On Tuesday, May 31, just two days after a decisive 55-percent majority of French voters had rejected the treaty proposal for a constitution for Europe, simultaneously destroying the president’s waning prestige and the fragile unity of France’s Socialist Party, Jacques Chirac staggered his supporters and detractors by pulling an extraordinary two-eared hybrid from his conjuror’s top hat.

The new prime minister, chosen to replace the patient, plodding, patently uninspired and uninspiring Jean-Pierre Raffarin, would be the president’s faithful supporter and former chef de cabinet—the brilliantly articulate, impetuous, and fiery Dominique de Villepin; and his senior colleague in the government, publicly elevated to the rank of minister of state and appointed minister of the interior, would be their principal bête noire and unruly problem child, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Not surprisingly, this astonishing feat of political legerdemain left most French men and women skeptical rather than impressed—and not simply among Socialists and other “leftists” naturally opposed to a supposedly “right-wing” government.  François Bayrou, a former minister of Education who heads a “centrist” party that has always been emphatically pro-European and, for that very reason, often anti-Gaullist, flatly refused to endorse this “baroque” solution by joining a “government of national salvation,” which, he predicted, would be unwilling to undertake the “fundamental reforms” that were needed.  Many members of the UMP—the Union pour un Mouvement populaire, which had been specially created three years ago to provide Jacques Chirac with a reliable parliamentary majority—pleaded with their new boss, Nicolas Sarkozy, not to join a monstrously misshapen government (a request shrewdly rejected by Sarkozy on the grounds that France’s situation was now so dire that he had to put duty first and act “responsibly”).  In the weekly Le Point, Catherine Pégard, its leading feminine journalist, quoted the somber prediction made by one of the French president’s close friends that “it will be a slow death.  Chirac will not be able to recover.”  For his part, Denis Jeambar, the caustic editor in chief of the weekly L’Express, who has long deplored the sordid infighting of rivals interested above all in the furtherance of their personal ambitions, foresaw the possibility that the “flamboyance” of the new prime minister might set all of France ablaze, with catastrophic consequences.  “A rough task, indeed,” he noted, “for this new government resembles a swamp-water of crocodiles . . . Hypocrisy oozes from this government’s every pore.”  More succinct was the verdict of a provincial editorialist, who wrote that what Chirac had fashioned was a “hydra with two heads.”

For Chirac, the inclusion of Sarkozy was an unprecedented admission of weakness.  Last November, the French president had sought to clip the wings of this brash “upstart” by informing him that he could not simultaneously hold two positions—that of cabinet minister and that of head of the UMP.  With a sure instinct for success, Sarkozy chose to relinquish an increasingly penniless Ministry of Economy and Finance—with little doubt the hottest potato a French cabinet minister today can be asked to handle—and to devote himself to building up a glaringly weak “presidential” party, which, in March of last year, at the time of the parliamentary elections in Spain, had one fifth as many members as José María Aznar’s Partido Popular (120,000, compared with 600,000 beyond the Pyrenees).  After the electoral debacle of the rashly chosen referendum, however, a crestfallen Chirac was forced to eat humble pie.  Sarkozy was appointed minister of the interior, while retaining his powerful position as the triumphantly elected president of the UMP.  Not satisfied with these two victories, the 50-year-old enfant terrible of French politics made it clear to his supporters in the “majority” party and to his foes in the Elysée Palace that he was going to retain his franc parler, his untrammeled freedom to express flagrantly “dissident” opinions at variance with those of Jacques Chirac (such as his opposition to Turkey’s political admission to the European Union).

While Nicolas Sarkozy’s extraordinary dynamism, well advertised during his previous terms of office at the Ministry of the Interior (May 2002 to March 2004) and at the Ministry of Economy and Finance (March 2004 to November 2004), has helped to make him the most popular politician in France, his seemingly tireless energy is only part of the secret of his phenomenal success.  Equally impressive has been his incisive manner of speech—clear, precise, and devoid of the rhetorical ambiguities indulged in by Jacques Chirac and so many other supposedly right-wing politicians.  A few weeks before the decisive referendum vote of May 29, a journalist, who clearly wished to embarrass him during a TV debate, asked Sarkozy in typically devious terms what his intentions were for the French presidential elections scheduled for 2007.  In other words, was he prepared to run as a candidate against Jacques Chirac?  “You want a frank answer? . . . Yes!” was Nicolas Sarkozy’s prompt reply.

During a pro-European constitution speech delivered three days before the climactic vote of May 29, Nicolas Sarkozy openly proclaimed his scorn for those who “have never had to face the test of an election.”  The barb was clearly aimed at Dominique de Villepin, who, as later became clear, was suspected of having allowed at least one of his subordinates at the Ministry of the Interior to tip off members of the press about the increasingly strained relations between Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Cecilia.  True or not, Sarkozy’s revenge was typically swift.  A senior Ministry of the Interior prefect, suspected of having participated in the “plot,” was summarily dismissed.

That Jacques Chirac should have chosen to replace an old political workhorse such as Jean-Pierre Raffarin with an aristocratic thoroughbred totally lacking in electoral experience such as  Dominique de Villepin revealed how rattled he was by the referendum debacle of May 29.  Nothing remotely comparable has been seen in the history of the Fifth Republic since the year 1962, when Charles de Gaulle chose to replace his devoted prime minister, Michel Debré (who had fallen out of favor because of his nostalgic pro-Algérie française sentiments) with his erudite chef de cabinet, Georges Pompidou.  Six years later, angered by the student riots of May 1968—which his prime minister, he felt, had not properly handled—De Gaulle fired Pompidou.  But one year later, it was the haughty ex-general who bit the dust, when he rashly staged a referendum designed to do away with the conservative French Senate, and it was Pompidou who was chosen by French voters to succeed him-—with, it is interesting to note, the help of a brilliant young “egghead” named Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

The question now exercising the imagination of many French observers is whether history is going to repeat itself with some new caricaturist twist.  Now that Chirac knows that his chances of being reelected for a third term in 2007 have been shattered—within a week of the May 29 tsunami, his popularity rating in several public opinion polls had slumped to an unprecedented nadir of 27 percent—all his hopes are concentrated on his designated “savior” and (he hopes) eventual successor, Dominique de Villepin.  Likewise an erudite phenomenon (who devotes an hour or more of each day to writing poetry or prose), Dominique de Villepin, however, lacks the banking experience that permitted Georges Pompidou to navigate successfully for close to five years and to be succeeded by his brilliant minister of Economy and Finance, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

The situation today, of course, is radically different from what it was in the 1970’s, when unemployment in France was virtually nonexistent; today, it exceeds ten percent of the country’s working population.  The figure of 2.5 million unemployed is bad enough, but it is even more shocking when juxtaposed with the figure of 500,000 vacant jobs for which no applicants can be found.  When, in a moment of rhetorical dementia on behalf of the “no” vote during the referendum campaign, Laurent Fabius, the former Socialist prime minister, warned that France was likely to be inundated by a torrent of “Polish plumbers,” the sober truth was that most plumbers, at any rate in Paris, are now either Portuguese or Spanish.  Polish plumbers would be more than welcome, for young Frenchmen today have no desire to dirty their hands with such menial tasks.  “What they all want,” one now often hears it said, “is to be lawyers, computer specialists, or doctors.”  (Even in the medical profession, the distaste for exacting manual labor is such that there is a severe dearth of young students willing to become surgeons.  The average age of French surgeons is an alarming 57 years, and already one third of all surgeons in the country are immigrants from other lands.)

Years ago, in 1967, an ANPE (Agence Nationale pour l’Emploi) was set up to help unemployed Frenchmen and women find jobs—but not just any old job!  No, with the passage of the years, it was taken for granted that it had to be a job with a built-in guaranty of tenure, with no risk of being fired for one reason or another.  To guarantee against such dangerous “precarity”—the new left-wing stigma, which has joined the “liberal” so disgracefully manhandled by Jacques Chirac (as “worse than Communism”) during the referendum campaign—there was elaborated a detailed Code du Travail, which, thanks to years of Socialist misrule and “rightist” capitulations before the threat of massive strikes, has acquired the force of a taboo, of an untouchable, of a sacred cow.  Incredible as it may sound to someone who is not French, this work code contains more than 2,000 articles and no fewer than 30 pages devoted to the hiring and firing of workers.

An exclusive resort to the carrot, combined with a total avoidance of the stick, has encouraged an inevitable sloth.  Why, after all, should those who are unemployed bother to work when they can survive on a monthly subsistence allowance that is so close to the minimum wage that it acts as a disincentive?  Not so long ago, a frustrated ANPE inspector who, over a period of three years, had offered an applicant 19 different jobs, each of which had been disdainfully refused, casually wrote fainéant under the 19th entry.  When the same “loafer” turned up for a 20th interview and happened to spot the insulting comment, he sued the inspector for defamation of character—in a judicial case that made the headlines as a deplorable example of administrative “prejudice.”

Such are the massive psychosocial problems now confronting Jacques Chirac’s newly found silver-haired “magician”—the 51-year-old Dominique de Villepin.  Just how this gamble, the most desperate of his career, will succeed or fail is anything but clear.  One thing, at any rate, is certain.  More than poetic verve will be needed to dissuade Villepin’s left-wing adversaries, and, in particular, the reactionary diehards of France’s relatively weak but singularly aggressive labor unions, from “descending into the street” to combat the slightest sign of “anti-working-class provocation”—the first and foremost of such “provocations” being any serious attempt to reform a paralyzing work code.