The remarkable aspect of the recent French presidential election was how uncannily it shared similarities with the American presidential election of November 2004.
Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s newly elected president, won an impressive victory in a country that is now as sharply divided between the left and the right as the U.S. was divided in 2004.
Not unlike George Bush in 2004, Sarkozy was opposed in France’s mainstream media by the left-leaning Parisian literati and the intellectual class. And as the New York literati—the self-possessed intellectuals seemingly owning all the virtues they can imagine for display in the New York Times or the New Yorker magazine—rooted for John Kerry in 2004, the Parisian intellectuals cheered for the Socialist candidate, Segolene Royal.
Sarkozy is the French Fifth Republic’s sixth elected president. The Fifth Republic was founded in 1958 with Charles de Gaulle as its first president as a result of the Fourth Republic’s wreckage brought about by the Algerian crisis.
Sarkozy’s election is also a generational change in French politics. The generational divide in contemporary France is marked by the war it fought and lost to retain Algeria as an integral part of the republic. Algeria became independent in July 1962.
Sarkozy (born in January 1955) was a child when de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic, and he was barely a teenager when the student rebellion seized Paris in May 1968. France and Europe’s New Left politics of 1968 coincided with the anti-Vietnam War protests and Civil Rights movement in the United States.
Student activists of that era are today’s political leaders, mostly of the liberal-left persuasion, on both sides of the Atlantic. But Sarkozy’s election represents a majority in France turning away to some extent from the sort of ideology—a mish-mash of socialism, Third World solidarity, anti-American, pro-Arab and anti-Israeli—that shaped the politics of the youthful rebels of 1968.
Jacques Chirac, the retiring president of France, was nominally conservative as a leader of the Gaullist right.
But Chirac’s career as the mayor of Paris and then president represented the cynical manipulation of 1968’s sentiments in the cause of the ever-elusive France’s glory as the embodiment of a great civilization, even as he embraced Saddam Hussein while opposing the United States in the UN.
France is a society stalemated by its intellectual class whose pretensions outstrip its capacity to play the role on the world’s stage that crashed with Napoleon Bonaparte. It cannot acknowledge that when France came close more than once to be devoured by the totalitarian powers of the right and the left the country of Moliere and Voltaire was saved by American interventions.
The French economy glistens in a state of denial. France suffers from a high rate of unemployment, a near-permanent underclass of immigrant children seeking work, high taxes driving away the more enterprising citizens into exile (nearly 500,000 young French people reside in England), patronizing arms of the French state protecting its favourite public sector workers from the effects of global competition, and social unrest that has exploded in suburban violence in recent years.
Sarkozy might find that winning the presidential election was less demanding than turning France around to meet the realities of global economic competition joined by such players as China and India.
But Sarkozy is young, energetic and driven by a dose of realism, shared by a majority of French voters, and he might give France a taste of glory without indulging in the cynicism of its moribund intellectual elite.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
- Israel: Decades-old conflict not about to cease - Saturday November 24, 2012 at 1:56 pm
- The better man lost the U.S. election - Saturday November 10, 2012 at 9:16 am
- The puzzle in U.S. presidential elections - Saturday November 3, 2012 at 8:43 am
