http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/17/weu217.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/06/17/ixnewstop.html
The Sick man of Europe? Worse than that, Chirac is politically dead. He was elected in the first place because French voters were only given the choice to pick from Le Pen or him…… It is humorous to see that just a few years ago, when Schroeder and he appropriated themselves of the global, massive protests against the war in Iraq, nobody would bet a dime for Bush and Blair. However, they were reelected, obtained large majorities and the trust of the citizens, their position is unarguably strengthened, while everyone who opposed them, namely Chirac and Schroeder, who were astute enough to camouflage French and German interests under the multicolor flag of peace, are mere corpses soon to be disposed of. Sarkozy will be his successor. Angela Merkel will certify Schroeder’s demise in September.
But are Chirac and Schroeder's problems the result of their opposing the US and UK on Iraq, or the result of France and Germany's high unemployment and underperforming economies? Of course, both Bush and Blair are champions of the kind of liberalism (in the European, not American sense) that's anethema in much of France. I gather that the French 'Non' campaign was spearheaded by the left which feared the spread of market economics and the trimming back of the welfare state. (I'm not sure about the Dutch 'Nee' campaign. It seems from here in California to have been more of a British-style argument about surrendering Dutch national identity to some unaccountable supernational bureaucracy. But I might be mistaken about that.) Anyway, whatever the reason for it, if Chirac and Schroeder's downfall leads to a more Atlanticist policy in Europe, the US can only be happy about that. I was reading something in last week's 'Economist' about how Schroeder's youthful formative experiences were anti-US Vietnam demonstrations, while Angela Merkel grew up kind of idealizing the US from over there on the other side of the Wall. So the Western German instinctively associates 'America' with 'imperialist', while the Eastern German associates 'America' with 'land of freedom'.
