Going, going... Jaques Chirac, the old man of Europe

Blackleaf

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« Going, going... the old man of Europe
(Chirac) the great survivor is on his way out, leaving France in a state of decline »
What do you call a great survivor at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.
I know, you're not in for easy jokes but I just couldn't help it. And because I'm the one pulling all the work here doesn't mean I should climb the walls, does it?

« Gaullism, tetchy in its defence of French interests, pining for grandeur, has moulded him.
One of its principal features is to lump Americans and the British together as "les Anglo-Saxons", and to mistrust both. Another (...) is the general's dictum that "with the English one must bang on the table and they will submit". »
Right. Tell that to Napoleon's horse, Charly.

« Forty years ago, de Gaulle described the Americans as "the greatest danger in the world today to peace". »
1. Now you know where Lefties and their Islamofascist allies borrowed their pathetic rhetoric.
2. Now you know why I regard de Gaulle as a great man up until, say, June 18th, 1940. Tops.

« Chirac is more circumspect. But he went out of his way to praise the philosopher Jacques Derrida, (...) as one of the "major figures of the intellectual life of our times". Derrida was notorious for calling America the "world's leading rogue state". »
1. Now you know where Lefties and their Islamofascist allies borrowed their pathetic rhetoric.
2. Now you know why I regard Chirac as a great man up until, say, November 28th, 1932. Tops.
And as a side note, I'll had that being called 'a major intellectual' by somebody like Mr. Chirac tells you a lot about what Derrida was, and was not. If you get my meaning, wink, wink.

« As to the British, the general once said that Churchill had told him: "Each time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall choose Roosevelt." »
Which is one among many reasons why Churchill still is a great man.

« There is a tangible fear that the French vision of the EU, politically integrated, socially conscious, is being replaced by an English- dominated collection of loosely linked states with a liberal, free-market economy hostile to Gaullist notions of state-backed industries and étatisme. »
Fear? What do you mean fear? Gee, I can't wait for that glorious day.
All right, this is just an appetizer really. I do insist you go and read the whole thing, as it is addressing some key French issues, above and beyond Jacques C., King of the Thieves -- from de Gaulle to that quarter of the French workforce made of public sector employees rushing the country on the road to bankruptcy.
However, as the French expression goes, here's a last one for the road:

« The socialists under François Mitterrand misused public funds on a scale undreamt of by Juppé. They created a building consultancy, Urba, with 16 regional offices, in order to siphon money from public works contracts into party coffers. It contributed £2.4m to Mitterrand’s re-election campaign. Police and investigating magistrates were stymied when Mitterrand announced a grand amnesty for those being investigated for financial misdemeanours. This applied to all elected representatives, including himself. »
That's the French way: bribe and swindle your way to the top, and then pardon yourself.

www.fuckfrance.com




The Sunday Times -
Going, going ... the old man of Europe
As Chirac arrives in London this week, Brian Moynahan says the great survivor is on his way out, leaving France in a state of decline



After a crowded day of talks in London, President Jacques Chirac will be the guest of the Queen on Thursday evening at a special performance of Les Misérables at Windsor Castle. Musicals are not known to be his style — sumo wrestling is his favourite spectacle — so he will have the chance for some reflection.
He has much to ponder. Les Misérables is a good starting point. It is the final, and perhaps all too aptly named, celebration in this centenary year of the entente cordiale.



Anglo-French relations have not recovered from the low point they hit two years ago when Chirac accused Tony Blair of speaking to him as he had never been spoken to before during a row over European Union farm reforms.

Chirac’s forceful opposition to the war in Iraq caused renewed tensions and confirmed the Gaullism that is the bedrock of his political soul.

Seventy-two at the end of this month, he cut his teeth while General de Gaulle was still president. Gaullism, tetchy in its defence of French interests, pining for grandeur, has moulded him.

One of its principal features is to lump Americans and the British together as “les Anglo-Saxons”, and to mistrust both. Another, which may explain the spat with Blair, is the general’s dictum that “with the English one must bang on the table and they will submit”.

Forty years ago, de Gaulle described the Americans as “the greatest danger in the world today to peace”. Chirac is more circumspect. But he went out of his way to praise the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who died last month, as one of the “major figures of the intellectual life of our times”.

Derrida was notorious for calling America the “world’s leading rogue state”.

As to the British, the general once said that Churchill had told him: “Each time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall choose Roosevelt.”

Iraq is taken as proof that nothing has changed. Blair’s instincts, like Churchill’s, are seen as Atlanticist and the special relationship as a replacement for the entente cordiale.

EU enlargement is another concern. A 25-nation EU is less easily influenced than the old. And the newcomers, conscious of the part the Americans played in their escape from the Soviet bloc, have no desire to cock a snook at Washington.

There is a tangible fear that the French vision of the EU, politically integrated, socially conscious, is being replaced by an English- dominated collection of loosely linked states with a liberal, free-market economy hostile to Gaullist notions of state-backed industries and étatisme.

Beyond Europe, Chirac has been a champion of la francophonie, the close cultural and sentimental ties between French-speaking peoples. Events in the Ivory Coast, long regarded as a model former colony, have given a hammering to this concept.

The north of the west African state is held by a rebel force that failed in an attempt last year to overthrow the government of President Laurent Gbagbo in the south. Under a French-brokered, UN-backed peace agreement, French troops have patrolled a “line of confidence” between them.

Gbagbo broke the ceasefire last weekend, bombing the rebel stronghold at Bouaké in the north. The jets also attacked the peacekeepers’ camp, killing nine French troops and wounding 22. Gbagbo claimed the attack, thought to be carried out by Belorussian mercenary pilots, was an accident. Paris said it was deliberate.
 

Blackleaf

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Chirac ordered the destruction of the tiny Ivorian air force and the seizure of the international airport at Abidjan. This triggered violent riots last week targeted at French expatriates.
Several hundred people were hurt as French and Ivorian troops struggled to restore order.



It is a far cry from Iraq, of course, whatever schadenfreude some may feel. But religion is an underlying cause of the Ivorian civil war.

The north, and the majority of the rebels, are Muslim. The south is predominantly Christian. And the continued detention in Iraq of two French journalists, taken hostage last August, is depressing evidence that criticism of the war there does not buy immunity.

Windsor is also, of course, a natural place for the president to ponder his succession. Here his plans have gone astray.

His chosen heir was Alain Juppé, his former prime minister, chief tactician, organiser and political soul mate. Juppé’s public life — mayor of Bordeaux, member of parliament and former president of Chirac’s party, the UMP — is now on hold following his conviction for misappropriating public funds. Earlier this year he was given an 18-month suspended sentence and ruled ineligible for elected office for 10 years.

The case dates from Chirac’s long tenure as mayor of Paris. Juppé was the secretary-general of the RPR, Chirac’s then party, which later merged into today’s UMP, as well as town hall treasurer. He was accused of using municipal funds to pay the salaries of RPR staffers as if they were bona fide town hall employees. His defence was not on the facts — it was soon clear that Paris ratepayers were picking up the tab for seven RPR workers — but on ignorance of them.

The head of Juppé’s cabinet told the court that “everybody knew” what was going on. Catherine Pierce, the judge, gave him a longer sentence than the prosecution had demanded on the grounds that he had “deceived the trust of the people”.

Chirac, visibly shocked, praised Juppé’s “exceptional quality, competence, humanity and honesty”, and invited him to dine tête-à-tête at the Elysée. Juppé has since lodged an appeal.


The natural candidate to succeed Juppé as president of the UMP is the man they most dislike and fear, Nicolas Sarkozy, the finance minister. Dashing, decisive, the son of an aristocratic Hungarian, lacking instinctive Gaullist Anglophobia, and making a Blairite power duo with his striking wife Cécilia, Sarkozy is the coming man, and it hurts.

Control of the UMP will give him a springboard for his 2007 presidential bid. State subsidies have replaced donations in an effort to end the long series of scandals surrounding party finances. He will thus have access to a treasure chest for his campaign, and a ready-made think tank from which he can winkle out the hapless Juppé’s advisers.

The Juppé case may have more serious implications. If “everybody” knew what was happening, must this not also include Chirac? In 1999 he obtained a ruling from the constitutional council that presidential immunity extended to any prosecution for any offence, short of high treason, including those alleged to have been committed before he assumed office.

Opponents say that questions remain for Chirac to answer on his town hall years the moment he leaves the sanctuary of the Elysée. How, for example, could he spend £1.5m in eight years to feed himself and his wife? And why was almost £1m of that in cash? He dismisses all allegations with a single magnificent word: “Abracadabrantesque.”

Chirac has reason to feel aggrieved, as well as concerned. The socialists under François Mitterrand misused public funds on a scale undreamt of by Juppé. They created a building consultancy, Urba, with 16 regional offices, in order to siphon money from public works contracts into party coffers. It contributed £2.4m to Mitterrand’s re-election campaign.
 

Blackleaf

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The Sunday Times - Review


Page 1 || Page 2 || Page 3 || Page 4

Police and investigating magistrates were stymied when Mitterrand announced a grand amnesty for those being investigated for financial misdemeanours. This applied to all elected representatives, including himself.
This relaxed attitude to the probity of the political class stems from tradition. Justice, or its more workaday companion, legality, is missing from the revolutionary pantheon of liberty, equality and fraternity. France has no strict separation of powers in the Anglo-Saxon sense. The law is not awesome, distinct, untouchable. It does not rule. It resides in the justice ministry, the servant of ministers not their master.



If this has led to high public tolerance — Juppé will bounce back if he wins his appeal — it also breeds cynicism.

This was a factor in the astonishing results of the 2002 presidential elections when Chirac put up both the best and the worst performance yet recorded by an incumbent in the Fifth Republic. He polled less than 20% in the first round — a personal disaster — but stormed home in the second with 82% of the vote.

In the first round, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the fire-eating leader of the extreme right National Front, polled 16.9%, a personal record. It left Chirac with a problem.

He campaigned in the first round on a centre-right platform. In the second he reached out beyond his natural constituency to beg for the anti-Le Pen vote as a whole. Mark I was altogether tougher and more uncompromising on divisive issues — pension reforms, whittling down strikers’ rights, getting rid of former prime minister Lionel Jospin’s 35-hour week — than the softer, Mark II.

Which Chirac is in charge? Last week, on a high-profile visit to Nîmes, he announced a Mark I-style policy of zero tolerance on petty crime and a tightening up of immigration rules. But he also emphasised his commitment to the Mark II buzz word, “social cohesion”.

Chirac has no fixed course to navigate. Gaullism is a dated philosophy and firmness of policy has never been his strong point. He is a remarkable man with brilliant survival skills. Some see him as a “Don Juan” of politics. It is apt. He likes to conquer power and to possess it, but he has less skill in exercising it, sometimes to the point where it seems no longer to interest him.

His career, observers note, has proceeded in two-year bursts of energy that then run into the sands. His first bout as prime minister in 1974 lasted for two years before he resigned. In 1986 the defeat of the parliamentary left obliged Mitterrand to appoint him prime minister again, in the Fifth Republic’s first “cohabitation” between a president and premier of different loyalties.

Again, he lasted just two years. He was back in 1995, this time winning the prime prize, the Elysée Palace. But in 1997 he decided to call early parliamentary elections on the basis that it would give Juppé, his prime minister, a mandate to bring in the euro. It was unnecessary. Juppé and the right controlled four-fifths of the assembly, two-thirds of the senate and 19 of the 22 French regions.

The two-year phenomenon hit again. The left won. Chirac was marooned in a sour, five-year cohabitation with the socialists. The euro, the cause of this disaster, limped through a referendum anyway.

He has immense staying power, however, and luck. France won the World Cup. Chirac’s image was burnished by his daughter Claude, his closest confidante. He is warm and sympathetic, a man of great personal charm and bustle. His ratings soared and he won the 2002 election.

Two years on, France’s long-term problems are still unaddressed.

More than a quarter of the workforce are public sector employees, a proportion matched only in Scandinavia. The finance ministry employs almost 180,000 people, with two distinct organisations, one to assess tax and one to collect.

The education ministry continues to employ 960,000, regardless of a fall in school numbers. The defence ministry sports a junior minister with his own department to deal with the dwindling number of war veterans. Public sector unions fight tooth and nail to preserve the feathers in their bedding. Their pensions, for example, are based on the final six months of salary. Such generosity is demographically unsustainable. Gas and electricity face difficult privatisations and they have huge unfunded pension obligations.
 

Blackleaf

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The health service is perhaps the best in the world. Hospital waiting lists are short, family doctors make home visits at weekends and most costs are covered by the state or co-operative insurance. But it costs almost 10% of GDP.
It is not only the unions who resent reform: 40% of French MPs are on leave from the civil service. They, too, have a vested interest in undoing any minister who takes them on.



Does the two-year rule dogging Chirac still apply?

As the old “bulldozer” endures his night out at Windsor Castle on Thursday, the prospects must look miserable.