An Excess of Ambition for Sarkozy
By JOHN VINOCUR
Published: July 26, 2010
 
PARIS — At a cabinet meeting last week, the French government issued a decree creating a general secretariat to serve France’s upcoming turn at the rotating presidency of the G-8 and G-20 economic summit groups.
 
Workaday stuff, seemingly, coming alongside directives concerning the functions of the French Coast Guard and the purview of the minister in charge of rural and territorial affairs.
 
But if you think big — and the French and their president, Nicolas Sarkozy, can think grandiose (as in organizing “a new international monetary order”) — then this was the first official and annunciatory clash of cymbals in the short reign of Nicolas, king of the G-20, from November 2010 until November 2011.
 
Yes, Mr. Sarkozy is wobbling at home with a current 61 percent disapproval rating in national polls; a running sore of a scandal involves a key cabinet minister, cash gifts, special favors and France’s richest woman; and massive street demonstrations are likely in September against a reform of the country’s retirement and pension system. That’s not to mention the existence of a still vague austerity program meant to sharply decrease the level of French debt and deficits that a Gaullist party budget expert last week acknowledged “lacks credibility.”
 
And, yes, this skips over the fragility of the euro, the International Monetary Fund’s projections of feeble growth in the euro zone, and the prospect of grief from France’s engagement in Afghanistan or a heightening of tensions with Iran.
 
Still, here is Mr. Sarkozy, whose international calling card could read Energy + Chutzpah Unltd., preparing for his year of setting the agenda for the world’s economic summit meetings with the goal of demonstrating, as he has said, “America no longer has the world’s only currency.”
 
Ultimately, that means limiting — whatever euphemistic verbs are used — the role of the U.S. dollar as the world’s monetary standard.
 
A close associate of the French president, trying to create a frame of reference for what Mr. Sarkozy has in mind, told me to think roughly of the Plaza Accords of 1985 when, in another context, the United States, Germany, Japan, Britain and France agreed to a controlled devaluation of the dollar and a revaluation of the yen and Deutsche mark.
 
Could Mr. Sarkozy and France conceivably have the authority, practical leverage and international support to start a process that would try to turn the dollar into a co-equal player in a basket of reserve currencies with those, let’s say, of China, Russia, India and the euro zone countries? They are G-20 members along with nations like Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey.
 
And would the United States under President Barack Obama consider such a proposal although it could seem very much intended to smother the dollar and the de facto G-2 duopoly developing between the Americans and Chinese?
 
Funny, where interesting answers can be hiding. Mr. Obama’s great friend, President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, attending an economic conference with Mr. Sarkozy in St. Petersburg in June, seemed to board the French president’s ship of dreams — Sarko has talked about his G-20 presidency’s projects as an effort for “civilization” — by talking up a multicurrency reserve portfolio.
 
In the process, the Russian seemed to admit it was not a certain hit.
 
“Three to five years ago, any discussion of this seemed like a fantasy that may never come true,” Mr. Medvedev said. “Now we’re discussing it in absolute seriousness with a number of countries, including our American partners, who are, perhaps, least interested in other countries replacing the dollar.”
 
Read that as considerably more than perhaps.
 
Unlike the Plaza Accords, where the United States dealt only with allies, admonitions about or moves against the dollar from a G-20 including countries beyond the democratic pale (as well as open markets or nonmanipulated currencies) would not go down well with an American electorate having big leadership choices to make in 2012.
 
Besides, Sarko’s Very Grand Ambitions have a history of imploding through excess.
 
His project for a Union of the Mediterranean, in which France would be the big dog in a quasi-confederation of South European and Arab countries, has come to next to nothing.
 
And now his desired reordering of the international monetary system (“I am establishing the basis that will save international capitalism”) is paired with a hazy idea to diminish quantitative measures for rating economies through the establishment of “qualitative” standards that would “integrate” factors like “well-being” or the “cost of our environment.”
 
Mr. Sarkozy’s motivations surely involve much sincerity, love of the big stage, and the reality that he faces difficult re-election in the spring of 2012.
 
It’s also probable that he has fond recollections of the summer of 2008, when, during the Russian invasion of Georgia, he held the European Union’s rotating presidency and arranged a partial troop withdrawal. His popularity at home spiked, but the Russians occupy parts of Georgian territory to this day.
 
Before Sarko takes hold of the G-20 agenda, he wants to prove his seriousness to ratings agencies and international markets (his friends say he is fixated on the task of not losing France’s AAA credit rating) by putting the retirement and pensions reform into law by the end of October.
 
Beyond that, in order to be believable on things he can theoretically control, the president needs to make clear how austerity measures would underpin a planned decrease in the French structural deficit of four points by 2013.
 
In a withering moment of frankness, Philippe Marini, Mr. Sarkozy’s party’s budget spokesman, said last week that similar French plans had never succeeded over past decades because “the norms for growth of public expenditure have always been substantially over-run.”
 
Excess also had its place as a target in Mr. Marini’s evaluation of the Sarkozy plan’s credibility. He described the government assumption of a 2.5 percent spurt in the French economy starting in 2011 as “a factor of doubt.” And how: The I.M.F. earlier this month trimmed its projection for growth in the euro zone next year to 1.3 percent.
 
These murmurs of concern within his own house about Mr. Sarkozy’s economic judgment hardly fit unquestionable king-of-the-world qualifications that would go beyond the luck of the calendar. In royalty, as in politics, legitimacy counts.

Editorial
Xenophobia: Casting Out the Un-French
Published: August 5, 2010
 
    * comments (113)
 
 
France has no equivalent to the 14th Amendment, but the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who likes to be known as Sarko the American, also is fanning dangerous anti-immigrant passions for short-term political gain.
Editorial Series
 
Last week, he proposed stripping foreign-born French citizens of their citizenship if they are convicted of threatening the life of a police officer or other serious crimes. Lest any voter miss the point that such a law would be particularly aimed at Muslim immigrants, Mr. Sarkozy’s interior minister, in charge of the police force, helpfully added polygamy and female circumcision to the list of offenses that could bring loss of citizenship.
 
Days earlier, Mr. Sarkozy promised to destroy the camps of the Roma and send them back to where they came from, mainly Romania and Bulgaria. Both countries are members of the European Union. Hundreds of thousands of their residents, in France legally, now risk being swept up and expelled in police raids.
 
And Mr. Sarkozy proposes denying automatic French citizenship to people born in France if their parents are foreign and they have a record of juvenile delinquency.
 
All of this in a country that has long proudly upheld the principle that all French citizens — native-born or naturalized — are entitled to equal treatment under the law. That applies to Mr. Sarkozy’s Hungarian-born father and Italian-born wife, both naturalized French citizens, and should apply to everyone else.
 
But immigrant-bashing is popular among nonimmigrant French voters and Mr. Sarkozy has never been shy about doing it. He built his 2007 presidential campaign around his tough record (and inflammatory words) as interior minister. Earlier this year, he ran a divisive campaign to define French national identity because he wanted to fend off the far right anti-immigrant National Front in regional elections. It didn’t work.
 
Now, with his political fortunes at a new low and the National Front resurgent under younger leadership, he has gone further, worrying traditional conservatives who still believe in the rights of man and the equality of all French citizens. They are right to be concerned, and he is recklessly wrong to ignore their cautionary advice.