Missing the deadline

It can’t be an April Fool surely, as the news broke a day too late for that.

But according to a scoop in the weekly satirical, le Canard Enchaîné, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, created something of a political blunder when he voted in last month’s municipal elections.

Apparently, says the paper, even though he cast his ballot he shouldn’t have done because he had missed the deadline to appear on the electoral register.

It was only the fact that the local mayor, François Lebel, who just happens to be from Sarkozy’s ruling centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement, UMP) party, had turned a blind eye in return for a bit of quid pro quo that the president was able to trundle on down to the local polling station to exercise his democratic right.

When Sarkozy was elected in May last year, he upped sticks and moved from the ritzy Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine to the president’s official residence, the Elysée palace in the capital’s VIII arrondissement. As such he was supposed to have registered with the local town hall by December 31 if he wished to vote in this year’s municipal elections. Yes even the president has to bow to bureaucracy here in France.

Now Sarkozy is a busy man at the best of times and certainly in the first few months of office, before he settled happily into married life, he seemed to be on hyperactive overdrive – omnipresent almost. So it’s probably not much of a surprise that he didn’t get around to registering himself.

Instead, according to le Canard Enchaîné, he left it to two of his staff from the Elysée, and they did in fact pitch up at the town hall complete will all the necessary paperwork, and their boss’s identity card. But that wasn’t until January 3. In other words hey had missed the closing date and in theory deprived him of his right to vote.

In theory only, because of course he did vote thanks largely to a little bit of pre-dating on the forms that were filled in.

Now this is where the tale gets a little confusing because there seem to be contradictory reports – from the very same source – Lebel.

One has it that the mayor, who would surely have known whether such a high profile voter had been along to register, knew nothing about the apparent stretching of the deadline – along the lines of “it’s all a bit of a mystery to me guv." And he has promised to look into the matter with his own internal inquiry.

The other version is that Lebel discovered what had happened a day later on January 4, he rang the Elysée palace and had a little tizzy fit down the ‘phone. But evidently Sarkozy was able to offer him a sweetener to help him forget the matter by asking him to officiate at his marriage to Carla barely one month later.

Lebel has dismissed such a conversation ever occurred as pure invention – but he would, wouldn’t he. After all it does nothing for the integrity of either man.

Meanwhile one of the president’s closest allies – and generally least liked in the media – Claude Guéant, said that all he knew about the matter was that the paperwork had been completed in time and that was all he was going to say.

What the story really reflects is probably the attempts by Sarkozy’s detractors to ridicule him at exactly the time when he’s trying to brush up his image and take on a more presidential demeanour.

Perhaps then it’s not surprising that it was le Canard Enchaîné that started the buzz. After all it enjoys getting a rise out of any political figure, from whatever party.

Nor is it particularly shocking to see the national daily, Liberation, and the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, pick up and run with it, as both are centre-left.

All a bit of a proverbial storm and brings back memories of the fun the media had when it discovered that his former wife, Cecilia, hadn’t bothered to vote in the first round of last year’s presidential election.

And little was made of the fact that a former French president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, didn’t bother voting in last month’s elections.

But this is Sarkozy of course – always good for a headline or two. And maybe after all it was an April Fool.