He lets his guard down for one second and the next thing you know he's on a medium-sized luxury yacht off the coast of Malta. It's all fine of course, except that about 12 hours after being handed a big pile of political capital he began spending it. Not a great sign but it's only day three of the Sarkozy era.
What's interesting about the Malta excursion of course is the Cecilia factor, which for the time being remains crucial. Political observers have nothing else to go on.
Paris Match, Sarkozy-friend Lagardere's best selling weekly, is plugging the first couple full-on with a cover showing her pecking him on the cheek election night. It's positively Pravda-esque, since it's also quite obvious that the couple have yet to quite hammer things out about their future together.
As has been well reported, Cecilia has never been shy in telling the world that she'd rather pick up stakes and move to New York. While her dalliance with PR guru Richard Attias is evidently well over, the fact that he was a high flying midtown bachelor with no connection to the grime of French politics goes a long way to tell us where she'd rather see Nicolas going.
Which leads me to believe that the Malta trip was an offering to Cecilia. By accepting fat cat Vincent Bollore's freebies, Sarkozy risks political decorum to yet again woo back his wife who'd rather be a queen of the Upper East Side than a ribbon-cutter in la France profonde.
This may all seem superficial, but in fact it gets at the heart of the matter. Sarkozy brilliantly united an unlikely coalition of right wing voters in order to secure his clear victory. On the one side he has a basically racist blue collar block who sincerely believe that he's going to reinforce some concept of whites-on-top France that some think is being lost in the globalized world and on the other, the fat cats and yuppies of France who just want to get on with it and be free to establish Manhattan-sur-Seine, unencumbered by Chirac's supposed cowardice towards the welfare state.
Needless to say, Cecilia represents the latter half of that rightist coalition. So as she tugs her man in her own direction, we can be sure that he's going to have to compensate in the other. For each image of globalized ostentation, the blue-collar folks will be expecting their bone. That reward, most likely, can be of two sorts. On the one hand, less aggression towards the much maligned Social model or conversely, a healthy does of race baiting.
Brace yourself Turkey.
(NB: I'm no specialist on these matters, but I think the Bollore yacht is somewhat average, right? A dwarf if it moored itself in Cannes for the festival this month, for example.)
Perhaps when Cécilia went AWOL those couple of weeks at the end of the campaign she was already on the yacht and just invited Sarko along for a victory lap? With all the image crafting Sarko has done, this millionaire's mini-break has to be a signal. I give the guy a lot of credit, though. How does someone from the ruling party (or an offshoot thereof), the party that has been in power for 14 years, convince the voters that he alone can bring change to the nation?
Posted by: Mary in MN | May 10, 2007 at 04:40 AM