Eyeing Return, Ex-President in France Has Hurdles

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/world/europe/eyeing-return-nicolas-sarkozy-has-hurdles.html

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PARIS — Barely a day after winning an internal battle last month to lead France’s main conservative party, the first step in his drive for re-election, Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president, made a significant announcement on television: He would create a council of former prime ministers to advise him.

Three out of the five former prime ministers from the party promptly refused. One of them, Alain Juppé, who has his own political aspirations, dismissed the offer by saying he was not interested in sitting on a “mothball committee.”

The embarrassing result was just one of the signs that Mr. Sarkozy’s political comeback faces considerable challenges. His first week in his new post seemed to prove only that he had determined rivals within his Union for a Popular Movement Party and that he was by no means assured of emerging as its presidential candidate in 2017.

François Heisbourg, an analyst at the Foundation for Strategic Research, said Mr. Sarkozy had gotten a great deal of media attention for his proposal, but ended up looking a little foolish.

“He had all the advantages,” he said, “and yet what people saw was that he was being snubbed.”

That was not Mr. Sarkozy’s only miscalculation. He announced that he would go to Germany to attend the party congress of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. But it seems Ms. Merkel could not find time to meet him, and the trip was canceled.

Mr. Sarkozy sought the party leadership because it puts the party machinery at his disposal and offers a platform for his ideas and perhaps a modicum of protection from the many corruption inquiries swirling around him.

But though he won the post, he did not get the kind of support that might silence his rivals within the party. When Mr. Sarkozy ran for the party presidency in 2004, he won 85 percent of the vote. This time he got barely 65 percent, with about 40 percent of members abstaining. More galling, some say, is that a much less well-known opponent, Bruno Le Maire, got almost 30 percent.

The impact of the internal division was almost immediately visible this week. Mr. Le Maire was able to quickly suggest that one of his own inner circle be appointed to head a committee preparing the party’s all-important primaries in 2016. Mr. Sarkozy, analysts say, was forced to agree.

Mr. Sarkozy, whose shift to the right on issues like same-sex marriage has kept him popular with the party’s rank and file, would benefit from a closed primary in which only party members can vote.

His rivals, particularly Mr. Juppé, would benefit from a more open format that would include voters who do not have official affiliation with the party, but consider themselves center-right.

Mr. Juppé regularly beats Mr. Sarkozy in countrywide popularity polls.

Although it will be two years before the campaign gets into full swing, the extreme unpopularity of President François Hollande, who has failed to curb high unemployment, seems to have generated an early focus on the elections. Polls at this stage suggest that Mr. Hollande’s Socialist Party might not even survive a first round of voting, leaving France to choose in a second round between Mr. Sarkozy’s center-right party and the far-right National Front, led by Marine Le Pen.

Mr. Sarkozy is still a savvy strategist. He spent last week ostensibly trying to mend fences and unite warring factions, as he promised to do in recent months of campaigning in the hinterlands for the Union for a Popular Movement Party presidency.

But many analysts said that Mr. Sarkozy was also making strategic efforts to sideline his rivals. The proposed council, for instance, might be seen as unifying, but was characterized in the news media here as a carefully laid trap by Mr. Sarkozy; it would have clearly labeled his two most prominent rivals, both former prime ministers, as has-beens.

“He tried to make them look old,” said Thomas Guénolé, a political analyst who wrote a book on the possibility of a Sarkozy comeback, “but they did not fall for it. They said no.”

Mr. Guénolé said Mr. Sarkozy was now finding out that people could and would say no to him.

“People are talking a lot,” he said, “but not in a good way.”

In the end, Mr. Sarkozy shrugged off the refusals, graciously met with his rivals, walking them to the door in full view of the TV cameras, and then downgraded the council to occasional meetings when needed.

Some analysts said he managed to look very much like a man in charge.

Jérôme Jaffré, a former pollster and a political analyst at the Cevipof, a political science research institute, said Mr. Sarkozy seemed in better form last week than he did campaigning among the party faithful. Mr. Jaffré said Mr. Sarkozy had easily brushed off the failure of the council idea and looked presidential as his party’s bigwigs arrived to meet with him. “I think he has done brilliantly since he retook the reins,” he said.

More quietly, Mr. Sarkozy sent a check to the party to reimburse it for the fine of about $500,000 it had paid on his behalf because of overspending by his campaign during his 2012 re-election bid.

Some in his party called the move a graceful gesture. But others sneered, wondering why he was paying if the party had been right to pick up the tab in the first place, as he has maintained.

Mr. Sarkozy is embroiled in a half-dozen investigations, which he often characterizes as witch hunts and political vendettas.

But the fine has always stood out as problematic, if only because it is the easiest to understand. The party paid it for him even though the electoral code clearly states it is the candidate’s personal debt.

The reimbursement will not end an official investigation, though it may make any official ruling against him look like piling on. And it will stop one of Mr. Sarkozy’s rivals, his own former prime minister, François Fillon, from bringing it up again.

Mr. Sarkozy had vowed to leave politics when he lost the 2012 election, but it was clear almost immediately that he was waiting only for the opportunity to return. He now finds himself in a crowded field, however.

Gilles Boyer, a communications consultant and Mr. Juppé’s right-hand man, said Mr. Sarkozy would have to realize that he cannot lead the party alone.