Inkless Wells

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Sarkozy: It's French for "worn out"

by Paul Wells on Friday, February 27, 2009 7:08pm - 31 Comments

Off the record, ministers and advisors in Nicolas Sarkozy’s government tell Le Monde: He’s paralyzed, he’s worn out, we can’t execute all his plans, he’s contradictory, he’s a control freak who can’t control what a freak he is…well, I’ll let them tell it. As always, the Sarkozy government is fun in its own right, and perhaps instructive as a funhouse mirror of administrations closer to home. Fun excerpts:

The hyper-presidency has reached its limits. The method was supposed to allow quicker action, by having every reform led from Elysée Palace. Ater two years, the machine seems to have seized up.

The Elysée can’t manage to implement the 1,001 reforms announced amid great media pomp. There’s no follow-up. “Once a decision has been made we can’t follow reforms through. It’s humanly, administratively, impossible,” says a presidential advisor.

“We have to rebuild a government, a real one, and put a screen between the president and events,” urges a minister. “Nicolas Sarkozy must do what he doesn’t know how to do: work in a team and value his ministers,” says a second. “The question is to know whether he’s able to question himself after two years of power.” Says a third: “He has to allow ministers who are personalities and can, up to a point, have their own policies.”

The head of state, who blames his impopularity and his increased caution to the economic crisis alone, says nothing needs to change. “He is utterly serene,” says a counsellor.

But to listen to the president, no personality of sufficient counterweight is available outside the government. Jean-Pierre Raffarin? He doesn’t get along with the president. [Wells here: that's new. Raffarin wrote a book in 2007 about why France needed Sarkozy as president.] Alain Juppé? He’s an “old fellow,” they say.

As I said, funhouse mirror. (There’s a lot more Elysée scuttlebutt in Arnaud Leparmentier’s fascinating article, but I’ll leave it to fellow Sarkologists to read the rest of his piece in peace.) The parallels to the Harper government are obvious, the differences in style obvious too, but I must say that when I read David Brooks’ thoughtful column the other day about Obama and his team (“I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well”) I thought of Sarkozy. Not that the two experiments in hyper-activist government must end the same way, but that they could.

Tags: Barack Obama, David Brooks, Nicolas Sarkozy

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Dot

Inertia.

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seasickness

Angela K

Hm, sounds like another leader I know, by the name of Stephen Harper..
“worn out”, yep, he should retire and go on the lecture circuit!

Another Canuck

To me he sounds more like Obama, promising the moon and the stars, without the vaguest suggestion of how this is all miraculously going to happen. Let’s see how our southern neighbours’ leap of faith turns out.

http://macleans.ca kc

I know, Obama really must stop giving those dreary speeches!
Angela K

At least they have faith! I’d rather have a bit of that than a leader who looks more like my banker or my accountant. I see absolutely no vision with Harper.
And honestly, 50 years from now, who will be remembered by history, Harper or Obama?

Sisyphus

It isn’t only his countrymen who are exasperated with him. He’s been alienating most of Europe as well.

Britain , Germany, the Czech Republic all wish he would just go away.

Critical Reasoning

Not to mention the Parti Québécois.

http://carnewsandviews.com jwl

I am fascinated by Sarkozy, he’s a delightfully stereotypical Frenchman.

Anyways, I was not certain why you thought Sarkozy admin was like Harper’s until I google translated – thank you google, that’s a very useful program – and I assume the Harper comparison is due to no-name ministers who don’t have power and are reliant on leader while advisors have too much influence.

When I was reading the translated section you provide I think I had similar reaction as you did, Paul. I, too, read that Brooks column and thought how Sarkozy and Obama were similar in having dozens of priorities and the hubris to think they can solve their country’s problems from their desk. I am sure there are lots of examples when a leader has multiple priorities but PM Martin is the most recent one I can recall and his admin illustrates what happens when everything is a priority. Nothing becomes a priority because you can only have a couple/few or else you lose track of what you are supposed to be doing.

My favourite part of Brooks column was: “They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.” Spot on David!

archangel

“Les conseillers sont infiniment plus importants que les ministres”, poursuit M. Copé.

Counselors like Carla Bruni Sarkozy?
CAPS

So essentially jwl, you are asking, “So, you think it’s easy to make priorities?”

Let us not forget that that quotation in context was not saying that it was impossible to make priorities. It was saying that not everything could be done at once and that if there were a couple of major files that the government was moving forward on (let’s say national unity and defeating the deficit to pick two) then other things would have to wait or not move as fast as hoped for. This was also said to explain how governing worked to someone who had never been in government or politics.

There is also a difference to having a couple of major files that are moved forward and add to the good of society versus naming a couple of piddly little priorities and checking them off with little or no discernable benefit to the populace.

sf

From Brooks column…
If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.

I would have to say that they have already failed twice (call it the 1930s and then once again the 1970s) in America, and similar failures elsewhere have shown that government interventionism in the economy is always a failure. And that we should not be revisiting the same failures today, but we are anyway.

I think it is unfortunate that Obama wishes to foment a long period of economic decline, this may harm the lives of many.

Derek Pearce

The 1930′s were a failure for conservative policies, sf. You’re right about the 70s though. And the current blowout is rooted in mistakes on both sides of the spectrum. So it’s a tie!

I would also find it unfortunate if Obama “wished to foment a long period of economic decline harming the lives of many,” but, uh, this isn’t what he wishes. He may make mistakes and he may in fact do more harm than good, but don’t pretend that he WISHES to do harm. Sheesh.

sf

Fair enough. “wishes” was not the perfect word. Not sure what the right word is though.

Whether he in fact believes that the outcome will be different than what I believe, he is certainly intentionally doing what he is doing, which is expanding government intervention and massively expanding the government deficit. The money must come from somewhere, and in fact I think the chickens will come home to roost in a few years.

Well, I do believe that the current problem was not caused by the Dems, or even the Repubs, in fact I think it will be some time before there is a total understanding of what has actually occurred. But I do not think that the current course of action can do anything but exacerbate the problem.

I do think the 70s are a good analogy. The 70s was a time when there was a largely incorrect understanding of the economy, and this understanding was held by the majority. The misunderstanding was that it was impossible to lower unemployment without also increasing inflation. The result of this failure to properly understand the situation was a decade of stagflation, because the government attempted to intervene based on flawed understanding of reality. During that time, the government attempted price controls and all sorts of other crazy interventions that all served to make the problem worse. Carter went on TV to say the nation was screwed. Reagan beat him in the election and proved him dead wrong.

I really don’t think the current politicians, economists, or the rest have the slightest idea what is going on and how to handle it. At first they all claimed there was no problem at all. Then they all claimed it was a crisis of liquidity. Now we hear all kinds of other crazy theories. They are all grasping at straws. But certainly, Obama and his team see it as an opportunity to do what they had intended all along, regardless of the circumstances.
sf

Oh, I misread you, you think the 30s was a bad analogy, a time when a stock market crash in 1929 was somehow extended into a decade long recession by the failures of the New Deal and increased protectionism. I see.

Derek Pearce

Well, economists and historians disagree on whether the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression or not, but increased protectionism certainly does damage trade and thus economic growth. And yes, I agree most ecomists and politicians currently seem to have not much of a clue as to how to handle this crisis. They seem to think “well we haven’t tried Keynes in a while so let’s give it a shot and see if it helps.” And yes, Obama & team are using the current crisis and stimulus plan as a cover to make changes they intended all along anyway (and to make these changes faster and deeper than would have been possible without the crisis.)

Dot

kody, is your new contract part of the $3 billion package?
Critical Reasoning

Try to imagine William Shatner reading Kody’s lines, and you’ll realize that Jack was right about Kody being a masterful artist and a student of Dadaism.
Critical Reasoning

“Je, et non toi, parle français.”

It’s “et pas vous”, not “et non toi”, and you’d never catch a French-speaking person arranging those six words in that order. Still, you get an “A” for effort!
Dot

hmmm. Your avatar blushes.
Bamboo

Critical reasoning,

I don’t know who you are, or what your background in French is. But I know who I am and what my background in French is. I would stroungly recommend that you read “à voix haute” the sentence (several times if you have to) : ” je, et pas vous, parle français” to realize that this is not proper French.
archangel

Yeah, unfortunately his Dada is a thing of the past. He mourns.
archangel

Ever wonder how to make those arrows connect the Dots?
Dot

not as much as I should, apparently. But then again, I guess that’s not stereotypical.
archangel

No, seriously Dot. Is there a way to filter these comments to sort by commenter?

Signed

Unintentional Luddite
Critical Reasoning

The use of “vous” would be ridiculous on a blog where the tone is familiar and when the blogger normally addresses his respondents with their first names or pseudonyms, not “Mr or Mrs/Miss/Ms.”

Vous plural, not vous singular, you dolt!

but I was trying to evoke the image of Paul Wells at a Francophonie summit and the badge he’d be wearing

I call Bullshit!!!
Critical Reasoning

Ta yeule.

Ta gueule. Why do I even bother…
Dot

zzzzzz, or zzzzz-ed, or rather should I say zzzzz-ee?
Critical Reasoning

Google is not a substitute for actually knowing French.
Critical Reasoning

I must have forgotten the quotation marks around the url.
Critical Reasoning

Bamboo, the parent post to my comment was deleted. I was refuting another guy who was claiming that the sentence was good. My version of the sentence would be: “Je parle français, et pas vous.”