Under pressure from Chirac, Sarkozy drops planned vote on Turkey-EU

From AFP, with thanks to Ali Dashti, who suggests that Chirac may be bowing down to his Muslim masters:

PARIS, Jan 20 (AFP) - Under pressure from President Jacques Chirac, his arch-rival Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday dropped plans to present a resolution opposing Turkey's full entry to the European Union before the national council of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party.
In what was widely described as a deliberate provocation of the president -- who supports Turkish entry -- Sarkozy last week told journalists that the 1,500 member council would be asked to vote in March on a motion to grant Turkey "privileged partnership" rather than membership.

Sarkozy -- the UMP president -- has the backing of most party members in opposing full membership for Ankara, which is to start accession talks later this year.

However leading Chirac supporters criticised Sarkozy for opening a divisive issue when the party needs to be united behind the campaign for approval of the EU constitution -- to be put to a referendum in the coming months.

The UMP president said Thursday that he had decided instead to present a composite resolution on the EU to the national council, in which the Turkish issue would be less prominent.

6 Comments

obl r us | January 21, 2005 7:35 AM

I think I understand Chirac now. Since when did sadomasochism (at the euro land level) ever involve voting?

Charles Martel | January 21, 2005 9:37 AM

However leading Chirac supporters criticised Sarkozy for opening a divisive issue when the party needs to be united behind the campaign for approval of the EU constitution -- to be put to a referendum in the coming months.

That's right! Musn't do anything to rock the boat when France is on the verge of being crowned Queen of the new Franco-German Eurabian superstate. Can't allow that cowboy Bush and those uncouth Americans to do anything to undermine French-Iranian oil deals, future EU arms funding for the Islamic republic of Palestine, or French participation in Chinese war games directed at Taiwan. Can't allow wicked American hegemony in the world, you know.

Hugh | January 21, 2005 1:01 PM

Sarkozy was the one who took no lying lip from Tariq ("I respect my grandfather, he was my grandfather") Ramadan on France-2. Unlike Chirac, he is not a crook; perhaps he does not require the simultaneous services, as Chirac is said to do, of three poules de luxe. He never was given, as Chirac was, a jewel-encrusted falcon of precious metal, in the Kniphausen Hawk style, by Arab admirers. Sarkozy never distributed Parisian apartments to his supporters, as Chirac, when Mayor did. The apartments, you see, had no owners -- or rather, the owners had been rounded up during the war, for the rafle of the Vel d'Hiv, as it is abridged, and sent off to Drancy and points East, never to be seen again.

Sarkozy is now the Great French Hope. He is by no means perfect. He may improve. Or someone better may come along. But as Miss Sadie says in that old song, "I may not be the best in town/But I'm the best till the best comes 'round." For now, Sarkozy is like Miss Sadie.

Someone with deeper pockets might send Sarkozy the French version of "Eurabia." Political figures of a certain age still read, in maddening France.

waterdragon52 | January 21, 2005 3:49 PM

Funny, isn't it, how the French sneer at the Americans for re-electing Bush, when the best they could do to keep ultra-right Jean Marie Le Pen from becoming President was to re-elect the vile, corrupt Chiraq

saturnine | January 22, 2005 10:49 PM

From the latest Tom Friedman column (NY Times, registration req'd http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/opinion/23friedman.html?hp)

I spent Friday morning interviewing two 18-year-old French Muslim girls in the Paris immigrant district of St.-Ouen. (It is about a mile from the school where in March 2003 a French Muslim girl, who had refused the veil and rebuffed the advances of a Muslim boy, was thrown into a garbage can by three Muslim teenagers, who then tossed lighted cigarette butts into the can and closed the lid.)
Both girls I interviewed wore veils and one also wore a full Afghan-like head-to-toe covering; one was of Egyptian parents, the other of Tunisian parents, but both were born and raised in France. What did I learn from them? That they got all their news from Al Jazeera TV, because they did not believe French TV, that the person they admired most in the world was Osama bin Laden, because he was defending Islam, that suicide "martyrdom" was justified because there was no greater glory than dying in defense of Islam, that they saw themselves as Muslims first and French citizens last, and that all their friends felt pretty much the same.

We were not in Kabul. We were standing outside their French public high school - a short ride from the Eiffel Tower.

Sigh.

Hugh | January 23, 2005 4:53 PM

Funny, isn't it, that Friedman is slowly beginning to have some things dawn on him. But he is locked into his previous 20 years of utter idiocy, not only in his preaching constantly to the Israelis about something he knew, and knows, nothing about -- the reason, immutable, and not to be assuaged by any further reduction in Israel's already infinitesimal area -- but also in all of his high-flow, no-doubt to him most exciting talks with so-called Arab leaders and intellectuals, with his constant inside-dopesterism which is such a feature of his well-paid life as a lecturer on "the Middle East" or the "Prospects for Change" or some other silly hour in which an audience of the ill-informed listens to another person, equally ill-informed but with a title on his door (and a Bigelow on the floor?). So even if he manages to accidentally stumble on a few home truths, he will never be a guide to the whole picture. It would require a certain amount of work, of study. He's too dumb. He can't do it.