Speaking to the people

It’s possibly his way of avoiding talking to journalists and facing potentially awkward questions. But in his own fashion the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has lived up to his promise to speak to the nation when and how he sees fit.

In Tuesday’s copy of the popular national daily Le Parisien, there’s a full-length five-page transcript of Sarkozy’s meeting with a panel of the newspaper’s readers.

Although the “interview”, held at the president’s official residence the Elysée palace, was scheduled over a week ago, recent events changed its tone somewhat. It became clear that it would give Sarkozy the chance to reduce the temperature of the debate that has been raging ever since he insulted a visitor at the agricultural fair on Saturday. And on first appearances it seems to work

The readers’ panel – made up of eight men and women from across the political spectrum - had two hours to pose any number of questions on a whole host of issues. Those included purchasing power, Sarkozy’s relationship with his new wife Carla, his nosedive in the opinion polls; the president’s challenge to the country’s constitutional council (Supreme court) and of course first and foremost that blooper on Saturday.

So what did Sarkozy have to say of that incident, when he insulted a man who refused to shake his hand during a press-the-flesh session at the agricultural fair? Well apparently the president, although not issuing an outright apology or regretting his remarks, admits that he would have been better advised not to have responded.

So not quite “mea culpa”, but almost. Except it turns out that wasn’t what he told the panel.

Such a question and answer session is common practice here in many newspapers and magazines, as is the custom of allowing the interviewee to see the final draft before it’s published.

And that’s exactly what happened after the two-hour session on Monday morning, when Le Parisien whipped off the text to the Elysée palace for the presidential advisors’ perusal.

After a day’s worth of hot headlines, not just in France but around the world, Sarkozy’s spin doctors clearly decided it was time for him to show a little remorse, even if he hadn’t actually done so during the interview. So at the last moment, just as the printers were ready to roll, the paper received the “amended” version and went to press.

In a sense then today’s readers are being misled. And the headlines in many of the country’s other newspapers also give the impression that Sarkozy showed some remorse.

But as the editor of Le Parisien, Dominique de Montvallon, admitted in national television this morning, at no time did Sarkozy ever give the slightest hint that he regretted his behaviour – on the contrary.

Of course, such a revelation raises the question as to whether the paper came under any sort of pressure from the Elysée palace to print what had after all never been said. And it undermines somewhat its own integrity vis-à-vis its readers.

De Montvallon has promised that Le Parisien, recognised as a newspaper, which on the whole is not unsympathetic to Sarkozy’s politics, will publish a behind-the-scenes piece on the machinations of the interview, the intervention and the reasons for running with the story in the way it did on Wednesday. There’ll also be the original version in its entirety, presumably guaranteeing a boost in the paper’s circulation figures.

Of course the way in which the story has been handled casts a rather dubious light on how much of the rest of the interview readers should actually believe or care about. Maybe it also reveals how far Sarkozy and his advisors are prepared to go to seem to say the right thing or change what was said for the sake of popularity ratings. There’s nothing new there.

What is perhaps most astonishing though is that a man who has taken so much care to groom a thoroughly stage-managed image should so totally appear now to have lost the plot.

Meanwhile as the media furore rumbles on, over three million people worldwide have taken the chance to log and listen to the clip of the infamous presidential retort.