- The would-be master chef in the Elysée Palace
appears to be cooking up a lethal concoction, worries Eric Walberg
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- There is no question that President Nicolas Sarkozy is
a master political manipulator. On the domestic front he trumped both left
and right, bringing Socialists into his cabinet, setting them at each others'
throats. At the same time, showing his true colours, he moved quickly to
confront the unions and students over early retirement, probationary work
guarantees, university places for all who want them. Note how his "reforms"
are all about taking away rights, not giving people more. He also cleverly
borrowed a soupçon of Le Pen's anti-Arab jingoism for his broth.
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- In a recent debate between Marine Le Pen, vice president
of the National Front of France and heir to her notorious father, and Tariq
Ramadan, the Egyptian-Swiss intellectual, grandson of founder of the Muslim
Brotherhood Hassan Al-Banna, dubbed the Muslim Martin Luther, both agreed
that Sarkozy and his ilk pose the biggest threat to Europe's social fabric.
Le Pen grumbled that they steal arguments and votes from the NF; Ramadan
complained that they make Le Pen's ideas acceptable to the average voters.
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- Ex-Mossad agent Sarko is able to piggy-back on the Zionist
stranglehold in European intellectual life to cow the likes of Le Pen into
dropping their anti-Jewish rhetoric and focus their racist instincts on
Muslims. At the same time, he is able to build on the Thatcherite legacy
to undermine the welfare state. In less than a year in office, he has thrown
together this poisonous stew and serves it up as his new programme to meet
the demands of 21st century France.
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- Ramadan is one of the few media personalities who is
given a chance to counter this slide towards a Euro-Reich, arguing that
forcing Muslim immigrants to abandon their traditions, capitulating to
the likes of Sarko, merely reinforces racism. "What we need is a new
narrative, a new 'we', a mutlicoloured, multicultural European identity.
Europeans need to psychologically integrate that into their world view."
This is light-years from the subtle but inherently racist project that
Sarko is busy trying to implement. By the way, he is not always subtle,
as his hate-filled reference to Arabs as scum when minister of interior
in Jacques Chirac's cabinet revealed.
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- On the international scene, Sarko has been even busier,
if that's possible, despite the lack of any clear foreign policy programme
in his election campaign. In addition to his reputation as a latter-day
Tartuffe, Sarkozy is also being called a reincarnation of Pétain,
the general who governed Nazi-occupied France from 1939-45, allowing the
Germans (read: Americans) to carry out their imperial agenda without any
French resistance. This rather startling parallel of current European politics
with the 1930s has also surfaced, of all places, in the Czech Republic,
where citizens are strongly against one of Sarko's pet schemes - to tear
Kosovo away from Serbia, seeing it as a reenactment of the Munich agreement
of 1938, when Britain served up Sudetenland to the Nazis, which was completely
illegal not to mention immoral. Strikingly, Russia played and is now playing
the role of the only major power to oppose such submission to the imperial
bully du jour.
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- So far opposition to the present world bully is weak.
While France, Germany and with some delay Spain refused to tow the line
on Iraq, the election of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and now Sarkozy
has undone this feeble protest. However, Russia's resistance to US world
plans has begun to gain respect around the world, even in once hostile
Eastern Europe, with Poland and Bulgaria being the latest to begin thawing
their relations with Russia, responding to popular pressure, despite unremitting
anti-Russia US/European media.
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- One startling development - remember, Sarko's been at
the helm of state less than a year - is either a pièce de résistance
or a recipe for disaster, depending on your culinary tastes. During a visit
15 January to the UAE, he unveiled his plan to set up France's first permanent
naval base in the Gulf, just across from Iran. The base will be built in
Abu Dhabi, and is intended to put France in the big league alongside the
US in the Middle East. The agreement is a "sign to all that France
is participating in the stability of this region of the world," Sarko
told reporters. "France responds to its friends. France and the Emirates
signed a reciprocal defence accord in 1995. Our friends from the Emirates
asked that a base with 400 personnel be opened." Earlier accords were
signed with the threat of Iraq under Saddam Hussein in mind; today it is
Iran that is the bête-noire, awaiting invasion by the US and France,
to be served up as Sarko's latest cordon bleu monstrosity. Or so this megalomaniac
imagines in his wild fantasies.
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- The closest French military base to the Gulf is in Djibouti,
a former French colony on the Red Sea. That base will be scaled back as
a result of the new one. "This is quite a revolution," said an
anonymous French government official. "We are no longer in our historic
sphere of influence. Now we're in a country we never colonised." Out
with the old imperialism, in with the new.
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- Does he need a reminder about the bloody wars for Algerian
and Vietnamese independence? Dien Bien Phu, anyone? How clever - arm Hussein
to the teeth (good for the French arms industry), frighten his UAE neighbours
into giving you bases, then use them to attack Iran. Is this really happening?
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- It is in this context that we must consider his supposedly
enlightened offer to compliant Arab states to provide nuclear energy cooperation.
The Emirates will soon start construction on a $6 billion nuclear reactor
with the generous assistance of France's EDF. Egypt has been offered a
similar radioactive white elephant. Another brilliant coup - bring coals
to Newcastle and sell them for big bucks. In the land of the eternal sun,
floating on a sea of oil, get your "friends" to pay you billions
of euros to build radioactive furnaces which produce eternal waste. The
quintessential snake-oil salesman. I rest my case.
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- Quelle affreux. There are a few cracks in his many dishes,
however. His inimitable ex-wife Cecilia did her level best to stab him
in the back, leaving him very publicly at a crucial moment in his political
intrigues - her stand-up of not one but two US presidents at Kennebunkport
last autumn is the stuff of legend. She recently published tell-all memoirs
revealing his 4 am Karaoke and booze-laced shenanigans with ladies of the
night while France was burning, the result of his stand-off with the unions.
He has shown his inner Tartuffe more than once on his numerous frantic
visits to Russia, America and Africa. He was forced to flip-flop on his
plan to scuttle the 35 hour work week, one minute saying it was toast,
the next - the bedrock of the state's understanding with labour.
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- Despite a flurry of appointments and speeches about a
new relationship with Africa, demanding less corruption and more democracy,
etc., there is little likelihood that his southern neighbours will pay
any attention to him. His diplomatic coup of saving Bulgarian nurses in
Libya and of retrieving adoption agents kidnapping Chadian children left
him with more egg on his face than on his platter. As a cook he is just
too ambitious, introducing spices and turning up the flame in a seemingly
chaotic manner as he tries to win approval.
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- And just as he is able to manipulate liberal left and
chauvinist right to forge an unholy alliance and pursue his Petainesque
neocon-neoliberalism, he is stirring up leftists, true French patriots
and anti-neocon conservatives into a new French résistance.
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- Petain or Tartuffe? Whatever he is, we are sure to be
in for more indigestion. Let's hope that's all.
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