France gets a new president and the US and Israel a staunch new ally. Nicolas Sarkozy who is set to move into the Elysée Palace on May 16 is proud to be called “Sarkozy the American” and didn’t flinch when a member of the opposition referred to him as an “American neoconservative with a French passport”.
“I want to call out to our American friends to tell them they can count on our friendship,” was one of his victory speech messages.
Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer is appreciative. He told CNN that “it would be nice to have someone who is head of France who doesn’t have a knee-jerk reaction against the United States”.
It’s hardly surprising that topping his foreign policy agenda is the cementing of relations between Paris and Washington, strained over the Iraq war. Sarkozy smoothed the path by crossing the Atlantic in a show of solidarity for the American president under siege and has even slammed members of his own government for their anti-war stance.
“You must have loathed us then,” he told his American hosts. Together with his statement that he sometimes feels like a stranger in his own land, it was a remark that grated on his parliamentary colleagues at the time.
Sarkozy’s incumbency is a great day for Israel too. He has Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side and is a self-proclaimed friend of Israel, which he termed a victim of terrorist aggression during the war with Lebanon last summer. Hezbollah is a terrorist group out to destroy Israel, he said.
And like most US politician hoping to succeed, Sarkozy has paid due homage to the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and has visited Jerusalem where he claimed a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial marked a turning point in his life. His promises to visit the West Bank and Gaza failed to materialize.
The Rabbinical Center of Europe has congratulated Sarkozy saying he brings hope that the chances of degeneration toward another Holocaust in Europe will be largely mitigated despite the “recent rise of anti-Semitism and xenophobia”.
Conversely, the Turks must be shuddering at the news. France’s new man at the top has been a firm opponent of Turkey’s entrance into the EU on the grounds that Turkey is an “Asian country” espousing less so-called European values than its eastern neighbors Israel and Lebanon.
And when it comes to the contretemps between the US and Iran over the latter’s uranium enrichment program, it is thought that Sarkozy will back stiffer sanctions against Tehran and may impose additional sanctions on top of those mandated by the Security Council.
During a televised interview, Sarkozy depicted Iran as “the most important problem on the international scene” and said calls by the Iranian president for Israel’s destruction represented the most serious threat to world peace.
At the same time he has stressed he has nothing against Muslims and, to be fair, he played a major role in setting-up an Islamic Council and stood against the ban on religious symbols, including head scarves, in French schools. He has further supported positive discrimination, which he says is the only way to guarantee equal opportunities for everyone.
The problem is few can ever forget his reference to underprivileged children of mostly North African immigrants as “scum” that should be washed away with a power-hose when they rioted over the electrocution of two of their fellows while hiding from the police in an electricity substation.
At the time he expressed a desire to expel foreigners involved in the riots and attempted to charter flights to deport illegal immigrants. He said immigrants should be allowed to bring in their families only if they are capable of housing them and providing for them. But his most controversial statement concerned immigrant women subjected to home imprisonment by their husbands who, he said, should be deported.
In his victory speech Sarkozy vowed to be a president for all French people. But while most French people crave reform, the country is virtually split down the middle as to what should be done about youth unemployment, outdated labor laws, rising crime levels, high taxation and an influx of immigrants.
Sarkozy is due to go into retreat for several days to form his Cabinet and fine-tune what is expected to be a tough agenda.
This includes plans to do away with the 35-hour week that he has referred to as “absurd”, a revision of the labor law, and job retraining programs. He has also promised market reforms while protecting French industry from unfair competition.
His plans to curtail immigration include a Ministry for Immigration and National Identity that was slammed by French Holocaust survivor and former president of the European Parliament Simone Veil. I would have preferred a Ministry for Immigration and Integration, she said. In recent months, Sarkozy has watered down his anti-immigration rhetoric and attempted a more inclusive approach. In the run-up to the election he had these fine words to say:
“I dream that you live in a France where no one is judged by the color of his skin, his religion or the address of his neighborhood, but on the nature of his character.”
He said he dreams of the day when “Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim children can sit together at the table of French fraternity.”
Judging by the rioting in the suburbs that have greeted the new French president even before the implementation of his hard-line policies that day may be sometime away.
