Segolene goes to China
5 January 2007French Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal is traveling to China this coming week. How she does there will likely determine her chances of success in winning over Sarkozy. I continue to think she will lead France.
Chirac yesterday laid out again how wrong the US was to attack Iraq, and noted that the world was a less safe place because of our actions.
With Angela Merkel making friends with the US again, how France votes will have a major impact on whether a) continental Europe continues to speak with a single voice, and b) the US finally stops to listen. Bush and Merkel appeared before the press today, theoretically his comments/accessions to Merkel on global warming have some abstract meaning; I think they have none. You have to watch his hands, not his mouth.
Bush’s many disasters at home and abroad have provided an opening for European leadership as large as the vacuum he daily creates. For Europe, the question is now simple: they already have achieved financial (currency) dominance. Can they achieve a position of political leadership, ahead and beyond that of the US, that would be recognized, generally, on a global field? Bush’s stupidity and mistakes have provided them with an unbelievable set of opportunities, and I expect they see this, and are working to take advantage, during these last two years.
Surge, anyone?
One Response to “Segolene goes to China”
January 7th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
As far as France is concerned I don’t think it will make any difference who wins the election. Sarkozy is a pure opportunist, like Chirac only not senile. Segolene promises to turn back the few positive reforms France has made in the past few years.
Just to give you an idea it’s common for me to be in conversation of cocktails here in Paris when a Frenchman tells me that if a man is making $40M he should be paying $39M in taxes. (It’s no use trying to bring up the fact that nobody would bother to make $40M if they had to pay $39M to the taxman because the atmospheric conditions here don’t allow words like that to be transmitted through the air.)
The world is in dire need of leadership that much is for sure. I wish I knew where it was going to come from but France probably isn’t going to be one of them.