Question: What do the European Central Bank, EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson, French army commanders, French public television broadcasters, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and Snagglepuss the Mountain Lion have in common? Answer: they have all come under withering attack in the past week or two from President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.
Actually, Snagglepuss hasn’t, but Sarkozy has sprayed his ammunition so far and wide that it was probably a close-run thing. It would be easy to dismiss the presidential antics - imagine Silvio Berlusconi on speed and you are halfway there - as a huge embarrassment for France just as it started its six-month European Union presidency on July 1. But I reckon there is a great deal of method in Sarkozy’s madness.
What I suspect he is up to is seeking to exploit a weakness in the human brain known to specialists as “source amnesia”. As Professor Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt explained in a recent article, we store facts first in the hippocampus, a finger-shaped structure deep in the brain and then, after much re-storing and reprocessing, transfer them to the cerebral cortex. But after a while, facts are separated from the context in which we learned them. It becomes hard for us to remember whether certain statements are true. Even things we once knew to be lies can be erroneously recalled, months later, as truths.
I am not saying Sarkozy is deliberately feeding lies to the European public. But if you consider his spirited attacks this week on the ECB’s monetary policy and Mandelson’s tactics in the Doha world trade talks, he is surely calculating that if you repeat something long enough and loudly enough, a good number of people will start believing you, even if at first they disagreed.
Whether this will improve Sarkozy’s chances of stopping a rise in ECB interest rates or getting a better deal for French farmers in the Doha round remains to be seen. Not for the moment, it would seem.
Pierre-Luc Séguillon, the veteran French political journalist, puts it neatly. He says “President Bling-Bling”, the Sarkozy of celebrity friendships, large wristwatches, fancy sunglasses and Carla Bruni, has morphed into “President Biff-Baff”, Sarkozy the confrontational politician unafraid to say the unsayable. As for the rest of Europe’s leaders, some are no doubt praying that German chancellor Angela Merkel will have a quiet word in his ear to calm him down.
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