FUEL ISTHE PRIZE INTHE 21STCENTURYVERSION OFTHE GREAT GAME PAGE 8

Price:£3

JUNE2007

HOWTO REINVENTAND REINVIGORATETHE RIGHT

France: Sarkozy’s old familiar song

The end of an era A R PENCK –‘What the system becomes’ (1982) DR

Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruthless and dynamic pursuit of the French presidency has been fascinating. The undeniable political skill he showed throughout his campaign, the blend of determination, authority, personal charm, provocation, nationalism and liberalism, combined with brilliant speeches and a formidable understanding of how to communicate, enabled him to win outright, with massive support from the media and business sector. Another of his amazing aspects was the intellectual ease with which he redrew the dividing lines between right and left. Analysts had wondered whether the lines had shifted under the impact of neo-liberal globalisation. Sarkozy settled the matter. The composition of his first government proves that the right now includes a large section of the Socialist party, especially its social-liberal wing, and confirms what we have known for some time: social democracy is the new right. The executive includes four leftwing members, Bernard Kouchner, Eric Besson, Jean-Pierre Jouyet and Martin Hirsch, and reflects a general shift to the right in French society, a strange development at a time of growing social hardship. Twelve years on from 1995, social strife remains a serious problem, jobs are ever less secure, and subcontracting, relocation and unemployment take a toll. Gaullism is making way for Sarkozyism, a French populism that plans to capture the entire right, from Le Pen supporters to social liberals, plus the centre parties, winning them over with an illusion of movement and progressive, modern openness. The main sources of inspiration for this are the neoconservative Republican model in the United States (see ‘France: Sarkozy’s old familiar song’, opposite),

Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and José María Aznar in Spain, although the electorates in all these countries have recently rejected the experiments. The left’s latest failure is primarily intellectual. It has failed – through inertia, loss of contact with grass roots or incompetence – to produce a new political theory for the construction of a fairer France, when all the social structures were in a state of upheaval after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of globalisation. The left lost the battle of ideas. It lost the battle in government, with wage freezes, factory closures, job cuts, destruction of industrial areas and privatisation of part of the public sector. It lost the battle when it undertook a task that was against its nature: to adapt France to globalisation and modernise it for the benefit of capital at the expense of the workforce. That is why it lost the election. It is feeble for the left to blame the mass media, now the system’s principal ideological tool, for its crushing defeat. Economic and financial power naturally has pride of place in the new hierarchy of neo-liberal globalisation, followed by its paid mercenary, the media. Political power is controlled by these dominant powers. In the age of globalisation, political power in a democracy can be won only with their consent. Even the far left failed to take this obvious fact into account. Despite all its brave proposals, it presented a depressing picture of disunity and egotism. This defeat is decisive for the left. It marks the end of an era. The movement will have to be rebuilt on new foundations: a new socialism for the 21st century, as they say in Latin America. IGNACIO RAMONET TRANSLATED BY BARBARA WILSON

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Britain:will history judge Tony Blair as no more than a warmonger? page 4

The left in France searches in vain for electability and modernity page 5

Colombia’s elites are mired in the work of the death squads page 6

1967:the Six Day war was due to confusion,not conspiracy page 10

1967:did victory sow the seeds of Israel’s eventual downfall? page 12

Cause or effect –global terror and the rise of USimperialism page 13

Big pharma researchers profit from ThirdWorld poverty page 14

Europe’s rulers struggle to address climate change page 16

Nicolas Sarkozy won the presidential election with over a million more votes than his Socialist rival in an extraordinary turnout of 83.97%.He has persuaded centrists and Socialists to support his rightwing programme to change France’s political balance

BY SERGE HALIMI

The last president of France fell out of favour with his own party: his successor is a man of the right who has beaten a woman of the left. This cautionary tale may comfort Republican candidates in the United States who want to succeed President George Bush, especially if they expect to run against Democrat Hillary Clinton in November 2008. But it would be odd if the right in the US were to adopt the new French president’s political strategy; that would be taking a cue from its mirror reflection. Nicolas Sarkozy’s strategy was not a new and magic formula. On the contrary, he studied keenly all the political skills used in the US for the past 40 years. His themes have been national decline and moral decadence, intended to prepare voters for liberal shock treatment and a break with the past; he proposed action against leftist dogma, which he claimed had paralysed the economy and stifled public debate; he wanted to reinvent the right on the lines suggested by Antonio Gramsci, so that he can show off his multimillionaire friends, and their yachts. He has redefined the social question – it is no longer about the division between rich and poor or capital and labour, but an internecine feud between two sections of the proletariat, those who won’t work and those who will; he claims to speak for the “persecuted” silent majority and wants to mobilise them. Overall, he means to take an aggressive political stand against a ruling elite that has thrown in the towel. The US right has used these tactics since the presidency of Richard Nixon and needs to learn nothing from Sarkozy, who took up the most effective arguments of recent US Republican presidents, embellishing them with references to Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum and Guy Moquet. Decline is a favourite theme. It seems natural to call for order when your own house needs to be put in order. On 8 August 1968 Richard Nixon, the rightwing presidential candidate, began his speech accepting the Republican nomination by praising the silent majority weary of watching the US descend into chaos. Two eminent political figures, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, had just been assassinated and the Tet offensive by the Communists in Vietnam meant that the US had already lost that war. Nixon called on fellow Americans to listen to “a quiet voice in the tumult of shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of

Americans, the forgotten Americans, the nonshouters, the non-demonstrators. They are not racist or sick; they are not guilty of the crimes that plague the land.” Sarkozy has taken advantage of the almost unprecedentedly violent riots in the French banlieues in October and November 2005 to develop his “stormy times” theme. At CharlevilleMézières in the Ardennes on 18 December 2006, he praised the France that believes in merit and hard work, is inured to suffering, and goes unmentioned because it does not complain, stop trains or set fire to cars: the France that has had enough of others speaking for it. This spring he enjoined a crowd in Marseille to rise up and express the feelings of the silent majority. Sarkozy, like Nixon, Bush and Ronald Reagan, understood that a campaign cannot win support if it is only a litany of pious hopes and boring statements of intent. So he used fighting words. The US right also made capital out of Democratic rhetoric, which became insipid in the 1950s after it abandoned the social polarisation espoused by William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) and Franklin D Roosevelt. Harry Truman’s successors did not say “win, win” but that is what they thought. For them, an opponent was an enemy. The Democrats were so afraid of frightening people, of being seen as really leftwing, that they accused the Republicans of being populist and claimed for themselves the reassuring title of conservative. As the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, explained in October 1952: “The strange alchemy of the time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country – the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations. The Republicans, by contrast, are behaving like the radical party bent on dismantling institutions which have been built solidly into our social fabric.” i

Sarkozy, encouraged by the polarisation his propositions and provocative remarks always caused, remembered that his strategy worked equally well in reverse. “We are proud to be the party of movement,” he said in November 2005. “The Socialists are the conservatives now.” He went on to identify the real enemy as the 1960s.

Continued on page 2