Sarkozy convinces the converted

The French remained largely unimpressed by Nicolas Sarkozy’s performance on prime time television last Thursday according to the latest opinion polls.

But unsurprisingly the French president did manage to reassure the party faithful, which is at least a start in his attempt to re-establish his popularity among his core voters.

It certainly didn’t take long for the French press to grind out inexorably their analysis of Sarkozy’s marathon interview, broadcast live from the president’s Elysée palace.

Almost 12 million people tuned in to watch him face a barrage of questions from five approved journalists over 90 minutes on economic, social and international issues.

Viewers were also treated to the sound and sight of the president actually apologising for some of the mistakes he had made in his first year in office.

The first polls to appear – and there were three of them over the weekend – don’t make especially great reading for Sarkozy.

In one of them, published in the national daily Le Parisien, 52 per cent remained “unconvinced” with his performance in general.

And 72 per cent weren’t persuaded by Sarkozy’s explanation of his fiscal package. That’ll be a bit of a blow as it was at the heart of one of his major apologies. Sarkozy admitted that he had failed from the start to spell out the advantages of allowing employees to work overtime rather than claim the days off to which they were entitled.

If viewers didn’t buy that explanation then there was worse news for Sarkozy on rising prices and purchasing power.

In another poll in the Sunday newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, those were the two areas in which viewers found Sarkozy’s arguments to be the least convincing – barely more than 20 per cent gave him the thumbs up.

Of course that might not sound as grim as it appears. It could also be an indication that the French have pretty much resigned themselves to the idea that things are not going to change as fast as initially promised.

Once again, as with all statistics, it’s very much a matter of interpretation – a fact that another national daily, Le Figaro, overwhelmingly displayed in the way it reported the results of the third opinion poll.

Now Le Figaro is in general a supporter of both Sarkozy and his governing centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement UMP) party. So it was a lot gentler and kinder in maintaining that Sarkozy had “seduced” almost 49 per cent of the French, which of course is another way of looking at the same set of figures.

It was also without doubt, as the paper was at pains to point out, far greater than Sarkozy would probably have expected given that his current popularity ratings have been hovering between 30 and 40 per cent.

Le Figaro also went in for a bit of “stating the obvious” in reassuring its readers that Sarkozy had in particular convinced his own supporters – so all-in-all a real case of preaching to the converted then.

These are just the first in what is likely to be a slew of polls to appear in the next couple of days, weeks and months. The French media loves them and even though they might confirm at the best of times what many French had already suspected and didn’t really need to be told, at the very least they’ll give political spin doctors something to chew over.