The efforts of France's hyperactive president Nicolas Sarkozy to become an indispensable and omnipresent global actor continue to be aided by the disarray of his domestic political opposition.  The internecine war for the control of the principal leftist movement, the Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party / PS), is emblematic of "Sarko's" luck. While the world's economic and social situation enters into ever-deeper crisis, denting incomes and threatening millions of jobs, the socialist leaders' dispute has offered a bathetic contrast. Indeed, coincidence of the G20 summit in Washington and the PS's gathering in Rheims gave the French media ample opportunity to contrast the grand scale of global challenges with the petty partisan warfare into which the congress descended.Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde

Among Patrice de Beer's articles in openDemocracy:

"Calle Santa Fé: between Chile and freedom" (16 January 2008)

"Sarkozy and God" (6 February 2008)

"May ‘68: France's politics of memory" (28 April 2008)

"Nicolas Sarkozy, the frenetic leader" (25 July 2008)

"Nicolas Sarkozy: world leader, local problem" (12 November 2008)

The internal agony of France's main leftwing party is severely disillusioning to many observers. The credibility of politics in France is at its lowest when it is most needed. The French used to say they had the "most stupid rightwing in the world". Now, when the PS is split between leaders who loathe each other much more than they do Sarkozy, and the extreme left is fragmented into multiple rival groups (while engaged in a hopeless search to coalesce into a single force that could overtake the PS itself), can it also be said that they have the "dumbest left in the world"?

A dubious affair

Maybe, but also maybe not. Yes, the PS has a new first secretary, Martine Aubry, who defeated her rival, Ségolène Royal by a few dubious votes after an election that some compared to what happened in Florida in 2000 when George W Bush was sent to the White House instead of Al Gore. The margin - a majority of forty-two of the 137,116 votes (out of 232,912 paid-up PS members) - was narrow enough to reinforce rather than quell the tensions that had preceded the result.

"Ségo", the socialist presidential candidate defeated by Sarkozy in the election of May 2007, took a few days to overcome suspicions of what she called a "stolen victory" before reluctantly acknowledging her rival's close win - without, however, shedding her ambitions to reform the party and lead it towards the presidential elections of 2012.

Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille from a strong political lineage (as the daughter of Jacques Delors, and labour minister in the Lionel Jospin government of the late 1990s who introduced the now almost defunct thirty-five-hour week), has offered to cooperate with a rival she detests while promising those who supported her leftist platform the lion's share of the party's leadership. It is hard at this point to say whether a harmonious "wedding of the carp and the rabbit" (as the French saying goes) is possible, or whether the devastated image of a party that has lost touch with the real world as well as with voters can recover.

All this looks like a recipe for political disaster. But this is only half the story of a PS drama marked by dubious tactics and irregularities. How, after all, to describe a process where full election results are not published more than a week after polling-day? Where widespread suspicions of fraud in regional constituencies have not been seriously investigated? Where results can only be challenged before a national body where the majority will obviously vote for their candidate rather than for the truth?

Both the definitive results of the 21 November members' poll and those of the PS national council on 25 November, remain in doubt (the council, controlled by Aubry's friends, increased her majority to 102 after days of consultation). No wonder there have been references to Tammany Hall, French-style - although it is worth mentioning too that the PS is the only major French party to hold real elections, even if they are messy; Nicolas Sarkozy's Union pour une Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Presidential Majority / UMP) is all but run by the president himself.

Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde

Among Patrice de Beer's articles in openDemocracy:

"Calle Santa Fé: between Chile and freedom" (16 January 2008)

"Sarkozy and God" (6 February 2008)

"May ‘68: France's politics of memory" (28 April 2008)

"Nicolas Sarkozy, the frenetic leader" (25 July 2008)

"Nicolas Sarkozy: world leader, local problem" (12 November 2008) 

All Against Ségolène

If the melancholy current condition of France's main leftwing party is worth a longer look, it is in part because the media-circulated image of political mud-wrestling between two ambitious prima-donnas - whose social-democratic platforms are, in truth, not that far apart - conceals a more interesting reality.

Jacques Julliard, a respected political analyst from the left-leaning weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, writes that the Aubry-Royal contest was less a left-right spat, or a war of the new vs the old (as in Britain's "old" and "new" Labour) and more an "anthropological" fight. Julliard, citing French philosopher René Girard's "theory of sacrifice", added that the PS's old guard - known as the "elephants" - chose to assemble behind Aubry and the "TSS" banner (Tous Sauf Ségolène [All Against Ségolène]) because they had been "looking for an expiatory victim to slaughter in order to ensure tribal cohesion and [the] regeneration of [the groups'] members".

But this still begs the question: why, if indeed the two "queens of the rose" are ideologically so close to each other? The answer is that the real issue at stake was not control of the party or clash of personality (even if civil wars are often bloodier than "normal" wars) - but Ségolène Royal's ambition to change the PS from top to bottom. This involved a great internal shift:

▪ transforming a party where one-third of members are party officials and elected officials into a mass movement where membership-fees would be slashed to attract new and younger voters less ideologically minded and more interested in societal issues than in class warfare

▪ opening it towards the centre in a country where all the "lefts" put together only represent 40% of voters, and where moderate votes are needed to win a majority in a presidential election.

This ambition, to the "elephants" that control the party machinery and are weary of members' unpredictability, represented a betrayal, a mortal sin and even more, a mortal danger. So they united to thrash the female troublemaker.

It was a fearsome sight to see such unlikely comrades cohere around the TSS cause: pro- and anti-Europe figures, pro- and anti-globalisation - from leftist ex-prime minister Laurent Fabius (who helped ensure a "no" vote in the 2005 referendum on the European constitution) to centrist former finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn (now International Monetary Fund director-general, and a European integrationist); from outgoing PS first secretary (also Royal's ex-partner and father of her four children) François Hollande to the failed candidate in the presidential election of 2002, Lionel Jospin.

The insults flowed freely; the mildest being that "Ségo" was stupid, mad or unqualified. "Who is going to take care of the children", said Fabius. Jospin went even further, comparing her with "neo"-socialists who collaborated with the Nazis during the second world war.

After the elephants

The elephants' confident rampage convinced them that Ségolène Royal would lose decisively. In the event, she actually won the first round of voting with 29% of the votes. This provoked a quick rearrangement of tactics in which the old guard tried to unite the three other factions - represented 71% of the votes - against her. Indeed, these managed to go as far as adopting a common platform, but failed to agree on a common candidate before finally rallying behind Martine Aubry. This did not stop "Ségo" winning again in the initial direct contest with her main rival, before they were virtually tied with 50% each (which meant that Aubry's vote had declined from 71% to just over 50% between the two rounds). The more Royal was attacked, the more she gained support - and she remains the favourite to be the left's presidential candidate in 2012.

Indeed, the results even at their provisional stage showed that she carried a majority of rank-and-file voters against a worn-out party machine which had failed for more than a decade to undertake any imaginative ideological and practical work to adjust the party's platform to the realities of the 21st century.

True, PS members do not always agree with her not-so-original political rhetoric; nor with a very personal, almost messianic style that has some resemblances with the style of campaigning familiar in the United States. But what unites them - another echo of the Barack Obama phenomenon - is their hope for a long-delayed modernisation of the PS, weariness with a generation of feet-dragging old men who always seem to be looking in the rear-mirror, and desire to move beyond the tired slogans and deal-making politics among different political courants (streams).

But, at this stage at least, Ségolène Royal has lost her political battle. Will Martine Aubry be able to open up the PS and break free of the shackles held by her "elephant" supporters. or will Royal build on her near success and carry the day in the battle to come; will the PS become an efficient national opposition party ready to retake power or remain a coalition of local "barons" just needing a common brand-name to support their local ambitions?

Even at the end, the questions outnumber the answers. But if the credibility of politics in France is to revive, at some point the new way of doing and thinking about politics that Ségolène Royal reaches towards must find expression - of a kind that can find a way to challenge both the PS's elephants and Nicolas Sarkozy.

France is the latest western country to find itself bogged down in the Afghan quagmire. It has paid a heavy price for its engagement with the death of ten of its elite soldiers killed in ambush east of Kabul on 18 August 2008 by the Islamist fundamentalist Taliban. France had previously had only a limited role in the Afghan conflict, training Afghan soldiers or flying reconnaissance missions. This changed with the election of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007.

Also in openDemocracy on the war in Afghanistan:

Antonio Giustozzi, "The resurgence of the neo-Taliban" (14 December 2007)

Paul Rogers, "Afghanistan in an amorphous war" (19 June 2008)

Paul Rogers, "Afghanistan: state of siege" (10 July 2008)

Kanchan Lakshman, "India in Afghanistan: a presence under pressure" (11 July 2008)

Paul Rogers, "Afghanistan: on the cliff-edge" (26 August 2008)

The former president Jacques Chirac - who had agreed to send troops there after 9/11 - had all but lost hope in the American-led war in 2006. During the presidential campaign of 2007, the then candidate (now president) Nicolas Sarkozy had declared that "a long-term presence of French troops in this part of the world does not seem decisive to me (...) There was a time when, in order to help Mr. Karzai's government, choices had to be made and the president (Chirac) decided to repatriate our special forces and some other units. This is a policy I will follow".

Yet Sarkozy reversed his stand after being elected. He bowed to President Bush's call for more troops and announced that the French forces in Afghanistan would jump to 3,000 - making them the fourth largest contingent in the coalition - and would join the fight against the Taliban. On 20 August - in the wake of the worst casualties suffered by French soldiers in a single incident since fifty-eight were killed by suicide-bombers in Beirut in 1983 - he justified his decision: "Why are we there? Because it is where a large part of the world's freedom is being decided. This is the place where terrorism is being fought. We are not there to fight against the Afghans but with them, not to leave them on their own to fight the dark forces of barbarity".

The change

French public opinion was never opposed in principle to sending troops overseas. They always clearly understood that there was no such thing as a war without casualties; the American obsession with body-bags was never there. So the decision to deploy troops in Afghanistan to ferret out al-Qaida - taken jointly by then socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin and conservative president Jacques Chirac - was supported by a national consensus. (A wild rumour was even circulated that French special forces once had Osama bin Laden in their line of sight but that the US command had ordered them not to shoot.)

Even in the period of France's opposition to George W Bush's and Tony Blair's war in Iraq, the French presence in Afghanistan was never questioned, even if the efficiency of the United States-led coalition's strategy on the ground was. A clear difference was made between an unacceptable war in Iraq and a necessary one against terrorism in Afghanistan.

Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde
Among Patrice de Beer's articles in openDemocracy:
"Calle Santa Fé: between Chile and freedom" (16 January 2008)
"Sarkozy and God" (6 February 2008)
"May ‘68: France's politics of memory" (28 April 2008)
"Nicolas Sarkozy, the frenetic leader" (25 July 2008)
"China and the Olympics: a view from France" (7 August 2The atmosphere started to change after Sarkozy's election in May 2007, beginning with a display of friendship towards a United States president whom most French people loathed. This was part of a policy switch towards Atlanticism, likewise anathema for the French since the days of Charles de Gaulle. The new direction was reflected in the decision in June 2008 to rejoin Nato's integrated command after more than forty years and to send new troops to Afghanistan. These measures broke a consensus that had long been at the core of France's foreign policy; the abandonment of France's "splendid isolation" without securing any influence on Washington's foreign policies in return left "Sarko" exposed to attacks by Gaullists on the right and socialists on the left.

Sarkozy, who indeed has an ideological affinity with American neo-conservatives, has gone further in siding with Washington's hard line on Iran; his foreign minister and advocate of "humanitarian intervention", Bernard Kouchner, even (in September 2007) raised the possibility of war with Tehran. His position is that France will be better heard if she pushes for her views inside the tent - thus within Nato's integrated command, for example - than outside; and that solidarity with the United States is not a vain word when the western world is threatened by fundamentalist terrorism. The opponents of Sarkozy's approach recognise the need to combat terrorism and the dire consequences of a western retreat from Afghanistan, but argue that sticking to a failed US strategy that ensures an endless war is not a sound policy.

Olivier Roy, the best French expert on the region, criticises Washington's "ideologised" vision of the war which divides Afghans in classic Manichean fashion into categories of good and evil. A better strategy, he says, would be to try to play the two main Taliban groups against each other in order to isolate the more extremist, al-Qaida-linked ones (as the Americans have done, with a degree of success, in Iraq). Other analysts, such as openDemocracy's columnist Paul Rogers, point out that coalition air-strikes which so often have the effect of killing civilians also harden the heart and minds of Afghans against foreign forces, and are likely to increase support for the Taliban.

This strategic context helps explain why the incident in which ten soldiers died persuaded more French people (a total of 55% in one poll) to express opposition to a French military presence in Afghanistan. This discontent is reflected in the refusal of the defence secretary, Hervé Morin, to use the word "war" when questioned by MPs (one of whom had fought in the French colonial war in Algeria of 1954-62 and had said bluntly that Afghanistan today reminded him of the "pacification" war there).

The mismatch

An allied reason for Nicolas Sarkozy's military activism in Afghanistan is to strengthen what he sees as France's "leadership role in Europe", especially in European defence. France has, he says, "restored a relation of confidence with the American people and leadership, and renovated our relations with the Atlantic alliance (...) Because, when we are among our family, we have more leeway to discuss with the others because they do not question where France stands".

The French president is also explicit about his aim of putting Paris at the political, economic and diplomatic / defence helm of the European Union. France's six-month presidency of the European Union (July-December 2008) is being used to implement that promise; the active role Sarko has adopted in the Russia-Georgia conflict - from brokering the initial ceasefire on 12 August 2008 to flying to Moscow and Tbilisi with senior EU colleagues on 8 September to reinforce the diplomatic process - is but one example (see "A deal, for now", Economist, 9 September 2008).

This could well be a reason for the bungled anti-Taliban operation: to show that the French military, albeit few on the field, were better than the Americans and other allies (especially the British). If voluntarism and boldness can pay in politics, as Nicolas Sarkozy has shown several times, it is another story on the ground. The ten soldiers killed by the Islamic guerrillas - whose gruesome fate was brought even closer to their compatriots after shocking images were published in the magazine Paris Match - did all they could with what they had under instructions from their military and political hierarchy, thousands of miles away (see Katrin Bennhold, "Taliban bring the war home to France", International Herald Tribune, 4 September 2008).

Such outcomers reveal the tensions in the president's strategy. First, France's international influence has been weakened by an economic crisis where her budget deficit approaches the permitted 3% ceiling and her trade deficit is gaping. Second, her armed forces - though still among the strongest in western Europe - were hit in June 2008 by a brutal downsizing.

The closure of redundant bases is necessary, but that saving money is not everything is even more true in the field of defence. The military establishment - which feels more and more estranged from a president with no military experience and, apparently, no personal empathy with it - is worried that slashing over 50,000 personnel out of 300,000 will make it harder to fight overseas; particularly in combat conditions as tough as in Afghanistan, which have nothing to do with ordinary peacekeeping. The elite forces deployed there have complained about obsolete body-armour, lack of helicopters and drones, missing artillery support, and even having to buy some of their own equipment. In addition, the two main training-camps for mountain-warfare, essential for soldiers sent to Afghanistan, are due to close in 2009.

No wonder the French are worried. It is not always easy to be a medium-sized power with international ambitions when you lack the means.

It is hard to imagine Nicolas Sarkozy as a diplomat - at least until his adoption of that role became unavoidable, when on 1 July 2008 France began its six-month chairing of the European Union. If it remains an an effort to think of "Sarko" performing the diplomat's duties, it is in large part a matter of style: for the French president seems always readier to bulldoze his views over his partners, to express himself in blunt and even acrimonious terms towards any leader or country bold enough to disagree with or oppose him, than to seek common ground or compromise.

Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde

Among Patrice de Beer's articles in openDemocracy:

"A not so quiet American" (13 July 2007)

"Nicholas Sarkozy, rupture and ouverture" (31 July 2007)

"The French temptation" (31 August 2007)

"Nicolas Sarkozy's striking test" (29 November 2007)

"Calle Santa Fé: between Chile and freedom" (16 January 2008)

"Sarkozy and God" (6 February 2008)

"May ‘68: France's politics of memory" (28 April 2008)

"Civil war, French-style, in the US" (4 June 2008)

This has been a consistent pattern of his presidency since his election in May 2007 - from his appropriation of the sole credit for the deal which freed the imprisoned Bulgarian nurses from Libya (even though this was arduously negotiated beforehand by Berlin and Brussels) to his scorn for the Irish after their referendum "no" on 12 June 2008 to the Lisbon treaty (an attitude only somewhat moderated during his flying visit to Dublin on 21 July). The fact that Sarkozy, fifteen months after his election, runs France unopposed means that he is still unused (or where they arise indifferent) to objections from foreign politicians or media.

Sarkozy is a man in a hurry, unable or unwilling to wait, ever pushing for new projects, eager to impose his hyperactive and egotistic and style to short-circuit his opponents and impose a quick outcome he can gleefully present on the TV evening news as his doing. A trained lawyer in a country long run by former civil servants in grey suits, he is more interested by show than by substance. What he wants is a rapid success which can be followed by another, then another; the cost of trampling anyone bold or rude enough to stand in the way is a trifle, if it is considered at all.

In this, Sarko resembles the idea of a hyperactive American president who seeks to unchain himself from constitutional constraints. So far, this departure from the model of how French presidents have been used to behaving seems to have worked - even if he is running a country his own prime minister has called "bankrupt", and even amid the irritation of European and other states who see in Sarkozy's frenetic activity a sort of rebranding of French arrogance.

Between reality and dream

The French presidency of the European Union is an opportunity for Nicolas Sarkozy to consolidate the success of this first year with the country's closest partners and neighbours. The grandeur of his political ambitions here was never better reflected than in the lavish republican gathering he hosted at the the Grand Palais in Paris on 13 July 2008, when forty-three heads of state and government from Europe, north Africa and the middle east came together - if only for a few hours - to celebrate the consummation of Sarkozy's pet project, the "Barcelona Process: Union for the Mediterranean" (or UPM).

Sarkozy's grin showed no sign of the compromises he had had to make to reach this point: weakening his initially stringent draft on the new "union's" immigration policy draft to appease Spain, and changing both the title and the composition of what he had wanted to call the "Mediterranean Union" after fierce opposition from Germany (Sarkozy had wanted to restrict European membership of the union to the southern EU countries, but had to concede to the argument of chancellor Angela Merkel that this could divide the EU and sideline Berlin). The French president was unfazed: what mattered was the show, the image, the performance, the occasion, the appearance - and that it was all his doing.

Indeed, the Union pour la Méditerranée is a case-study in Nicolas Sarkozy's foreign policy. It had been conceived by his close political adviser Henri Guaïno with several artful purposes in mind:

Also in openDemocracy on French policy under Nicolas Sarkozy:

Andrew Stevens, "The Paris-Tokyo syndrome" (7 June 2007)

James MacDougall, "Sarkozy and Africa: big white chief's bad memory" (7 December 2007)

* bypassing the European Union (which Guaïno loathes) in the effort to acquire the lead role in defining the EU's Mediterranean policy and funds

* creating a grand project to affirm France's independence of action

* developing the countries on France and the EU's southern fringe with the purpose of drying up direct economic emigration, creating a bulwark against emigration from sub-Saharan Africa, and diverting Turkey (which, for Guaïno is not an European nation) away from EU membership

* showing the Bush administration that it could be more fruitful to engage enemies (such as Syria) in dialogue than demonise them as members of an "axis of evil".

Between the ambition and the reality, falls the bling-bling. For the reality revealed by the pomposity of 13 July 2008 is little more than a new "Club Med" (after the group once represented by Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece) whose bureaucracy, resources and ethos somehow fail to cohere: there are two co-presidents (Nicolas Sarkozy and Hosni Mubarak), but as yet no structure, no serious budget for its six ambitious programmes, and no real human-rights dimension. It also sits in awkward relationship with the 1995 "process" of which it is the inheritor (see Fred Halliday, "The 'Barcelona process': ten years on", 11 November 2005).

The grin without the cat

Sarkozy wants to remain co-chair of the Barcelona Process: Union for the Mediterranean after December 2008 - in the same way that he would have liked to stay co-chair of the European Union throughout 2009, were the Czech Republic and Sweden not to be in line for the rotating presidency. His UPM partners are dubious about this ambition, so the decision has been deferred. Tunisia and Morocco are competing to house the secretariat, so this decision at least should be made by the end of 2008. With no money to spare, France hopes for financial support from the Gulf states to bankroll the UPM.

Meanwhile, not even Sarkozy's smile or hand-gestures can conceal the tensions between some of the Paris participants. The king of Morocco stayed away in anticiaption of the warm welcome afforded to his neighbour and rival, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika (who himself is highly critical of the UPM); Turkey is aware of Sarkozy's opposition to its accession to the EU, and the UPM's place in this; Palestinian and Syrian leaders left the Grand Palais when Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was ready to speak. But it was worth Bashir al- Assad's time to attend, for the Syrian president's presence - and promise at some point to open an embassy in Beirut - were enough to make his host lay aside Syria's alliance with Iran and complicity in the murder of Lebanese former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005 (and a series of other critics of Syria in Lebanon since).

The Paris event ended with a Sarkozy-style triumph of appearance which - after years of inaction under Jacques Chirac - did at least put France at the centre of the world's attention for a day. It looks impressive: forty-three European, African and middle-east leaders representing 800 million people, in a unified manifestation of north-south, rich-poor, Israeli-Arabs engagement facilitated by a great feat of French diplomacy (with only the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi boycotting the summit). But what was it all for?

The dream of a new Mediterranean once again becoming the centre of the world - 2,000 years after the Roman empire - is unlikely once the heads of state and government are again mired in hard domestic political realities. What, after all, will become of the UPM when the French presidency is over? What will matter of the Bush-Sarkozy intimacy when Barack Obama or John McCain enters the White House? What will happen to Sarkozy's promises to be the president of human rights? What will European countries do when they become tired of the French president overbearing ego and ambitions?

And - for all politics is local, as a wise observer once said - what will be the result if and when France's dire economic situation begins to cloud Nicolas Sarkozy's rapid-fire diplomatic performance? Will it then still be all his doing?

France is approaching a potent anniversary in a strange mood. The student riots of May 1968 radically shook an arch-conservative society and came near to toppling then-president Charles de Gaulle - as well as inspiring students in Europe, the United States and Japan to emulate Paris's "example". It is natural, then, that the fortieth anniversary is being vigorously commemorated; more than 100 books have already been published in France to coincide with the sparking date of les événements (22 March 1968), and dozens of TV and radio programmes are on the way around the moment (3 May) when the student uprising effectively began.

The French president elected in May 2007 might not have changed his country as much as he and his supporters (at home or abroad) hoped or as much as his opponents feared. But Nicolas Sarkozy's craving for "rupture" with a past he regards as demonic - one, moreover, that can seem to stretch back far beyond the conservative ogre-year of 1968 to that of the 1789 French revolution itself - is undiminished. Now, Sarkozy's ambitious desire to redress the flaws of his nation's predecessors has become especially blatant in two areas: the pipolisation of politics (to use the inventive new French word), epitomised by his highly publicised "liaison" - and subsequent marriage - with Italian singer and former model Carla Bruni); and the role of religion in the life of a country which has lived secularism as a dogma since the law establishing "separation of church and state" in 1905.

The nine-day transport strike had just ended on 23 November 2007 when French president Nicolas Sarkozy was confronted with a new upsurge of violence in Paris's banlieues (suburbs). Two years after the violent riots of November 2005 - in which the then interior minister's rhetoric played an inflammatory part - hardly anything has changed in the banlieues for the better. Villiers-le-Bel, where the latest riots started on the night of 25 November after an incident where two young men died in a collision with a police car, is still waiting for a police station; more generally, yet another "Marshall Plan for the banlieues" remains more of a slogan than a reality, as a great deal of the money promised has still not been delivered.