Sarkozy's efforts overseas haven't washed at home

PARIS LETTER:With nine months to go before the presidential election, the president has some work to do

THE IDEA that power boils down to a perpetual struggle between two people – one the figurehead with his name on the office door, the other an éminence grise wielding influence behind the scenes – has spawned some of the oldest parlour games in politics. Kremlinologists puzzle over whether Dmitry Medvedev or Vladimir Putin really pulls the strings in Moscow. American liberals whiled away a few years chewing over the division of labour between George Bush and Dick Cheney. Lady Macbeth and Rasputin long ago gave her names to some of the most tired clichés in the book.

The French find the notion as seductive as everyone else. At various points in Nicolas Sarkozys presidency, journalists have homed in on a senior minister or adviser and designated him the closest France has to a vice-president. Prime minister François Fillon's popularity so far outstripped Sarkozys last year that the magazine Le Pointeven ran the cover headline "Fillon, Président". But senior ministers and aides asserting themselves doesn't quite explain why the French public could be forgiven for wondering if they are being led by two quite different leaders.

On the one hand, they see the dynamic, persuasive and passionate president who revels on the global stage, asserting French diplomacy and earning praise for his leadership and courage. Since this is a man who doesn’t have much of a poker face, it’s clear that he relishes his job, convening summits and last-minute meetings at every turn to cajole world leaders around to his views, and so enjoying his press conferences that he stays until every last question is answered.

On the other hand is the beleaguered, defensive and irritable figurehead of the dominant party in French politics – a president languishing far below his rivals in the polls, his government lurching from one scandal to another, even his own deputies sniping from the sidelines about his decisions. He rarely gives domestic press conferences, and has recently taken a back seat to his senior ministers in public.

The past fortnight has neatly underlined the Sarkozy paradox. No sooner had the Libyan rebels reached Tripoli than he had summoned world leaders to the Élysée Palace for talks on Libya’s future. Although careful to avoid signs of triumphalism, Sarkozy basked in the apparent vindication of his push for foreign intervention. At the start of the year, his government was ridiculed for its clumsy response to the Tunisian revolution. Now the conflict that ousted Muammar Gadafy was being called “Sarkozy’s war”, with an unlikely coalition that included US neo-conservatives and French socialists lining up to pay him tribute. In a reflective annual address to foreign diplomats in Paris a few days later, he talked of a “renaissance of the Mediterranean” and said the Arab Spring had led to a deep shift in French foreign policy that promised to “reconcile our values and reality” for the first time.

If the transition in Libya goes smoothly, it will fit into a pattern. Most of Sarkozy’s major successes have come abroad. He earned domestic credit for his role in ending the Georgian war in 2008, and again this year for sending French troops into action in Ivory Coast to end a potential resumption of civil war. As president of the G8 and G20 this year, Sarkozy has seized the opportunity to project French power, while some deft diplomacy after the fall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn enabled Paris to quickly install Christine Lagarde as head of the IMF.

The euro zone crisis may have revealed just how much the relative strength of Germany’s economy has led to a shift in the power balance from Paris to Berlin, but Sarkozy has still managed to impose himself, largely by pressing – successfully – for closer co-operation among the 17 euro zone leaders, a forum in which France exerts more influence than at meetings of all 27 EU states.

And yet for all this, Sarkozys efforts overseas have done little to lift his position at home, where his government has been mired in difficulty for much of the past year. Within days of the Libya summit, interior minister Claude Guéant admitted that the secret service had spied on a Le Mondejournalist to trace the source of an embarrassing story about the Bettencourt party-funding scandal, bringing that controversy ever closer to the Élysée. A relatively modest austerity package aimed at generating an extra €1 billion this week turned into a shambles when opposition to many of the measures from within the ruling UMP party led to hasty revisions. Meanwhile, Sarkozys approval ratings remain static at about 30 per cent, and with unemployment high and growth projections being revised downwards, surveys show that even on what has always been his biggest strength – credibility on the economy – he is now trailing both frontrunners for the socialist nomination, François Hollande and Martine Aubry.

With nine months to go before the presidential election, Sarkozy is very far from beaten. But he could do with his globetrotting alter ego’s touch rubbing off at home.