FRANCE:The French president's Toulon speech owes much of its clout to Henri Guaino, writes Lara Marlowein Paris
HE HAS been called Nicolas Sarkozy's guru, Sarkozy's brain, Sarkozy's shadow. Le Monde newspaper refers to Henri Guaino as the "omnipresent adviser to the hyper-president" and the president's "sole, indispensable wordsmith".
"Ridiculous," says Guaino. "Do I look like a guru?" To his official title of "special adviser to the president of the republic," he adds only the words "friend" and "writer".
Guaino spent four sleepless nights crafting Sarkozy's recent landmark speech about the need to "refound capitalism". There was something "vielle france" (old-fashioned) about the way he dashed off the handwritten pages, handing them to his companion so she could type them up while their infant son slept nearby.
The Toulon speech "will go down in history," predicts one of Guaino's colleagues at the Élysée Palace, where Guaino occupies the salon Murat, adjacent to the president's office. The text confirmed Guaino's role as the verbal architect of what he and Sarkozy refer to as a new Bretton Woods, after the conference that set up the international monetary system in 1944.
Guaino is on the frontline of the crisis, constantly solicited by French media. Though details are sketchy, he denies France is pushing a Euro version of the US Paulson plan. He says observing the 3 per cent limit on budget deficits set by the stability pact "can no longer be a priority".
Guaino has long advocated political control of the European Central Bank and competitive devaluation of the euro - themes which have not endeared him to France's German partners. These positions, along with his crusade to "moralise capitalism", were adopted by Sarkozy during his presidential campaign. Guaino says his two great passions are Europe's response to the financial meltdown and the Union for the Mediterranean, which was launched in July and which was his brainchild.
After completing a doctorate in political economics, Guaino spent a decade at the Crédit Lyonnais bank, the French treasury, the Paris Club (which manages Third World debt) and a major insurance group. He says he saw the crisis coming for the past 20 years. For this reason, French commentators call the Toulon speech Guaino's triumph.
"I don't take it as a triumph," he says. "What was bound to happen, happened. What matters now is what kind of world comes out of this debacle." Guaino sometimes seems out of place in the Sarkozy universe, which is a hybrid of bling-bling and technocrats. The son of a cleaning lady from Arles, father unknown, he's a product of France's "republican meritocracy" who appeals to Sarkozy's admiration for self-made men. In his first book, Strange Renunciation, Guaino described his childhood in Provence as "poor but happy, in the days when the love of France and the Republic went without saying".
A political maverick who voted against the Maastricht and constitutional treaties, Guaino professes understanding for the Irish No in the Lisbon Treaty referendum. He sees the Irish government's bank guarantee plan as "an example of what will happen if we don't have a unified policy - every man for himself", but he says he doesn't want to judge leaders "faced with an extreme situation". He wants a Europe that protects "a more political Europe, one that's not bogged down in rules and procedure, that's not on automatic pilot". Though he rejects labels, Guaino comes from the "social Gaullist" camp that felt betrayed by Jacques Chirac's broken promise to heal France's "social fracture".
In 2002 he and Sarkozy co-signed an opinion piece in Le Monde which argued that the right too cared about social justice. In 2006 he offered his help to Sarkozy, saying: "If you're just a partisan economic liberal and Atlanticist, you'll never win!"
Guaino brought all the beauty and power of the French language to bear in Sarkozy's campaign, and not a few observers credit him with Sarkozy's victory.
By questioning Sarkozy about the events and emotions that had changed him, Guaino gave the candidate a human dimension in his January 2007 speech for the UMP investiture. Guaino peppers texts with literary quotes and allusions to great French men and women, both left- and right-wing.
It was his idea to make purchasing power the president's chief campaign promise: Sarkozy often gives the impression of mixing irreconcilable people, ideas and policies. Guaino's crusade against jungle capitalism sits oddly with Sarkozy's moves to decriminalise white-collar crime.
Within the government, Guaino's history of Euroscepticism is counterbalanced by the European affairs minister Jean-Pierre Jouyet. When Guaino described the EU's competition policy as "absurd", Jouyet spoke of "convergence" between Paris and Brussels.
Guaino says he has "no vocation" to stay at the Élysée for the duration of Sarkozy's presidency. At 51, he claims he is too old to start a political career. "What would interest me would be to have a job with responsibility, where I can see the results of my labour."