Sarkozy Is Trashing de Gaulle's Legacy

Charles de Gaulle must be turning in his grave.

The brave general risked all as the Nazis swept Europe and millions of French fell in behind the collaborationist Philippe Petain.

Out of the ashes of World War II and the shame of fascism a la Francaise, de Gaulle forged an alliance with the left-wing resistance to create a new republic, and a Centre-Right party formed in his own image.

Opposed to all that Vichy France represented, in favour of decolonisation and an independent foreign policy, this giant of the 20th century never accepted compromises or deals with the forces of extremism. Today, the heir to the political movement founded by de Gaulle, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has trashed the heritage of its founder.

By pandering relentlessly to the fear and racism of the far-Right National Front, reborn under the bleue-Marine wave of Jean-Marie Le Pen's daughter, Sarkozy has destroyed his political party's raison d'etre and, in all likelihood, his own chances of re-election.

For the first time in French history, polls show the National Front candidate for the presidency leading; Marine Le Pen has attracted a record 23 per cent of the vote, according to a series of surveys commissioned by Le Parisien newspaper.

Harris Interactive surveys, examining various candidate scenarios, reveal that even with the IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn as Socialist candidate, Sarkozy at 21 per cent of the vote would be eliminated in the first round of the presidential election in just over one year. DSK, as he is known, does not do much better on 23 per cent, but would at least make it to the second round.

April next year could possibly see an alternative Centre-Right candidate where the President is pushed out by his own party if he continues to slump in the polls.

Sarkozy has changed the culture and landscape of French and European politics for the worse, by slavishly following the agenda set by the extreme Right, instead of doing his job as head of state and defining the debate.

In 2007, even cynics were hopeful that Sarkozy's campaign flirtation with the National Front would fade away. After all, Sarkozy had seemingly neutralised Jean-Marie Le Pen as a force in French politics, with the warhorse registering his lowest single-digit scores since the party's founding in 1972. Instead of capitalising on this annexation of the extreme Right's base, by offering it economic and social reforms that allayed anxieties about immigration and Islam, Sarkozy has taken the easy option: engineered panic. First, there was the 2009-10 "great national debate" on French identity, swiftly hijacked by racists. Then, Sarkozy jumped on the burka-banning bandwagon.

Last northern summer saw the widely condemned expulsion of tens of thousands of Roma, or Gypsies. Among more recent desperate attempts to play catch up with Madame Le Pen, Sarkozy is orchestrating national debates on a French Islam as opposed to an Islam in France.

Humiliated by the sidelining of France during the Arab Spring, amid a series of embarrassments to French diplomacy occasioned by the disgraceful holidays of ministers, courtesy of North African dictators, Sarkozy's administration can only grasp at images of hordes of African refugees on France's doorstep.

Bereft of his own ideas, the President openly mimics Marine Le Pen's obsession with banning Muslim street prayers.

As sociologist Sylvain Crepon, author of the book The New Extreme Right, says, the once impermeable frontier between the French republican Right and the fascist Right of Petain and his acolytes in the Le Pen clan has collapsed. In Crepon's analysis Marine Le Pen cloaks her racism in the mantle of republican values and plays up anti-Islam sentiment more than the traditional anti-Semitism of her father.

"Marine Le Pen has succeeded her father but she is not at all his ideological heir. There is a generational rupture . . . the National Front of Vichy, of the (denial of) the Holocaust, the collaboration and French Algeria.

"With Marine Le Pen, it is not any more about anti-immigrant xenophobia, (being) anti-Arab, anti-black, but it is xenophobia in defence of liberal values, in the moral and not economic sense.

"It is, however, paradoxical: she purports to be defending secularism, women's rights and even those of gays at the same time as declaring that Islam represents a danger. The National Front is polishing its image and retaining its old foundation of extreme radicalism. For these two reasons it is dangerous for the (mainstream) Right."