by David A. Bell

With the large lead taken by his UMP party in the first round of French parliamentary elections last Sunday, Nicolas Sarkozy continues his almost flawless political season. He ran a superb presidential campaign this spring, tacking far enough to the right with his talk of "national identity" and France's "Christian roots" to marginalize the far-right National Front, while also sounding enough notes about inclusion, diversity and compassion to keep a critical mass of centrists in his camp. Since his election in early May, he has held to the strategy, keeping his promise to name a "parity" cabinet that is half female, and impressing commentators with his choices: especially maverick socialist Bernard Kouchner as Foreign Minister, and Rachida Dati, the charismatic daughter of North African immigrants, as Justice Minister. He has also been helped by the Socialist opposition's remarkable talent for self-destruction (just this week, the party formally rejected standard-bearer Ségolène Royal's call for an alliance with the centrist Mouvement Démocratique, known as the "MoDem"). Of course, most political honeymoons are preludes to later tears, and even with the massive political capital Sarkozy has now accumulated, he still has mammoth obstacles ahead of him if he wants to push through radical reforms. In the past two years, France has seen the defeat of the European Constitution, large-scale suburban riots, and widespread student protesting that led to the failure of proposed youth labor reforms--signs, to many observers, of dangerous social tensions, and a stubborn refusal to surrender entrenched privileges. Add to this the fact that many of the French are actually content with their economic lot (recent growth has been quite respectable, despite the impression given by the English-language media), and it will be all the harder for Sarkozy to introduce real changes. Nor do the most economically vulnerable parts of the population (young people, old people, immigrant communities) trust him to keep their interests in mind. It is unlikely that real confrontation will erupt before the long summer vacations. But what the French call a "rentrée chaude"--a "hot autumn" of protests and strikes--is a real possiblility, and if so, Sarkozy's political skills will be put to a harsh test indeed. But for the moment, Sarkozy has emerged as the most successful French politician since François Mitterrand in 1981, and it's worth pausing a moment to ask why. One reason, I think, has to do with his political style. Under the Fifth Republic, most French presidents and presidential candidates have affected a regal, bombastic style of public presentation. At first glance, it seems very much at odds with the famous egalitarianism of French democracy, but it is important to remember that French political culture does not see a contradiction between egalitarianism and elitism. Since the days of the Jacobins, with their cold, high ideals of virtue and sacrifice, French egalitarianism has tended to strive towards lifting up all citizens to a common high level of culture and civism. And the dominant style has remained, in an important sense, classical: the bombast of the Roman rostrum, as refracted through a school system long grounded in the classics. The Socialist François Mitterrand affected this style quite as much as figures like Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, Gaullists trained at the ultra-elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA). It is a style of grandeur, suited for summoning the citizenry to great national tasks or ideological struggles. Small wonder that its greatest modern master was that prophet of French grandeur, Charles de Gaulle himself. But it is also a style ill-suited to the more pedestrian, middle-class concerns of modern French voters: jobs, social security, crime, education. François Mitterrand often seemed to ignore these concerns--and indeed modern, middle-class France itself--almost entirely, as he shuttled back and forth between central Paris and his idyllic country retreat in the southwest, oblivious to the middle-class neighborhoods in between. It is one reason why, after his electoral triumphs of 1981, he ended up accomplishing relatively little in office. Nicolas Sarkozy has never been a politician in this mold. He comes, like an increasing number of French people, from a middle-class, immigrant background. He was not educated at the ENA. His oratorical style is cogent and articulate, and sometimes quite eloquent, but not bombastic. He does not summon from on high, but tries to address his audience at their own level. For this reason, he has often been tarred with the label "populist"--a grievous insult in French politics (in France, egalitarianism definitely does not imply populism). But he also seems much more capable than the swank, aristocratic de Villepin of connecting with ordinary French voters. And if the first-round trends are born out in the final round of voting for the legislature this Sunday, the connection will have earned Sarkozy an electoral sweep dwarfing even Mitterrand's. The question is still whether this connection will stand the heat of a rentrée chaude. And for a cautionary tale about a fresh young leader who had a superb connection with the voters and scored remarkable electoral successes, Nicolas Sarkozy need only look across the English Channel.