The Economist: After his Libyan adventure

NICOLAS SARKOZY has had a good war. The armed campaign in Libya was the French president’s biggest gamble, the moment he put his reputation, judgment and leadership on the line. France, along with Britain, carried out the bulk of the air strikes. Unlike President Barack Obama, Mr Sarkozy enjoyed cross-party support for the campaign and popular backing at home. The fall of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi ought therefore to yield some domestic reward. Yet Mr Sarkozy’s poll numbers remain grim, and, little more than six months before France’s presidential vote, his chances of re-election do not, on paper, look good.

The Libyan air strikes were not Mr Sarkozy’s first armed campaign. He sent French soldiers into hostile territory in the name of democracy in both Afghanistan and Côte d’Ivoire. But his investment in the Libyan campaign was the most intensely personal. Before anybody else, and unbeknown at the time even to his foreign minister, he stuck his neck out and gave diplomatic recognition to the Libyan rebels, whose leaders he met at the Elysée palace at the urging of Bernard-Henri Lévy, a celebrity philosopher. Along with Britain’s David Cameron, he made a personal plea to a reluctant America to get involved. A president without personal experience of war (unlike all his Fifth Republic predecessors), Mr Sarkozy sent French fighter jets roaring into Libyan airspace before anybody else got airborne. By June he was dropping arms to rebels on the ground.

The reasons for Mr Sarkozy’s zeal are various. He was stung by criticism of France’s ties to discredited regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as his hosting of Colonel Qaddafi (plus tent) for a week in Paris in 2007. As Libyan forces advanced on Benghazi, he was haunted by past French failures, as…..Read More

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