Reality government

Sarkozy kept his word. On the November weekend after the Constitutional Council, the final arbiter of all new laws, approved the text voted by parliament, France had a new, slimmed-down government. End of story.

Except that the story had taken months, with the candidates for the Prime Minister’s job posturing and pouting and the incumbent François Fillon looking more and more like a man eager for a rest in the wilderness. Former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, Sarkozy’s bitter rival on the Right, said the process undermined serving ministers. Senior civil servants no longer took seriously those who were rumoured to be on their way out, Villepin whined. François Hollande, a former Socialist Party chief, likened the process to government by reality TV. It was as if the candidates for the PM’s post had been locked in a room all summer, eliminated one by one until only the winner remained.

In the final weekend, a breathless Sarkozy left the Group of 20 leading economic powers summit in Seoul, foregoing a closing dinner with Barack Obama and other world leaders, and rushed back to Paris to put the finishing touches to his new team. But the new team was not very new. Fillon was still prime minister. The usually discreet Fillon had emerged a couple of weeks earlier with a speech defending his record and stressing the need to continue as before.
The fat-cut to arrive at the new slimmed-down government, which went from 37 ministers to 30, came mainly from the left-wingers recruited by Sarkozy in his policy of ouverture, or “opening.” Chief among those who packed their bags was Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. For the first time since the unashamedly right-wing Sarkozy was elected in May 2007, France has an unashamedly right-wing cabinet. Its task now is to lead France up to the next presidential and parliamentary elections in the spring of 2012.

Keeping Fillon removed a subtle threat to Sarkozy’s re-election. With Sarkozy free-falling in opinion polls, one survey in the week before Fillon was reconfirmed as Prime Minister showed that Fillon would beat Socialist Party chief Martine Aubry in the 2012 presidential election, whereas Sarkozy would lose. Keeping Fillon as Prime Minister makes it harder for Fillon to mount his own presidential bid.

Commentators were unanimous in the view that Fillon had emerged as a new strongman who would no longer play second fiddle to the over-active Sarkozy, who has picked up nicknames such as hyperprésident or omniprésident. In a television interview two days after the reshuffle, however, Sarkozy portrayed himself as a man willing to take unpopular decisions to lead France out of crisis. He showed no sign of wanting to share the limelight.