Sarkozy changes political agenda

World View:Political change can throw up the most unlikely combinations. The latest and most intriguing of them is Nicolas Sarkozy's enthusiasm for the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who died 70 years ago after being jailed for 11 years by Mussolini.

His voluminous Prison Notebooks explored why the communist revolution failed in Italy, why the country lagged politically behind France for so long and why power has to be pursued so as to achieve hegemony in the sphere of ideas and values as well as through revolutionary organisation and force.

Their subtle exploration of these themes inspired two generations of the European left disillusioned with Stalinism since they were published after the war.

In an interview on April 17th with the French newspaper, Le Figaro, Sarkozy said he had made the same analysis - that "power is won by ideas". "It is the first time," he explained, that "a right-wing politician has fought on that ground". There have been several other references to Gramsci before and after the election, notably a statement that "the ideological victory always comes before the electoral one". Their importance is better appreciated at the end of his first few activist weeks in power - not that he has been less visible during his first extravagant holidays in New England, where he is to meet George Bush this weekend, and was seen jogging in a T-shirt with the slogan "I am an American agent".

Sarkozy was described as "omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent" by one of his socialist opponents in the National Assembly last month. The Socialist Party felt understandably bruised after being so comprehensively defeated at the polls. To rub that in, Sarkozy proceeded to co-opt many of their luminaries - six of them into the government, most notably Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister, and others such as Hubert Védrine and Jack Lang on to advisory commissions. The nomination of Dominique Strauss-Kahn as next head of the International Monetary Fund completed an audacious effort to disrupt his defeated and demoralised opponents.

It is all part of what Sarkozy describes as a "rupture" from a type of politics that had become "sclerotic, predictable and rigid over the last few years". The French, he insisted, "are not afraid of change. They're waiting for it."

These observations should be put alongside the criticisms made as the first emergency parliamentary session ended last week by members of his party annoyed at his choice of so many social democrats, and by the newspaper, Le Monde, which underlined several major compromises made on his campaign programme. A political battle fought on the plane of ideas and values has to be strategic. In that light Sarkozy has established an ideological hegemony in a remarkably short time, which will allow him make up lost ground in the autumn.

Already, as promised, he has put through legislation lifting tax on overtime to bring flexibility into the 35-hour week; made it more difficult for transport workers to support strikers (along with determined efforts to woo trade union leaders); introduced university reform; and threatened to penalise repeat offenders. Each of these press buttons calculated to highlight the change of values he seeks: to favour those willing to work over those who are reluctant or lazy; to take on those who resort to direct action against him; to confuse student opponents; and to crack down hard on criminals. He has changed the political agenda, long dominated by the centre left and the inheritors of 1968, not by talking about globalisation, liberalism or markets but about merit, success, ambition, promotion, work and the idea of capital.

Skilfully, he has redirected ideas away from the ground occupied by his opponents and managed to redefine them. He is not embarrassed to flaunt his expensive tastes and rich friends but rather seeks to legitimise them in line with celebrity spectacle. The social question is no longer the gulf between rich and poor, the French social model and Anglo-American neo-liberalism but between those who support and oppose such values and those for and against reversing France's international decline. There is a similar effort to recalibrate attitudes towards France's six million Muslim immigrants.

A report this week in the German magazine Der Spiegel examines one aspect of the international fallout from this burst of energy. Nobody bothered to call Berlin to give advance notice of France's nuclear plants for Gadafy and its nominee for the IMF - or a new round of US weapons for the Middle East. "This has come as a shock to Berlin, especially after going through the first six months of the year basking in the warm glow of German-led multilateralism," the weekly writes.

Sarkozy's Libyan intervention "is really the sort of behaviour one would expect from despots. It makes George Bush pale by comparison," according to the Social Democrat parliamentary leader, Ulrich Kelber. Sources in the foreign ministry expected Sarkozy would calm down soon enough, acknowledging his need to make an immediate impact.

From Brussels, Prospect magazine's lively Manneken Pis correspondent reported a similar Sarkozy upstaging of Gordon Brown in his first month: on the IMF, rescuing the constitutional treaty with concessions for his domestic audience, and with Poland. In contrast Brown has "favoured a traditional British approach of saying as little as possible about the EU for fear of upsetting the tabloid press". Brown, too, is capable of playing a long game, however; he is also a student of Gramsci, having edited a book in 1975 which invoked his work as an inspiration for modern socialists.

He and Sarkozy may find it mutually favourable to work together, reinforcing a worrying inter-governmental trend in EU policy-making. Gramsci devoted many pages to the study of how political change is brought about by intelligent leadership, including by Renaissance leaders in Italy and Jacobins and Napoleon in France. In The Modern Prince, his illuminating study of Machiavelli, he wrote that "the man of action is the true philosopher; and the philosopher must of necessity be a man of action".

One does not have to admire Sarkozy to be impressed by his success in changing the French agenda. It will be up to his left-wing opponents to understand how he did it by reclaiming Gramsci's vision for themselves and probing the tensions involved. Jérôme Sgard points out in the current issue of the French journal Esprit that, despite his new-found hegemony, Sarkozy's centralist Bonapartism sits uneasily with his free-market rhetoric.