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Sarkozy as the French Berlusconi

Six months in office, and Nicolas Sarkozy has not ceased being an embarrassment on the world stage. From his first appearance at the G8 summit in Germany, where he foolishly called for more delay on Kosovo to his fawning visit to Washington this week, France’s President is making waves for the wrong reasons.

Take his sudden descent last Sunday on Chad, where a group of French charity workers have been charged with kidnapping scores of children, describing them as orphans, putting fake bandages on some, and seeking to remove all of them from their families for ever. Here is a case that clearly deserves to be tried where the crime was committed. Yet President Sarkozy flies into N’d

jamena, brightly declaring that he wants the defendants taken to justice in France.

The visit to Washington is of a different dimension, though here the Americans are as much to blame as Mr. Sarkozy and his entourage for the phoney mood music. They are hyping the alleged shift in French policy as falsely as Mr. Sarkozy’s people. Some U.S. and French commentators are even saying that Mr. Sarkozy is President George W. Bush’s staunchest European friend, the new Tony Blair. What is the substance?

Mr. Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, was a lifelong admirer of America. Mr. Sarkozy first visited the U.S. at the age of 31 as the guest of a U.S. government “young leaders” programme — the classic case of an ambitious man who was willing to be wooed.

Mr. Chirac’s cooling towards America was not based on prejudice but a principled difference in policy over Iraq — a stance that Mr. Sarkozy (to his democratic credit, since few French people would support a turnaround) is not reversing. All that has happened is a shift in symbolism in the war on terror, pushed partly by France’s Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, who did agree with the attack on Iraq. France will send 50 military trainers, not to Iraq but southern Afghanistan, as well as letting its Mirage fighter-bombers go into action there. Not much change there.

At home, Mr. Sarkozy’s rush to act first and think afterwards is as notable as on foreign policy. So are his arrogance and bad temper. Where is the dignity of the office? Where is a sense of the responsibilities a President carries? Where is the subtlety needed by anyone who wants to negotiate a new deal with France’s public service workers?

Ground yourself for a while Mr. Sarkozy. Otherwise, you could become the gaffe-prone European whom your colleagues roll their eyes at when you turn your back — the new Berlusconi, the clown they grimly have to grin and bear. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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