journal de bord | août 2009 | 21

Un peu salop d’avoir foutu la tête de Valls en couverture alors qu’il n’a rien de sarkozyste.

D’autre part cette question ô combien fondamentale a été résolue par The Economist fin 2008 : Is Sarkozy a closet socialist?

[…] Mr Sarkozy was elected last year on a promise to get the French back to work, to allow them to earn more, to end the welfare culture and to encourage risk and reward merit. But recently the president has sounded a different note. He has declared that “laissez-faire capitalism is over” and railed against the “dictatorship of the market”. He is setting up a “strategic national investment fund” to take stakes in French companies so as to protect them from foreign predators. His prime minister, François Fillon, has threatened to nationalise banks unless they lend more to companies. And Mr Sarkozy has also pledged to create 100,000 state-subsidised jobs of just the sort favoured by a former Socialist government, which he denounced vigorously during his election campaign.

This lurch to the left has not gone unremarked by real socialists. Martin Schulz, German leader of the Socialist group in the European Parliament, has congratulated the French president for “speaking like a real European socialist”. […]

Part of Mr Sarkozy’s enthusiasm for state intervention can be explained by the financial crisis. With even the Americans and British bailing out companies with public money, the state is back in favour in the least likely places. […] In some ways, indeed, Mr Sarkozy is simply returning to French interventionist tradition, with the economic crisis providing a ready excuse.

Yet the Americans and British consider such policies least-bad solutions, to be reversed as soon as possible. Mr Sarkozy actually believes in an activist state in certain areas. He has long advocated a forceful industrial policy, for example, on the ground that “once the factories go, everything goes.” […]