- Jon Henley in Paris
Six days to go before the French vote in their cliffhanger of a referendum on the EU constitution, and the pressure on the Yes camp is plainly beginning to tell: for what must surely be the first time in his career, Nicolas Sarkozy has backed out of a prime-time TV appearance.
Since it normally demands some ingenuity to turn on the television or radio news and NOT see or hear France's most popular (and most media-savvy) politician, his decision to cancel an interview on the main evening bulletin of the country's main commercial broadcaster, TF1, on Sunday night might indicate that something is up.
"He's just a bit tired, a bit run down" insists the entourage of the hyper-active former interior and finance minister, who left the government earlier this year to head Jacques Chirac's centre-right UMP party and, it is universally assumed, turn it into a well-oiled springboard for the 2007 presidential elections (which, the polls agree, he will win hands down if he actually stands).
Sarko, tired? Pull the other one. The man has always been indefatigable, a kind of Duracell bunny with a sharp suit and a brain. Some commentators have declared he has a few domestic problems: his awe-inspiring spouse Cecilia, who runs his office and keeps the Sarko-show on the road, is said to be unhappy, after life as wife-cum-chief personal private secretary of a high-flying minister, with her somewhat reduced role.
There is, however, an alternative explanation.
Sarko is due to team up with the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, this evening at a public meeting in Poitiers, to plead the increasingly desperate cause of the Yes vote (a seventh consecutive poll, for Libération, today puts the No camp ahead on a slender but consistent 52%).
That will be a perfect occasion for the younger politician to polish his profile as the coming man: the dynamic Sarko's personal approval rating has rarely dropped below 65% for the past three years, whereas the affable if bumbling Raffarin is currently the most unpopular prime minister in the history of the Fifth Republic (74% of voters, a poll showed on Sunday, are dissatisfied with him).
A solo TV appearance, however, would have offered no such contrast, and no such opportunity. Could it be that Sarko, the only politician in France to be peddling the heretical message that the nation should vote Yes to the constitution "in order to change France for the better", has already decided that the die is cast - and wants to reduce as much as possible his association with a lost cause?
