John Metzler Archive

Sorry soccer team symbolizes malaise in France

For a football obsessed nation the World Cup soccer scandal was a particularly cruel cut. Les Bleus, the team which won the 1998 World Cup is but a distant memory, now marinated in a boluibaise of scandal, poor performance on the field, and sleazy antics off the pitch. The team has been the grist of lurid headlines and the Minister of Sport called the squad a “moral disaster. “

The scandals of Les Bleus have gone as far as hearing in in the National Assembly and a spate of finger pointing stories. Even the reserved Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called the episode, “an appalling soap opera.”

Many say this team is a group of spoiled millionaires, acting like raucous teenagers, and pulling the flag, the name, and the honor of France into the mud. The coach Raymond Domenech has called his team “imbeciles,” and team members more than return the rhetorical favor to the coach.

All this has left a bitter taste in what should have been a scandal free start of summer.

Economically France is doing much better. Despite the deep shocks of the Greek debt crisis, and the undertow of debt facing most European governments and the USA, French industrial production has been expanding at a brisk rate of 8 percent over the past year. On the other hand, the national debt levels have steadily risen from 84 percent of the GDP this year and shall edge up to 87.5 percent in 2012. This is only slightly less than the current American debt levels and needless to say, a dangerous financial millstone.

Interestingly on a more understandable level and certainly appealing to the French populace, Sarkozy’s government slashed the high value added tax on restaurant prices. The TVA as it is called here is about 19.6 percent cost built into every commercial transaction. This has been trimmed to 5.5 percent for restaurants which had the practical effect of creating more patrons and indeed an extra 22,000 jobs between July 2009 and March of this year..

Still political scandal, the grist of politics has taken a toll. President Nicholas Sarkozy’s government has been slipping in the opinion polls for months; the center-right President’s ratings are hovering near 32 percent.

Recently Sarkozy dismissed a deputy minister of charging $14,000 of pricy cigars to the state. The aura of bling-bling what the French derisively call fast money, fast cars, and lax political rules, has oft been thrown a President Sarkozy and many of his political confidents.

The weekly magazine Le Point headlined, “Scandals; Politics, Football, Business...the Awards of French indecency. “ This certainly creates a growing political populism.

The current crisis du jour allegedly concerns illegal campaign payments to Nicolas Sarkozy before the 2007 Presidential election. According to allegations, the heiress of the L’Oreal cosmetics fortune, Madame Liliane Bettencourt had given Sarkozy $190,000 in illegal cash donations. While a blizzard of allegations have been blowing around the usually restrained Paris press for weeks, some of the original stories have changed prompting the daily Le Figaro to say the charges have boomeranged. Hopefully so.

One government Minister has denounced the charges as a “political cabal orchestrated by the Socialist Party.” This is not at all unlikely. President Sarkozy’s reputation is taking serious political damage at a time when the government is pressing for needed and overdue economic reforms to trim the size of a bloated State bureaucracy and services.

Given the political fallout, a respected French commentator told me that despite the initial optimism concerning his presidency in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy “has not maintained the gravitas of being president.“

With the next election in 2012, there’s possibly sufficient time for damage control with an impending cabinet reshuffle, but the undertow of political scandal can nonetheless paralyze the government from taking the decisive actions so necessary for socio/economic stability and prosperity.