Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and ...

Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and Napoleon III
consensual take over of the UMP conveyed the image of a unified party that mobilized all of its
political levearages in supporting its candidate. Nowadays, and despite a severe blow inflicted
to the Right wing during the last mi-mandate regional elections of March 2010 that revealed a
historically low score for the Right under the Fifth Republic regime (of only 35,38 % while the
Leftist list scored a confortable 53,47 % of the total of expressed votes 3 ), the Leftist undertaking
of the 2012’s presidential race do not seem to be facilitated by this electoral achievement.
Two reasons explain such an assessment. First, this electoral result is rather a plebiscitarian
disapproval of Sarkozy himself (and of his politics by extenso), as shown by his current
extremely low confidence ratings, than a real return of the Left to the headlines. As matter of
fact, the French are accustomed to and proponents of the sanction vote technique: they
showed it by the past during their “No” to the European Constitution in 2005 that was more a
clear political disavowal of Chirac’s than the simple formulation of their disapproval vis a vis the
EU. Accordingly, it is legitimate to be questioning and unconvinced about a real break through
of the PS in the French political life. Second, and as if the lessons to be learned from the past
were not accuratly digested by the Socialists, the way they are preparing their party’s
“primaires” for the 2012’s presidential candidacy are a reproduction of their 2007’s
miscalculation. As a matter of fact, the up-to-date developments backed up by several recent
opinion polls, showed that only one Leftist pretendant is able to face up a 2012’s Sarkozy
presidency: namely Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the current head of the International Monetary
Fund. Here, and after an initial good move toward a Royal-Aubry-Lang Pact supporting a DSK’s
candidacy, internal splittings and scissions appeared, embodied the late week of November in a
3 Official statistics of the French ministry of the Interior, retrieved from :
http://www.interieur.gouv.fr/sections/a_votre_service/resultats-elections/RG2010/FE.html
A website dedicated to this project is available starting Dec 7 th 2010 at: http://www.aui.ma/personal/~Y.Assaoui/
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