French politics is often colorful. However, it achieved a disturbingly vivid hue when President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed he would see his rival and one-time boss, former Premier Dominique de Villepin “ hang from a butcher’s hook” for the role Sarkozy believed he had played in a smear plot.
Thursday de Villepin was cleared by a Paris court of any involvement in the crime. As a result, the French president may already be ruing the deeply unpleasant imagery of his comment. That there was an attempt to discredit Sarkozy was in no doubt. Three other men in the dock with de Villepin were found guilty in what has become known as the Clearstream case.
In 2004 Sarkozy’s name along with those of several other leading politicians and businessmen appeared in forged documents. These seemed to show that they had all received bribes from international arms companies, the money being channeled through a Luxembourg bank account. In court, de Villepin admitted seeing the documents but denied he knew they were fake. Therefore in using them against his main rival to succeed President Jacques Chirac in 2007, he was acting in good faith.
This extremely unedifying affair does not redound to the credit of the French president. The charisma that voters so much admired three years ago now looks more like mental imbalance. He has criticized President Obama’s take on climate change with the comment that the US leader “is not very experienced”. He has described the Spanish prime minister as “not particularly intelligent”. After the G20 summit in Pittsburgh last year, he belittled the impact of EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, who had been at the meeting saying that Barroso had been ‘totally absent from the G20’. He also annoyed German Chancellor Angela Merkel by insisting publicly that in the face of the financial crisis, he had got her to “toe the French line”.
While individually none of these gaffes is particularly serious, taken together they paint a picture of a French leader who is certainly not in complete command of his mouth, if not indeed of his faculties. The EU already has one boorish and disreputable leader in Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. It does not need another.
The sensible course of action for Sarkozy would be to accept the verdict of the court and seek to mend fences with de Villepin. He could even apologize for the fact that de Villepin was sent for trial. Ostensibly the case against him was brought by independent prosecutors but few Frenchmen doubt that Sarkozy was egging on the process. His unpleasant “butcher’s hook” remark points strongly toward this being so.
De Villepin, however, may be in no mood to accept any olive branch. His acquittal has undoubtedly restored his political fortunes and cleared the way for him to challenge Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential election. His demeanor as he left the court was of the outraged innocence, that most politicians so rarely have the chance to assume. This deeply unsavory episode is money in the bank for his campaign and a discredit to Sarkozy.
