It's Sarkozy time!

France's answer to Rudy Giuliani is riding tough talk on crime all the way to the presidency.

By Elisabeth Franck-Dumas

Read more: Rudy Giuliani, Crime, France, Immigration, Opinion

April 21, 2007 | On the cover of the Economist this week, in an issue partly devoted to the French presidential elections that kick off on Sunday, the president of France's ruling center-right UMP party, 52-year-old Nicolas Sarkozy, is portrayed as Napoleon charging to France's rescue on a white horse.

But no matter how apt the image -- much like Napoleon, Sarkozy is short, hot-tempered, ambitious and authoritarian -- as a Paris native who lived in New York City in the 1990s and into the 21st century, I am reminded less of the late emperor of France and more of a certain contemporary American. "Sarko," who is almost certain to be one of the two candidates who will advance from Sunday's first round to the final round on May 6, is the Gallic version of former New York City mayor and current Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani.

A self-styled radical reformer who early in the presidential campaign advocated "La Rupture" with the old, stagnant French way of doing things and vowed to tackle unemployment and modernize the welfare state, Sarkozy seems to have modeled his political persona on his American counterpart. He is tough on crime, prone to polarizing the public, and tosses off ready-made solutions to the host of ills that ail France.

As minister of the interior in charge of national security and police forces from May 2002 to March 2004 and then again from June 2005 to March 2007, Sarkozy's successive tenures have earned him the nickname "France's top cop." During the wave of violence that spread through France's banlieues -- the country's impoverished, largely immigrant working-class suburbs -- in the fall of 2005, he helped ignite the fire shortly after a police chase gone awry led to the death of two banlieue teenagers hidden in an electric facility. First he proclaimed the teens delinquents, then he proclaimed the police innocent prior to a full investigation. It was not long after he had called suburban youth "racaille," or "scum." It reminded me of Giuliani's statement, after the death of Patrick Dorismond at the hands of cops in early 2000, that the victim was "no altar boy."

Although his first term as interior minister was marked by conciliatory steps toward French minorities -- he notably proposed that France endorse affirmative action -- during his second tenure, Sarkozy did everything imaginable to deserve the "top cop" moniker, including sending police into primary schools as part of his strategy to fight illegal immigration and trying to push through legislation that would detect future delinquency in the behavioral problems of 3-year-olds. (In a recent interview with Philosophie magazine, he also stated his belief that pedophiles are "born that way.")

In the final weeks of this first round of campaigning, actively courting the far-right voters who put Jean-Marie Le Pen in the presidential runoff in 2002, Sarkozy sparked yet more controversy by offering to create a Ministry of Integration and National Identity, with its nauseating whiff of Vichyism, and, in a snide reference to Muslim traditions, stated that anyone who would consider "slaughtering sheep in their bathtubs" was not welcome in France.

The tough-guy stance, the insensitive and outrageous pronouncements, the antagonizing of the underclass and the self-cast "man of action" persona -- how not to think of Rudy? Many of the problems faced by France today -- persistent unemployment, rising crime, a slowed economy -- reared their heads in New York before Giuliani was voted in. New York and Paris are even alike in having a wealthy white center ringed by poorer neighborhoods full of high-rise housing projects.

The Sarkozy/Giuliani parallel is one I am sure Sarkozy would relish, since Giuliani is as much known in France for his "travail admirable" in ridding New York of crime as for his handling of Sept. 11. There is little recognition, except in well-informed circles, of the many factors -- demographic, economic, historical -- that helped create the drop in crime for which he is credited.

An avowed Americanophile, Sarkozy paid Giuliani an informal yet well-publicized visit in the summer of 2002, right at the beginning of his first tenure as minister of the interior. Although no one knows what they talked about for an hour and a half (and Sarkozy denied at the time that he had come to "copy" the New York model), many of his techniques as interior minister bear an uncanny similarity to those used by Giuliani as mayor.

First and foremost is an obsession with statistics and tangible results, which Sarkozy put into play in the summer of 2002, when he stated that police would now work toward precise goals and routinely be evaluated, adding that "the results would determine the future of their careers." There were clear echoes of the CompStat system first implemented by the NYPD and credited with pushing crime down in once dangerous neighborhoods.

Sarkozy was also, and still is, a vocal advocate for zero tolerance and has crusaded for tougher treatment of repeat offenders. He instituted a December 2005 law that, among other things, allowed for immediate imprisoning of convicted repeat offenders and instated the use of electronic monitoring bracelets, and also proclaimed that "up to 50 percent of crimes and misdemeanors are committed by 5 percent of delinquents, always the same ones."

He also recently vowed, if elected, to shrink the welfare rolls by prohibiting unemployment recipients from refusing two consecutive job offers and by making some form of work mandatory for recipients of the state-dispensed minimum social stipend.

To anyone who witnessed the actions, and heard the implacable discourse, of the Giuliani administration, there is something almost nostalgic about this catalog of laws and incentives. The same code words are bandied about, the same certainties, the same abrupt and oversimplified answers to complex problems like crime or illegal immigration.

Next page: The dominant question among many of my own friends seems to be, how can we stop Sarkozy's accession to power?