FRANCE: BAD NEWS FOR THE LEFT (Updated)

A new poll has very bad news for the French left: a huge chunk of left voters are being  seduced by Nicolas Sarkozy (right), the hard-line, demagogic, law-and-order ultra-free market right-winger who is the ruling conservative UMP party's candidate for president in the elections which begin with a first round of voting on April 22.

On Monday, Sarkozy -- a telegenic media manipulator --- appeared on the top-rated TV network TF1's prime-time political show "J''ai une question a vous poser" ("I have a question to ask you"), in which 100 French selected by a pollster to be demographically and politically representative of the French electorate were invited to ask the candidate questions. And a poll commissioned by the daily Le Figaro and LCI radio from the firm Opinion Way, and released on Friday, showed that a whopping 60% of voters who identified themselves as "left" and who saw the broadcast found Sarkozy "convincing." (Above Left, Sarkozy's puppet character, which portrays him as the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, on the popular Canal+ satirical TV show "Les Guignols de l'Info." The balloon has him saying, "Too much liberty kills liberty".)

On the broadcast, which drew an all-time audience record for a TV political show of 8.2  million, Sarkozy -- supposedly the most hated man for the left -- was even found "sympathetic" by 35% of left voters, despite sharp  clashes between Sarkozy and audience members over gays ("Sarko," as he is called, re-iterated his opposition to gay marriage and adoptions by gay couples, policies with which there's a lot of discomfort among the working classes) and immigration (Sarko, as Interior Minister, has stepped up deportations of immigrants -- including of children attending French schools, speaking French perfectly, and doing well scholastically -- and is campaigning on a nationalist slogan stolen from neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen: "La France, on l'aime ou on la quitte" ("France -- Love it or Leave It.") 

Worse, 40% of left voters polled agreed with Sarko on gay marriage (even though most polls show a majority of the French favor it), and 35% of left voters agreed with him on immigrants and his "France -- Love It or Leave It" slogan. That last number undoubtedly reflects the residual electoral effects of the country-wide French ghetto riots of October-November 2005, which dramatically heightened the mood of anti-immigrant domestic security hysteria that has gripped France for years and motored the racist rise of Le Pen -- a hysteria which Sarkozy is so skilled at inflaming and exploiting (in part by borrowing Le Pen's ideas.)

More bad news for Segolene Royal, the Socialist Party's programatically vapid nominee, whose unfocused campaign of bland generalities has been in decline for weeks: a separate poll  taken for the Paris daily Metro (a very successful free newspaper geared to younger readers) showed that Segolene has lost 10 points of support among younger voters since January -- and, in fact, also shows Sarkozy beating her among younger voters by six points. If the establishment left's candidate is losing the youth to the right, and a chunk of her left base is slipping away, what hope does she have?

And the latest poll for the France 2 public TV network also shows Sarkozy beating Segolene in the run-off second round of presidential voting by 6 points.

For those left voters looking for a solidly left-wing alternative to the centrist, Tony Blair-loving Socialist Party candidate Segolene, there was also bad news: a French court last week sentenced Jose Bové-- the anti-globalization and environmental leader who announced his presidential candidacy last week as the representative of the "left of the left" -- was sentenced to four months in jail for another one of his highly-publicized (and popular) acts of civil disobedience, in the occurence the destruction of a genetically-modified crop. (See my post from February 1, "Jose Bové Complicates the Contest," for an analysis of the presidential race thus far and Bové's impact on it.) This means that Bové (above left, in handcuffs) will be unable to campaign in person across France, and will have to content himself with issuing occasional written statements from his jail cell instead of declaiming before the TV cameras, which has been the source of his widespread popularity up until now. At present it's hard to see how this "left of the left" campaign, which was only just getting off the ground, can have much impact in the first round of voting deprived of its media-savvy candidate on the stump.

If you want an intelligent perspective on the campaign, the best-selling libertarian  philosopher Michel Onfray (right) -- who's been the most important intellectual figure ardently advocating a "left of the left" alternative to Segolene -- has been invited to write a "presidential blog" for France's largest weekly newsmagazine, the tepidly-left Nouvel Observateur. Onfray's blog debuted day before yesterday with a declaration of principles -- and he followed it up today with a definition of the "Deleuzian politics" that have led him to back Bové, the candidate who is "a reader of Ellul, of Illich, of Thoreau, and of Bakunin." Unfortunately for Onfray, his candidate will now have a lot of unexpected reading time while he's off the campaign trail and behind bars.

And a specter is haunting France -- the specter of Sarkozy...Stay tuned.

UPDATE, FEBRUARY 10 -- The Paris daily Le Figaro reports today on a new poll taken by IFOP, one of the more reliable French polling institutes, showing that the working-class vote is split right down the middle: hard-right Nicolas Sarkozy gets 31% of the laborious electorat, the same as the Socialists' Segolene Royal. Moreover, says the polls deputy director, "a third of the workers who voted for Le Pen in 2002 say  they'll vote for Sarkozy this time," which suggests that Sarko's blatant borrowing from neo-fascist Le Pen's arsenal of demagogy has paid off. And the latest BVA-Orange poll (whose accuracy I sometimes find debateable), echoing other polls this time, has Sarko beating Segolene in a run-off 52 to 48% (and its a sign of her weakness that, in the unlikely event the run-off would feature Segolene against the centrist UDF party's candidate, Francois Bayrou (right), he too would come out on top, by the same margin.

In the hunt for the 500 signatures from France's 35,000 mayors needed for presidential candidates to achieve a place on the April ballot, the Trotskyist LCR's young postman, Olivier Besancenot (left), is still short, with only 428 mayors signing on to let voters cast their ballots for him (Besancenot, who got 4.5% of the presidential vote in 2002, hasn't progressed much in signature-gathering the last ten days.) And Jose Bové has a long way to go, with just 200 signatures. By contrast, the ultra-sectarian Trotskyist Lutte Ouvriere's perennial candidate, Arlette Laguiller (right, who attracted a lot of protest votes from the Socialists' disaffected electorate in 2002 to get 5.2% of the presidential vote) has already qualified for a place on the ballot, with 510 signatures. The austere Laguiller --France's first female presidential candidate back in 1974 -- has been around so long that, despite the secretive style and indigestible authoritarian accents of her ultra-Leninist party's politics, she attracts affectionate indulgence from some surprising quarters: last time out she could boast the support of Genevieve de Fontenay (left), a TV fixture on the chat-show circuit who is the elegantly-costumed head of the Miss France pageant! And Laguiller's presence on the ballot will give working-class leftists sick of Socialist Segolene's centrist economics a place to cast a protest vote. In the last week, Segolene Royal -- no doubt in response to the polls showing her slipping among the working classes -- has exchanged her trademark, elegantly-tailored white suit for a more proletarian black leather jacket. But it will take more than a costume change to convince the cynical toiling part of the left electorate that she represents a solid, pro-labor alternative to the right (particularly with Sarkozy seizing every chance for a photo op in a factory in dialogue with workers -- which, together with his thinly-veiled anti-immigrant racism, helps explain his progression in the polls among them.)