France on amphetamines - International Herald Tribune

(((Slowly, the Anglophone press is coming to realize that something genuinely weird is happening in France.)))

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/16/opinion/edcohen.php

Link: Roger Cohen: France on amphetamines - International Herald Tribune.

I know there's a view of Sarkozy as a Bonapartist Caligula, consumed with himself, brooking no dissent, petulant to the point of puerility, and governing in such perpetual motion that he will only see the wall he's condemned to hit when it's too late.

True, Sarkozy is not Saint Augustine, Gandhi or the Dalai Lama. I don't like his attempt to subjugate the media - Le Figaro now fawns to a point that's cloying and his control-the-message TV machinations are shameful. I also think the president should open his mind to Turkish membership of the European Union.

But this man is a tonic to his country and the most important European leader of his time. (((It's strange, but it's entirely true.)))

In the space of a year, he has transformed France's relations with the United States, Israel, its North African neighbors and NATO. On the domestic front, he has got a Socialist leader to confess he's also a liberal, a word long so taboo to the French Left because of its free-market associations that embracing it was worse than admitting incest.

Let's take international matters first. Sarkozy's Mediterranean Union summit - a kind of Club Med Bastille Day bash - had its share of vapid ostentation, but was significant for several reasons.

It got the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in the same room, drew the latter out of isolation, and signaled a new European awareness of how its identity has become inseparable from societies across the "mother sea" that have sent so many of their Muslim sons and daughters northward.

At a deeper level, here was the European Union taking the initiative in its neighborhood rather than in the familiar fallback reactive mode where critiquing the United States masquerades as policy. (((Hey, uh, yeah.))) The Union for the Mediterranean is a near-empty shell but an important impulse for Europe to think big.

I was gratified that a communiqué said this new venture will be independent from the EU enlargement "accession negotiations." That was a message to Turkey. Thinking big and excluding Turkey from the EU is oxymoronic.

Sarkozy has reached across oceans as well as seas. By breaking political taboos about America, and burying Gaullist posturing by announcing France's return to NATO's military command, he has given France greater room for maneuver. The new French diplomatic mantra is: Join the club to gain more independence.

U.S. mistrust of France is now in eerie abeyance: Universalist France has its day in the sun. (((They just don't know what to make of him, besides which, the terror-war US doesn't have any "diplomacy" – just bluster and guns.)))

Because you can't build a Europe that's divided toward the United States, as Iraq illustrated, his pro-Americanism has aided EU cohesiveness.

In the same way, his warmth toward Israel has given France the room to emerge as a credible Middle Eastern intermediary. (((The idea of people trusting France as a mediator is incredible, but who else is there? The Norwegians, maybe?)))

At home, where he's unpopular in the polls but less so around the dinner table, (((they don't love him, but they can't stop obsessing about him))) Sarkozy has circumvented the 35-hour week by slashing taxes on overtime, freed up universities, downsized the state functionary community (and mentality), spurred small businesses, cut public spending, and set in motion a radical reform aimed at creating a 21st-century army.

By comparison, Gordon Brown in Britain, he of Heathcliffian moodiness, and Angela Merkel in Germany, she of grand coalition paralysis, look second-tier. (((Yep.)))

(((Meanwhile, on the Carla "Notorious, Home-Wrecking Man-Eater" Bruni-Sarkozy front:)))

http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/Columnists/Van_Dusen_Lisa/2008/07/16/6169836-sun.html

"While all the other wives at the G8 summit in Toyako last week giggled demurely through a Japanese tea ceremony, Bruni, the 40-year-old former supermodel and lover of rock stars, philosophers, philosophers' fathers and lesser statesmen now married to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, was busy launching her third CD, Comme si de rien n'etait (As if Nothing Happened).

"The CD, which is vaulting up the Amazon charts in both France and Britain, includes references to her multiple lovers and a breathy tribute to the French president's addictive properties.

"You are my drug," Bruni croons of her stocky neo-Gaullist husband. "More lethal than heroin from Afghanistan and more dangerous than Colombian white." (That last bit prompted a protest from the righteously indignant Colombian government).

I try till my head hurts, but it's impossible to imagine anyone uttering the same things about George W. Bush or Britain's Gordon Brown.

(...)

"In the gilded locker room of G8 alpha-male rivalry, (((hey, nice turn of phrase, ma'am))) Sarkozy's glammy wife gives him a disproportionate competitive advantage. George W. may be six feet tall and he may represent the world's reigning superpower but, in the same way Pierre Trudeau's sex life put Canada on the worldwide media map, Sarkozy's elevation to sex symbol by a benignly articulate cover girl gives him a few extra inches on the invisible international power yardstick.

"His physique, his charm and his intelligence seduced me," Bruni has said of their whirlwind affair. "He has five or six brains, remarkably well irrigated."

Again, close your eyes and concentrate; Bush? Pas vraiement.

While in the past few months Bruni has overcome all the tremendously entertaining, exasperated French forehead slapping over her elevation from notorious, home wrecking man-eater to first lady, the new hazard for Sarkozy is that she will upstage him. (((That's not a hazard.)))

In the past week, Bruni has been promoting her CD in interviews, offering her views on pretty much everything and anything. She now has an approval rating of 68 per cent, more than 20 points higher than her husband. (((It doesn't take Machiavelli to figure that one out. You can't savage Sarkozy without harming Carla's tender, womanly feelings, and no French gentleman will do that. So it's up to Segolene. And Segolene is a pill and her marriage broke up. I personally thought Sarkozy should have married Segolene, but he probably knows her too well.)))

For women, a first lady interesting enough to have held her own in morning-after chit chat with both Mick Jagger and former prime minister Laurent Fabius, whose personality, at least so far, has trumped her colourful past, may actually qualify as a neo-feminist role model. For official wives, she could be an unexpected heroine. (((Well, she's certainly undone the corset and given political spouses some breathing-room.)))