Chirac's long, hard fall
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
PARIS
In spring 2004 French President Jacques Chirac appeared to be on top of the world. He had vocally and vehemently opposed the invasion of Iraq, aligning himself with the vast majority of French citizens.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar backed the war and found himself ousted from office and the two heads of state who led the war, American President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, both faced difficult re-election campaigns. Around the globe, a growing, angry anti-Americanism dominated public debates and Chirac was the face and the hero of that movement.
There was even talk of the European Union becoming a global economic and political superpower to rival the United States; the continent's elites eagerly envisioned a superstate to "counterbalance" reckless American power, with a consummate sophisticated diplomat like Chirac at the controls.
Today, Bush and Blair have been re-elected, talk of the EU as a global power sounds like a sign you've enjoyed too much French wine and the last two years of Chirac's reign have been so bad they make President Bush's stumbling second term look like a golden age. The French president's long fall is a cautionary tale for world leaders.
Path to demise
A key step on the EU's road to greater power was the ratification of a constitution that would lay out the powers of the administrators in Brussels and set policies on all manner of issues. Chirac was the driving force behind the roughly 230-page legislative monstrosity. But his own voters didn't trust it, fearing the loss of sovereignty and an influx of cheap foreign labor. The electorate rejected it by a shocking 55 percent to 45 percent; because each EU member nation has to approve the constitution for it to be ratified, it is sidelined for the foreseeable future.
Back in 2000, EU leaders including Chirac outlined "the Lisbon strategy," an ambitious plan to make Europe "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010." Today, those pledges look deliriously over-optimistic, particularly in regard to France's economy.
The French work force is used to enjoying benefits that are unimaginably generous by American standards -- 35-hour-work weeks, an average of seven weeks paid vacation per year, unemployment benefits of 57 to 75 percent of a jobseeker's last salary for up to three years and sometimes longer for older workers. France is not in a temporary slump; a bloated regulatory state, high taxes, frequent strikes and other complications have proven that the country just isn't a competitive place to do business. The economy has sunk into le crappeur and any serious attempt at reform was torpedoed by huge strikes and protests by young people earlier this year.
(Americans enjoying the exquisite food, fine wine, glorious views, and leisurely pace of life in a city like Paris often say, "Europeans really know how to live." Indeed, this is because many of them don't know how to work.)
The riots
Last fall's car-torching ethnic violence demonstrated that state authorities could not keep order in large swaths of their cities and suburbs. France has never had its own Rudy Giuliani or its equivalent of the policing reforms that dramatically reduced crime in New York City and other major cities in the 1990s.
It took weeks for the violence to die down; some speculated that the nightly arsons ended not because of effective police work but because the most violent neighborhoods simply ran out of cars. The riots also exposed that allegedly progressive and sophisticated France had, in reality, little ability to assimilate its millions of North African, central African and Middle Eastern immigrants into the broader French culture. The country is now struggling to deal with an underemployed, resentful and seething underclass.
Recent weeks have seen the collapse of public confidence in their elected officials, from all of the problems listed above and now an ugly, complicated political scandal. Chirac and his preferred successor, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, are so widely disliked that they could look up at Bush's current approval numbers.
Finally, Chirac's anti-Americanism seems to be going out of style. More than a few Europeans who were previously harshly critical of the U.S. are begrudgingly acknowledging that not all of the world's problems can be blamed on President Bush.
From Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinjiad's nuclear saber-rattling to the explosion of Islamist violence in response to the Danish cartoons, from the international community's paralysis in the face of genocide in the Sudan, to the United Nation's Oil-for-Food scandal, Chirac proved a master of saying "non" to American ideas and policies but he's fallen far short at proposing serious alternatives.
Jacques the Morose
While President Bush is fighting his lame-duck status every day, Chirac seems to have settled into a morose acceptance of his government's paralysis. There is some belief in France that Chirac may dump Villepin this summer and move his tough-talking Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy into the prime minister's office -- perhaps when all of France is following its national team in the World Cup.
That change would make Sarkozy a de facto incumbent, akin to Al Gore following Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush following Ronald Reagan. If that scenario occurs, Chirac will truly be seen as yesterday's man, irrelevant to the challenges of the moment.
Chirac will leave office in spring 2007 with a mess in his wake. By nearly every measure -- economic growth, foreign relations, crime, social policy -- his nation has stumbled while others strode. The adoration over his Iraq war stance didn't last and "Chirac-ism" is exposed as a dissatisfying combination of grandiose rhetoric and hesitant, status quo policies.
Sometime soon, Bush and Blair may get together to enjoy the last laugh.
Jim Geraghty, a contributing editor at National Review, is author of "Voting to Kill: How 9/11 Launched an Era of Republican Leadership," published by Simon and Schuster this August. |
