The frog of peace
Jo Johnson says that Chirac is riding high in the opinion polls because of his defiance of the United States
Pans
Game over yet? Don't count on , it. As Prime Minister Raffarin retorted to President Bush, 'It's not a game. It's not over.' French President Jacques
Chirac and Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin, his foreign minister, are having a great war. Just look at the polls: a Sofres survey to be released on Friday will claim that 86 per cent of French people approve his handling of the Iraq crisis. That's more than the 82 per cent Chirac scored in last year's elections against the far-Right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. This expresses nicely what most French people think of George W. Bush, and most of it is unprintable. Eighty-one per cent. a figure to make Tony Blair weep with envy, believe France's role in the world has been strengthened by Chirac's 'principled resistance' to American hegemony. Flattered by comparisons with General Charles de Gaulle and saluted by politicians across the spectrum, Chirac has in six months erased a reputation for sleaze and opportunism acquired over four decades. Some argue he could even run for a third term in 2007, at the age of 74.
The Iraq crisis has also transformed de Villepin. An unelected appointee struggling to find a solution for the Cote d'Ivoire, his power until recently derived solely from a father-son relationship with Chirac, whom he served as chief of staff at the Elysee Palace until 2002. Back in 1997, de Villepin was widely held to be responsible for advising Chirac to call the snap election that handed power to the socialists and ended up emasculating the Gaullist President for five frustrating years of 'cohabitation'. Yet he survived. Over the past four months, from his gilded office at the Quai d'Orsay — oil painting of Napoleon on an easel to his left, bust of Napoleon to his right, and African tribal masks hanging off the walls
— he has worked tirelessly to amass a stock of political capital that is all his own. As well as being the aristo heart-throb of the diplomatic circuit, the 49-year-old is now seen as eminently presidentiable'.
The price of their high standing is the worst crisis in Franco-American relations for 40 years. The transatlantic (and crossChannel) mud-slinging is unprecedented, With 'Who? Moi?' outrage, French politicians and diplomats reject responsibility for the debacle. Both Chirac and de Villepin continue to deny the legitimacy of unilateral action and have poured scorn on the 48hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. In its editorial on Wednesday, Le Monde reflected the elite consensus that `for the US and Britain to go to war without a UN mandate represents a crushing diplomatic failure. . . . It's less the UN that is diminished than the prestige and perhaps moral authority of the US. Despite all the pressure, it failed to win a "political majority" of nine votes.. . . It failed to convince. Since the start of this affair, the US has failed to prove either the reality or immediacy of any Iraqi threat.'
Even though Chirac has granted the US overflight rights 'because we are friends and allies', has affirmed 'friendship — dare I say, love — between the French and American peoples', and hinted that France would participate in a war if Iraq turns out to have weapons of mass destruction, few doubt that he will try to score easy points if the war goes wrong. If Iraq disintegrates amid communal rivalries, if terrorists strike again, or the Palestine crisis deepens, there will be no shortage of Frenchmen crowing, It is a stance that is infuriating US diplomats. 'Chirac was cynically looking for an opportunity to establish France on the world stage with an act of resistance to US power,' claims one US diplomat in Paris. 'Chirac could have achieved all of his objectives simply by abstaining. Once he promised to vote "no", he provided cover for all of the undecideds and created the conditions under which America had to go it alone.'
US officials in Paris say they doubt the Bush administration will seek United Nations approval or Nato involvement for future military actions, effectively consigning both organisations to 'after-care' roles. For the United Nations again to hold any credibility in US eyes, many believe France will have to sacrifice, or at least share, its Security Council permanent membership status, 'De Villepin has delivered exactly what Chirac wanted, and in the process has done great damage to three institutions: the UN, Nato and the EU,' said one US diplomat in Paris.
Chirac seems scarcely worried by the new Francophobia. In a perverse way, it is even a measure of his success. It is proof that France finally counts. After all, to be on the receiving end of sustained and organised frog-bashing is a lot more satisfying than dishing out traditional French antiAmericanism, which is a bit vieux feu. So far the Francophobia is all harmless enough. Accor has decided to remove the Tricolore from outside some of its US hotels, rednecks have taken to smashing up Peugeots with sledgehammers, a Florida Congresswoman has called for the bodies of US servicemen to be reburied on US soil, and a chef has poured S1,000-worth of French wine down the la). Boycotts, as Le Figaro notes, often mistake their targets. Nothing has attracted a bigger sneer than the idea of 'freedom' fries: as pedants have endlessly pointed out, they were never French. but Belgian. Other traditional targets such as Perrier are, of course, not actually French-owned. More organised boycotts or sanctions would be self-defeating: almost half the money invested in French companies is American.
Emotional blackmail failed, too. Yes, many American soldiers died in the liberation of France in 1944, as the pictures of gravestones in the Sun and the New York Post testify, but few accept that this means France must agree to support whatever any bellicose US administration decides at all times for the foreseeable future. If that logic did apply. France might expect the US to be permanently grateful for Lafayette's role in defeating the British at Yorktown. Nor has it stopped France triggering far more serious altercations with its traditional ally, such as the 1956 Suez crisis or de Gaulle's withdrawal from the Nato command structure in 1966. Chirac's neo-Gaullist desire to assert
France's independent decision-making capacity is exactly what has created the diplomatic imbroglio of the past six months. His resumption of nuclear-testing in the South Pacific in 1995, before cohabitation, gave a clear signal of his willingness to soak up global opprobrium in this cause; over Iraq, he has become a hero.
There is another reason why Chirac is unlikely to stop playing to the gallery. There is an awful lot that is not going to plan on the domestic economic front. French unemployment has risen sharply over the last year to 9.1 per cent and is poised to breach the traumatic 10 per cent threshold this year. The rapid slowdown in French economic growth — the official forecast for GDP growth in 2003 was halved this week to a mere 1.3 per cent — means that France will soon be in violation of European Union rules on both budget deficits and public debt. It is ironic that these optimistic forecasts are based on the idea of the quick, short and clean war that French diplomats claim is so unlikely. Either way, few economists believe Chirac has any chance of being able to honour an election pledge to cut taxes by 30 per cent over five years. Even if France is not in quite such bad shape as Germany, there are plenty of reasons for Chirac to seek short-term wins abroad. The game is not over. It has barely started.
Jo Johnson is Paris correspondent of the FT.
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