 Okay, I want you to bear in mind this calendar as I'm talking, because France is facing a whole series of elections over the next two and a half years. And this is sort of shaping the whole political context at the moment. Very quick rundown of these on November 29, Nicola Sarkozy is almost certain to be re-elected the president of the UMP, the main conservative party. This March, the socialists are slated to be wiped out in the departmental elections. December, the regional elections are going to be even worse for the socialists. There is going to be a massacre, one of the leading French political scientists told me. Two years from now, there will be a UMP primary for the presidential candidate. It's become very much the American system now. At the moment, Alain Juppet looks like he will be the UMP candidate. You've noticed I put possibly socialist primaries. That's because there's a sort of move underway now to prevent Francois Hollande standing for re-election within the socialist party. So normally, the incumbent president would be the socialist candidate, but that's far from certain. There's a big question mark over who will be. And then, of course, May 2017, the presidential election. And France is just waiting for Godot or the presidential election. Joe mentioned Charles de Gaulle and the whole idea of the providential man. This is something quite unique to France. One explanation I've heard for this is that Germany and Italy, because of their experience with Hitler and Mussolini, are very, very distrustful of the idea of a providential leader, whereas the monarchies, Britain, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, they have kings and queens so they don't need providential leaders. But France, this is a recurring theme through French history. In times of crisis, France looks for the providential man. They haven't had any, well, I think they did have a gendarme, I suppose, but usually not providential women. Napoleon Bonaparte, after the turmoil of the French Revolution, Maréchal Philippe Petain in the hour of defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany, Charles de Gaulle to extricate France from the torment of the Algerian war. And I'm going to quote Eric Zemmour, who Joe mentioned. The providential man he wrote in the Suicide Français is open, quote, a national speciality like Camembert cheese or Gévry Chambertin wine. Now another concept, which is quite specific to France, is the traversée du désert, which is part of the myth of the providential man, de Gaulle's wilderness years lasted for more than a decade. Valérie Giscard d'Estein tried to reconquer his own party two years after he lost the presidency to François Mitterrand. And he was mocked for having crossed the sandbox instead of the desert. So Nicolas Sarkozy promised that he would leave politics when he was voted out of office in 2012, but he's back already. I won't say like a bad penny, like Giscard before him, hoping to retake the party that elevated him to the Elysees Palace, and which, by the way, he bankrupt, there are 74 million euro in debt, according to Le Monde. So on November 29, there are 268,341 card-carrying members of the UMP, and they will vote for their new leader. I'll quote Sarkozy when he returned in September, he said, I've returned with my ideas to speak to all of France to give hope back to her. So he was very much adopting the tone of the presidential man. Sarkozy should have no trouble crushing his relatively unknown challenges for the UMP leadership, but his real rivals, who are both former conservative prime ministers, are Ellen Juppé and François Fillon, and they are not standing in this election on November 29. They're not interested in the party leadership, but both have announced their intention to challenge Sarkozy in the UMP's primary election in the autumn of 2016. Now, party primaries are sort of a novelty in France. They were started by the Socialist to prevent a repeat of 2002, when, as you remember, Lionel Gelspin was defeated by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of the presidential election, and that happened because there were too many left-wing candidates. So both parties have realized now that they've got to boil down the number of candidates before the presidential election. Another factor is the switch from the seven-to-the-five-year presidential term, which happened under SHIRAC, and the sort of 24-hour news cycle, which is really, one might say, accelerated time. So France is in a permanent election campaign, just like the US. People are so busy campaigning all the time that they don't really get much governing done. Sarkozy had hoped that by reappropriating the party, he would automatically become its candidate for the May 2017 presidential election. But he's been forced against his will to accept the idea of a broad primary in which members of the center-right parties will also be allowed to vote. François Bayrou, who's the main leader on the center-right, has announced that he will support Juppé. That's very important because Bayrou got 9.5% in the first round in 2012, so that's enough to make or break an election. Now there's little chance of François Hollande, I think Joe said this already, recovering politically in time for the next presidential election. Then polls show that Marine Le Pen, the head of the National Front, of course, will lead in the first round. So you can imagine the earthquake. This is going to be, to actually have the far right in the lead in the first round. That could change, however, if Bayrou withdraws from the race in favor of Juppé. Because at the moment he hasn't firmly committed to that, but if Bayrou says, no, I want my supporters to vote for Juppé, Juppé could actually come in first in the first round. Polls also show that Le Pen would defeat Hollande in a runoff. So imagine, that's the scenario under which Marine Le Pen could be president of France. But she herself would be defeated by Sarkozy, Juppé or Fillon. Juppé scores the highest against her. There was an EFOP poll in September that said Juppé would win 64% to 36% for Marine Le Pen. In any case, it is more or less a foregone conclusion that the UMP will retake the Elysée Palace in 2017. And one must say by default, this is probably not a party that deserves to come back to power. They're embroiled in scandal, they've got all kinds of problems, but they're less bad than their opponents, I suppose you could argue. It won't even be called the UMP anymore. It's a sign of the depth of political crisis in France that moves are underway in all three leading parties, the Socialists, the UMP and the National Front, because now France is no longer a two-party system, it's become a three-party system. There are three political families. All three are talking about changing the names of the parties. Before I came to talk to you today, I talked to Nadine Morano, whom some of you may know as she's a Conservative member of the European Parliament. She was a Cabinet Minister under Sarkozy, and she's one of his most loyal supporters. And she told me that she was against, originally, against changing the UMP's name. She said a party's name is a brand that is difficult to impose on the political landscape, except that in this instance, the brand is so damaged that we don't have a choice. Now the reasons that the UMP brand is so damaged is because of the 2012 war between Jean-François Copay and François Fillon for the party leadership. It made militants flee, Morano told me. Copay eventually won, although maybe not fairly, and he was forced to resign earlier this year because of the Big Malion scandal. Big Malion, they wanted to name it Pigmalion, but the name was already taken, so they called it Big Malion. And it's an events company that is run by two close associates of Jean-François Copay. They sent the UMP party 18.5 million euros in fake invoices. And this was to cover expenditure from Sarkozy's 2012 campaign, which exceeded the legal limits. The limit was 22.5 million, and he spent 40 million on his losing his failed campaign. So there was a lot of fiddling of books, and this has plunged the party into controversy and scandal. There are more than a half dozen. It depends how you count them. There's basically eight scandals involving Sarkozy right now. Big Malion is the one that most worries his supporters. I've talked to a lot of them, and they'll make excuses for all the other as well. It's the judges who are politically more orientated and so on. But this is very, very close to home, their own party. The only explanation they can come up with is that Sarkozy was above worrying about how his campaign was financed. He had this sort of attitude of l'intendance suivra. The other people will take care of that as beneath me. But unfortunately for him, the investigators have found memos and text messages indicating that he was informed and that he had surpassed the spending limit. Indeed, François Fillon, who was his prime minister, has said that everybody knew that Big Malion was working for the UMP and building the UMP. So that's to watch this space. And I came across researching this, something which I find almost incriminating, let's say. The man who was responsible for the financing scam of building the party for Sarkozy's campaign expenses is called Jérôme Lavrilleux. He was the deputy campaign manager. And four months after he left office, Sarkozy decorated Lavrilleux. He gave him the Ordre de Mérite. And as he pinned the medal on Lavrilleux's chest, he described Lavrilleux as, open quote, a man who has a talent for not bothering the people he works for with problems that they don't need to know about. I'm glad you enjoyed that. I did. Money is, that's a good one, isn't it? Money is Sarkozy's Achilles' Hill. Whether it's the cost overruns in his campaign, the tens of millions that he allegedly received from Omar Gaddafi for his 2007 campaign, the 403 million euro out-of-court settlement that his underlings obtained for his friend Bernard Tapie, money could be Sarkozy's undoing. And it must be said, both the left and the right have manipulated the justice system in France for political advantage. So it's possible that some of these investigations involving Sarkozy are politically motivated, as he claims and his supporters claim. But the public perception that Sarkozy is too fond of money was a major factor in his defeat in 2012. And it undermines his credibility as a providential man. There's a very famous quote by Sarkozy. He was asked repeatedly, what will you do when you leave office? And he said, j'irai faire du fric. I'll go and make money, or make dough. Which is, you might get away with this in the US, but in France, this really just is offensive. People just, you can't say, I want to go get rich. So also, it's a challenge for any politician to represent the party which represents the privileged class, which traditionally the right in France represents the privileged class. So if you're logical about it, you do everything you can not to show that you're from the privileged class, not to just sort of blatantly flaunt signs of wealth. But Sarkozy, on his election night in 2007, went to Fouquettes with his rich friends. And then he went on Vincent Bolloré, a billionaire's yacht with his then wife. He rented a palatial residence next to a lake in New Hampshire. You may remember that. That belonged to Mitt Romney of our people. And nobody has forgotten these things in France. And another very important factor against him, basically I'm explaining why I don't believe that Sarkozy is going to be president again in France. You'll understand that. He has no roots in rural France. I remember Bernadette Schiak saying before the 2007 election that Sarkozy could never be president because he didn't have a terroir. He didn't have any roots in French land. When he goes on holiday, he goes to the Côte d'Azur and he stays with the Bruny family in their manor house. Another thing, if you think about de Gaulle, had Colombé de l'Eglise and Pompidou had, I think it was L'Auvergne. No, Contale and Giscard had L'Auvergne. And Schiak had Corres. But Sarkozy has no geographic roots in France. Also on the money question, since he left office, he's been on the International Lecture Circuit where he charges 100,000 euro for a speech. He's continued these lectures, even since his comeback. He gave a lecture in Seoul, in Korea, in mid-October. His office was asked, why is he continuing to do this if he's supposed to be coming back to save France? And they said, well, he'd made the arrangement before his return and he didn't see any reason to cancel the engagement. There was a quote I liked very much from Bernard de Bray, who's a UMP deputy in the National Assembly. He said that since Sarkozy's earning so much money delivering lectures, maybe he could pay back some of the 11 million that the party raised in their Sarko-thon in 2013 to pay his campaign debts. Or the 380,000 euro fine that the party paid on his behalf, and which he's under investigation for because it was illegal for them to pay that fine for him. Some of Sarkozy's closest friends and aides told him that he should not return to politics. Nadine Morano said to me, aside from Napoleon and De Gaulle, no one has ever achieved it. Will the French want him back? I tell him he has no margin of error. Another Sarkozy supporter whom I talked to, a business executive called Sophie de Menton, sent him a personal letter in August, which she gave me a copy of, and she said, it was unthinkable that you should retake the UMP because the party was so discredited. De Menton said he had attained a certain auteur since leaving office. It was beneath him to wade back into the muddy pond. They're going to throw every scandal in the book at him. And I'm still quoting Sophie de Menton. I could be wrong, but I think he lost his chances of being re-elected by returning too soon. Now, opinion polls confirm what Sarkozy's advisors were telling him. The first month of his return to politics from mid-September to mid-October, his approval rating dropped from 40% to 31%. In a poll published last Thursday, it was 26%. Marine Le Pen is for the first time ahead of Sarkozy in approval rating, she's at 29%. And Alain Juppet, who I think is probably going to be the next president of France, is at 55% at the moment. And within the sort of hardcore of UMP militants, Sarkozy still has a fairly high rate. He's getting 71%, but Juppet's getting 78%. So even among the strong UMP supporters, Juppet's ahead. One of the main differences between Sarkozy and Juppet is their attitude towards the national front. Sarkozy's supporters say that the fears of extreme right-wing voters must be addressed. But Juppet wants nothing whatsoever to do with the far right. When he was at the Elysée, Sarkozy recruited a far right strategist called Patrick Bisson to help him win over the national front voters. Now, Sarkozy broke with Bisson last March because there was another scandal that Bisson secretly taped hundreds of hours of conversations at the Elysée. But in his campaign rallies, Sarkozy has reverted to the Le Pen-like language that he learned from Patrick Bisson. I'll give you a quote from one of his recent rallies in Nice, an open quote, this is Sarkozy speaking. Immigration must not be a taboo subject, but a major subject for it threatens our way of life. Our values must be defended against fanatical Islam that dreams of sowing terror in the West. So like the national front, Sarkozy is equating immigration with Islamist terror. The other two other things on the whole immigration issue, he wants to re-examine the Schengen Accords and think about taking France out of Schengen. And he also talks about what he calls the considerable problem of the Roma. There are 20,000 Roma in France. You can, I leave that to you to decide whether, how big a problem that is. But it's certainly one that the national front emphasizes. I talked to Pascal Perrinot, who I think is a terrific political scientist in France. He's at Sibypuff and at Sciences Po. He said, Sarkozy changes style and substance from one week to the next. His entourage is mediocre. The country's in a bad way. Sarkozy isn't up to it. He came back too soon without giving it sufficient thought. He clutches a microphone on stage and he talks about himself. I think that sums it up pretty well. The economic policies espoused by Sarkozy, Juppet and Fillon are similar. Fillon is the most stridently liberal. But all three of them say they want to reduce government spending, lower the cost of labor, decrease the number of civil servants, and raise the retirement age. But one sort of niggling question, that the right held the president's office continuously from 1995 until 2012. All three of the conservative presidential candidates held high public office during that period. All of them face the same question, which is why didn't they reform the country during the 17 years that they were in power? Sarkozy's defeat in 2012 is widely attributed to his personality and character rather than his policies. His policies too were found wanting though. The international economic crisis thwarted many of his plans. But nonetheless, if you're a conservative voter, you might not understand why he increased public spending by 15% and why public debt rose 30% under Sarkozy's stewardship. Furthermore, and this was Sophie de Monton, the business executive pointed out to me, he didn't get rid of the ESF, the wealth tax. He didn't get rid of the 35 hour working week and his pension reform was pretty measly. He'd been a very small and inadequate pension reform. Now that brings us to Alain Juppé, who's the main rival to Sarkozy. Since 1995, Juppé has been prime minister, minister for foreign affairs twice. He's been minister for defense and minister for the environment. He's widely praised for his performance as the mayor of Bordeaux for the past 20 years, well, he had to take one year off, I'll get to that in a minute. Juppé is a grand provincial notable was how Pascal Perrinot described him. He wields authority and credibility. Now there's sort of a sideline here, do you have time? Bernadette and Jacques Chirac have both taken sides in this contest and you may know of this already but I thought it was kind of interesting. Bernadette Chirac, who's been called the last queen of France, says, and I open quote, that Juppé is very, very cold, he doesn't attract people, friends or ultimately the voters. And Jacques Chirac, a couple of days later, came out in the Figaro newspaper saying, open quote, I have always known that Alain Juppé would have his date with destiny and that of France, basically anointing Juppé as the providential man that we're all looking for. Few things would give me, himself and above all the country greater pleasure, Chirac said. Juppé was Chirac's protégé and right hand man. When Chirac was mayor of Paris back in the 1990s, they were paying the party apparatchics, it was called the RPR then, but the same party, they were paying them out of the town hall coffers. Now Juppé took the fall for the scandal, he received an 18 month suspended prison sentence and one year's ineligibility for public office. And he's obviously asked about this on the campaign trail, he says, open quote, my personal honesty was never in question, there was never any personal enrichment. I assumed collective responsibility and he says he doesn't regret it. Now Juppé will be 71 years old when the 2017 election is held. Sarkozy Loyalist say that he's a man of the past, but Pascal Perino thinks that his age might actually be an advantage in the next presidential election. Open quote, the French are looking for someone who'll do the job, who confers some dignity on France, on the international and European stage. And Juppé says I'll only serve one term in office, which means he's more likely to take on difficult reforms. Unquote. When he was prime minister under Shiraq in 1995, Juppé tried to do away with the exceptional retirement conditions for transport workers, basically the SNCF railway and metro and so on. And the country was paralyzed for weeks by strikes. Eventually, Juppé was forced to back down. And French politicians have been very wary of reform ever since, that was really the turning point beyond which no one tried anymore to reform France. His adversary still criticizes handling of that crisis. At the time, Juppé said he was droit dans mes buttes, which apparently translates as he had a stiff upper lip. But it can be argued now that Juppé was right too soon. His opponents fear that his rigid manner could precipitate social crisis if he becomes president of France. But as Juppé points out, French public opinion has changed a lot since 1995. It's probably evolved a lot faster than the politicians over the last 20 years. France sometimes seems to be so fixated on its permanent campaign that one fears that nothing can be achieved in this election schedule, in the run up to the primaries and the presidential election. But I found some cause for optimism as I was researching this. One reason is that Manuel Valls, the prime minister and the economy minister, Emmanuel Lacombe, although they're both nominally socialist, they're avowed liberals and they're beginning to make small reforms, experts say that there could be some positive effect by the end of Hollande's term. At the moment, the money's on Alain Juppé to become France's next president. Remember, he's got a 55% approval rating. As I mentioned earlier, he has already got the support of François Bayrou, the main centrist leader. He could work with social liberals like Valls and Macron. There would of course be resistance from the far left and from the far right. But this idea of cross-party cooperation in the interest of reforming France, the belief that the left-right divide must be breached, maybe an idea whose time has come. It's a very fashionable idea. One hears about it a lot in political conversations now. Probably Juppé's strongest argument in the contest for the UMP presidential nomination is that he is best placed to defeat Marine Le Pen. Le Pen calls the, actually both she and her father before, they lump the UMP and the Socialist Party, which is of course the PS, together in the term UMPS, UMPS. So if Juppé faces Le Pen in the runoff in May 2017, it's a safe bet that much of the left will vote for Juppé. Whereas the other, the contrary would not be true. If Le Pen is against Cé Hollande, a lot of the UMP voters would be very tempted to vote for Le Pen. So the left will not vote for Le Pen, the right might vote for Le Pen. So if Marine Le Pen is defeated by Juppé in the second round in 2017, she will say she has been defeated, accurately say she's been defeated by the UMPS. But she could win 40% of her vote and that certainly makes her a force to contend with for the foreseeable future in French politics. That's it.