening to news on this dramatic affair on my car radio as I crossed France in the summer of 1993, to start work in Grenoble. Finally, the elite police force known as the RAID [Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion] burst into the kindergarten while Human Bomb was dozing, and filled his skull with lead. I've always imagined that this affair symbolized the start of Sarkozy's ascension in the world of politics and police.

Maybe a whitewash for Chirac

Everybody in France is familiar with the time-honored satirical weekly named Le Canard enchaîné (the duck in chains)... including people who've never actually read it. Long ago, tabloid newspapers were referred to disparagingly as ducks because their content was likened to a quacking noise. [In English, too, fake doctors are called quacks, probably for the same reason.] The great statesman Georges Clemenceau [1841-1929] edited a newspaper called L'homme enchaîné (man in chains). When the Canard enchaîné was founded in 1915, its name was a humorous allusion to Clemenceau's newspaper. These days, in the title of the newspaper, the "ears" on either side of the name (which generally present a topical pun) feature ducks.

The Canard enchaîné has just thrown a spanner into the electoral works by suggesting that, "according to informed sources" (as the saying goes), the candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has promised Jacques Chirac that, after his re-entry into civilian life, the ex-president will not be pursued by the law for misdemeanors allegedly committed back in the days when he was the mayor of Paris. Naturally, both Chirac and Sarkozy immediately rejected this allegation, but there's a good chance that it's true, because claims made by the Canard enchaîné usually turn out to be based upon factual information. In any case, it's true that Chirac will have some serious explaining to do when the law starts to ask him questions. So, the idea that he might have bartered his support for Sarkozy, against a legal whitewash, is perfectly plausible. It's an interesting hypothesis. All we can do is to wait and see.