Sarkozy's actions divide Socialists
PARIS -- In the heat of the presidential campaign early this year, Jack Lang, a popular icon of the French left, accused Nicolas Sarkozy of "trickery at the highest level," "antirepublican behavior," and -- perhaps most cutting of all -- being a "Bush adapted for France."
Now Lang, a former culture minister and education minister who served as campaign spokesman for the defeated Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, is the latest leading Socialist to defect to the Sarkozy camp.
On Monday night, he said he was accepting the president's invitation to join his committee on modernizing France's institutions. Threatened last week with expulsion from the Socialists' leadership council if he accepted the assignment, Lang quit .
"Everyone, no matter what his ideological family, has the duty to bring his contribution to the reform of the constitution," Lang said on TF1 television.
Sarkozy seems gleeful with his stunning success in raiding the highest levels of the Socialist Party, a measure of what he calls his political philosophy of "openness."
At a recent European Union meeting in Brussels, he joked, "I'm the only non-Socialist in the delegation." In an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche this month, he reiterated his commitment to ignore party politics, saying, "To be the president of all the French is an obsession for me."
"How to rebuild the party when Sarkozy, brick after brick, undermines it?" said an editorial in the daily Le Figaro last week. "Shocked, the Socialists are splitting up, squabbling and spying on each other."
After naming Socialist Bernard Kouchner as his foreign minister, Sarkozy this month nominated a former Socialist finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn , to lead the International Monetary Fund.
Strauss-Kahn, who unsuccessfully sought the Socialist Party nomination for president this year and could oppose Sarkozy in 2012, quickly won the backing of the European Union.
Among several other figures on the left who have succumbed to Sarkozy's powers of persuasion are a former foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, tasked with drafting a report on globalization, and Jacques Attali , a one time senior adviser to François Mitterrand who is working on a government report on the overhaul of development aid.
