“After weeks of embarrassing French slip-ups – including Paris blindly standing by the Tunisian and Egyptian dictatorships until the last minute – a group of diplomats have published a scathing attack on the president in Le Monde.”
—The Guardian writes about an open letter by “Marly,” a group of anonymous high-ranking French diplomats who have had enough of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s antics. Under his leadership, they say, “impulsivity, amateurism, concern for the media, incoherence” have become the rule, ruining the prestige of French diplomacy, which, since World War II, has managed to maintain an independent, yet strong position on the international stage.
The fact is that the only country who has more diplomatic envoys than France is the U.S., although this isn’t doing us any good since Sarkozy has apparently replaced Tony Blair as America’s poodle. Granted, better to kiss Obama’s ass than Dubya’s. But all this does is make France even more irrelevant. And where’s that original view on foreign affairs, the different angle, the healthy debate amongst friends?
Your first instinct may well be to laugh at the thought of a privileged few bemoaning France’s dwindling influence. Yet it wasn’t that long ago when former French President Jacques Chirac stood firm against Bush on the war in Iraq, when France’s resounding “NO” shook the walls of the UN’s Security Council (en français), giving a voice to the millions of people who took to the streets to denounce the Yes Men who’d betrayed them (in Spain and in the U.K., to cite only two), and when the Republicans’ most spiteful response was to rename food. Sadly for us, sadly for everyone, that time is far behind us.
If voters needed another reason to give Sarko the boot at the next elections (in 2012), here’s a perfectly good one: he’s embarrassing us all. Yet I fail to see what this open letter is accomplishing, other than shed an even harsher light on France’s shortcomings.
Somebody get him out of the Elysée Palace, please.
For the full text in French, click here.
— From SF.
