Nicolas Sarkozy’s choice for foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, a charismatically iconoclastic Socialist, is but one of several odd choices that were announced earlier this morning in Paris, as prime minister François Fillon, who directed Sarkozy’s presidential campaign, filled out his government. Also taking up ministerial duties were a number of interesting appointees, some representing two-fer constituencies. Examples: Another campaign advisor, Rachida Dati (ethnic + female), who will run the Justice Ministry, and Alain Juppé (convict + énarque), an élitist whose experience with fraud positions him perfectly to head up Sarkozy’s Global Warmists. It’s an unusual bunch. The overall motif: Green women. Le Figaro has the reaction in its morning coverage here.
Kouchner is the figure attracting the most attention, and not just because he seems to be the loosest cannon in Fillon arsenal. He has as many qualities that pundits appreciate as there are French republics:
First, the press likes him because he likes them; as the co-founder of a fairly no-nonsense humanitarian organization, Doctors Without Borders, he likes publicity and understands the media. “He is not shy about the press,” a Paris-based journalist friend told me. “He likes it.”
Second, he’s a Socialist — although, according to a depressed Le Monde, now an officially shunned one — so his appointment is being trumpeted as an ecumenical gesture.
Third, he’s not the guy everybody thought earlier this week was in line for the job, the odious anti-American énarque poseur, Hubert Védrine.
Fourth, he’s quite popular and his appointment by Sarkozy has the zest of irony about it; Sarko’s ambition was to reverse the excesses of ’68, the student-led riots that first catapulted Kouchner into prominence.
Fifth, and for our purposes, most importantly, he’s one of the few political leaders in France open in his support for Israel and the American decision to invade Iraq. (My own favorite Kouchner moment, captured in brief by Le Nouvel Observateur, was in October 2003, when he described Tariq Ramadan, the putative Muslim “scholar” and anti-Semite so beloved by Time, the New York Times, this way: “Cet homme est une crapule intellectuelle.” Consider “crapule” a cognate. I wrote about the guy here, way back when.)
Given France’s behind-the-scenes role in encouraging Saddam to out-wait the demands of the U.S. and Britain, and the French efforts at the U.N. to diminish the significance of the Security Council’s resolutions, it might be argued that if this were the government in power in Paris five years ago, Iraq would not have been invaded, the U.N.’s role in the world would still be a speaking part, and the world would be richer by many thousands of lives.
Nevertheless, the new cabinet, along with Sarkozy’s apparent wish to make the French presidency into something a little less cloudlike, suggests that Sarko is apparently taking seriously the promises he made as a candidate. Certainly, as the International Herald Tribune reports, things will look differently in official Paris. He’s an animated fellow, Sarkozy, and the changes he’s wrought in just the first few hours of taking power from Jacques Chirac, a man so distant from reality that he thought the French actually liked him, are startling everyone.
As John Lichfield reports in the Independent, “The French president and his prime minister hit the ground running…a couple of hours after [the appointment was made] the two men went jogging together in the Bois de Boulogne.” That was startling to the French. Not two middle-aged men running around together in the Bois de Boulogne — that’s what passes for a romantic life for many Parisians, after all — but a president of the French republic actually exerting physical energy. It was a shocking display, a media-friendly event intended, obviously, to show that things were going to change in France.
The appointments suggest the influence of the politically carcinogenic ENA, the nation’s all-powerful vo-tech for the élite, has been severely diminished. To have both a president and a prime minister who are not énarques is a novelty in France. And if the texture of his government is new and improved, the changed size of the thing is even more radical. Previous French governments had more ministers than a busload of Scottish clerics — there were 30 in Villepin’s outgoing cabinet, for example. But Sarkozy’s has only 15 spots, and two of them went to members of parties not his own (Kouchner, a Socialist, and the UDF’s parliamentary leader Hervé Morin, who was given the important defense ministry, and whose appointment comes at the expense of the would-be third man of French politics, the UDF’s François Bayrou). Ministerial posts are currency in French politics, so this represents a serious revaluation, adding to Sarkozy’s political capital.
Much has been made of Sarkozy’s victory speech, in which he declared the U.S. could again count on France, and on Kouchner’s generally pro-Israeli, anti-Islamofascist sentiments. But it’s unlikely we’ll see much overt Bush-hugging soon. First, Sarkozy’s party must win the legislative elections in June and no matter how well-disposed he may be toward the U.S., Sarkozy’s not likely to make Americanism, pro- or anti-, an issue. If he does well in the June elections, there will be a few relatively minor street skirmishes in the summer. During this period, he will likely move to embrace more of the center and some of the members of the reasonable Left, Kourchner being a good example.
He’ll need them all as allies this fall when he will no doubt have to face off against the unions and the radical Left who will fight for the status quo until there are no paved streets in Paris. For a half century, the mob has exercised veto power in France, demanding bribes and rejecting economic and political reforms along with any hint of a friendly gesture toward Washington. If a year from now, Sarkozy’s gained some political traction and has actually initiated change where it is most needed — in taxation, pensions, education and employment — then he’ll have the luxury of discarding the one winning ticket every self-interested politician in France (read: all of them, at least until now) has relied upon most: Yank-bashing.