A Cesspool of French Scandals Favors the Far Right's Marine Le Pen

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

17 November 14

 

mean-looking kitchen knife in hand, the evil villain glares in bilious yellow, while his short, hooked-nosed victim hunches forward, a knife in his back. The colorful cartoon, which fills the cover of the satirical tabloid Charlie Hebdo, screams out from newsstands all over France. At a glance, it captures the mainstream mud-slinging and internecine blood-letting that now points the way for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine to move beyond her “Vive Hitler” upbringing to become a serious political contender.

The cartoon’s victim is the hyper-kinetic former president Nicholas Sarkozy, now running to win back the office in 2017. The villain who stabbed him in the back, his former prime minister François Fillon, who wants Élysée Palace for himself. The combatants are leading figures in the same political party, the center-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). Neither has any significant ideological or policy differences with the other, and both have repeatedly veered toward the far right, attacking Moslems, Gypsies, blacks, homosexuals, and other “outsiders” to win over Le Pen’s über-nationalist and Ultra-Catholic supporters.

For both men, the fight is personal, mano a mano. During their five years running the country together, Sarkozy often appeared to go out of his way to humiliate the polished and infinitely more subtle Fillon, and then refused to back him two years ago in the race to head the UMP. Fillon, for his part, finds Sarko loathsome, a feeling that a significant number of French voters shared in the presidential election of 2012, when they tipped the balance to the Socialist Party candidate François Hollande and cut short Sarkozy’s hope for a second term.

How quickly political expectations here have changed! Determined not to throw off his country’s longstanding partnership with Germany and their shared support for the single European currency, the Euro with all its constraints, the hapless Hollande has proved unwilling and unable to come anywhere near solving his country’s economic woes. He has not imposed the fulsome austerity that Chancellor Angela Merkel and her northern European allies have wanted. Nor, in the absence of sufficient private investment, has the former economics professor fought for a serious Keynesian solution, borrowing heavily to promote the massive government spending needed to create demand, growth, and jobs. Widely seen as an inept potato-head, he remains the man in the muddle.

Without even mentioning Hollande’s messy and all-too-public romantic life, his poor job performance seemed to guarantee that Sarkozy would return to power. Or, that was how it looked until November 5, when two of Le Monde’s top reporters – Fabrice Lhomme and Gérard Davet – published their new blockbuster, Sarko s’est tuer (Sarko was killed). They opened their preface with the story that inspired Charlie Hebdo’s stab in the back cartoon, and have since expanded and followed up on it in several articles they wrote in their newspaper, beginning November 8.

As they tell it, on June 24 of this year Fillon met with President Hollande’s chief of staff, Jean-Pierre Jouyet. Over lunch at a restaurant within spitting distance of the Élysée, Fillon sounded off about the scandal-ridden UMP. He was especially scathing about Sarkozy, who had illegally exceeded spending limits in his 2012 election campaign. Sarkozy paid the fines, for which he took reimbursements from the party.

Sarkozy’s crime was “an abuse of the social good,... a personal fault, the party did not have to pay,” Fillon let loose on Jouyet, whom the reporters described as flabbergasted. He could not get over Fillon’s insistent and disconcerting demand. Would the presidential office use its authority to speed up the judicial investigation already under way? Having learned from Sarkozy, the master of cesspool politics, Fillon appeared to think that Hollande would jump right in.

“Hit him fast! Hit him fast!” Fillon insisted, as the reporters tell the story. “You clearly realize that if you don’t hit him fast, you are going to let him come back.”

Here was a former prime minister of the right asking a left-leaning President of the Republic’s closest collaborator to stick it to Sarkozy as fast as possible to keep him out of a presidential race three years away. Of more than passing significance, Hollande knew that Jouyet was meeting Fillon and gave his “green light” to the encounter as long as it did not take place within the Élysée.

Returning there, Joueyet rushed to tell Hollande what Fillon had demanded, and – according to the reporters – the telling made the rounds of the palace. Hollande confirmed the story to them in September, insisting that he had refused to intervene. Then, on September 20, the reporters interviewed Jouyet, who filled in the details.

Or did he?

A classmate and friend of Hollande from their days at the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) as well as a friend and former colleague of Fillon, Jouyet denied the meat of the story, as top civil servants learn to do. A third man at the lunch, a friend and former aid to both Jouyet and Fillon, supported his denial. Lhomme and Davet then reminded Jouyet they had recorded what he’d said on their cell phones, as naughty reporters learn to do, and he reluctantly confirmed their account.

As the reporters predicted and polls now confirm, the story has devastated Fillon’s image and political prospects. No longer considered innocent until proven guilty, he has no way to get it right. He shamelessly snuggles up to Sarkozy, at least in public. He accuses his old friend Jouyet of lying. He assails Hollande for setting the whole thing up. And he sues everyone in sight, which will keep the story on the front pages for months.

Hollande is similarly sullied for giving his chief of staff the go-ahead to meet with Fillon, confirming the story to the reporters, and – so far at least – refusing to fire Jouyet, at the very least for so clumsily getting caught in a bald-faced lie. Even those on Hollande’s side of the left-right schematic now berate the president for getting down and dirty.

Sarkozy gains in the short run, characteristically presenting himself as victim and walking away with new elections at the end of this month for leader of the battered UMP. But, even without presidential intervention, the judicial investigation still hangs over his head, while the bulk of the book by Lhomme and Davet provides tasty details of all the scandals that plagued his first term in office.

The only UMP leader who might stand to gain is the mayor of Bordeaux, Alain Juppé, who has served in countless governments, notably as prime minister under Jacques Chirac and Minister of Foreign Affairs under both Chirac and Sarkozy. But he too stands tainted with scandal, having been convicted of mishandling public funds.

All of which leaves only one clear winner, the tireless Marine Le Pen, who is having a field day simply saying what increasing numbers here are coming to believe. That for all their obvious differences on gay marriage and other significant issues, the two mainstream parties – the UMP and Socialist Party (PS) – form one ruling establishment that completely lacks decency or credibility. Marine calls them the UMPS.

To date, she is taking every advantage of this latest scandal, always careful not make herself too prominent a part of the debate. She has pointedly moved away from her father’s bombast and Jew-bashing, focusing her attacks on Moslems and other “outsiders,” as well as on the increasingly unpopular European Union. She has even talked of dropping the name of the party her father created, the Front National. Her near-term goal is to absorb whatever remains of the embattled UMP, becoming the leader of a unified and nationalistic French Right.

She is still a long way from power. But make no mistake, the cesspool of establishment scandals greatly enhances her chance of success.

---

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.