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Why the British center-left wants Sarkozy to win

By Denis MacShane
THE OBSERVER, LONDON
Saturday, May 05, 2007, Page 9

Sometimes the oddest of odd couples produce success on the world stage. Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin against fascism, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the late French president Francois Mitterrand in favor of Cruise and Pershing missiles and the Single European Act, and former US president Richard Nixon linking with Mao Zedong (毛澤東) against Moscow. Now we can see a new pairing forming in front of our eyes: A left-of-center prime minister in London linking up with the man emerging as the leader of the European right.

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy may yet be beaten by Segolene Royal in the contest to be France's president. In which case, UK prime-minister-in-waiting Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown will work with her. But on pure foreign policy and EU issues the vision of a Brown-Sarkozy tandem -- or on a tricycle made for three with German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- offers the prospect of Europe shaping a new foreign policy that is coherent and effective after the disastrous divisions and personal rancor of recent years.

Royal has made mistake after mistake on foreign policy. Her language is like that of the British Labour party in the 1980s -- hostile to the US, to Europe, and to open world economics. The best French politics watcher in London is Charles Grant of the Center for European Reform, who is close to the French socialist leadership. Even he has had to confess his dismay at Royal's deeply conservative French leftism.

Royal has driven France's Jewish voters into Sarkozy's camp by appearing to endorse a venomous anti-Semitic attack on Israel by Islamist fundamentalists during a visit to the Middle East.

On a trip to Beijing she praised the speed of the Chinese justice system. She spoilt Merkel's plans on Europe by insisting on impossible demands to rewrite the defunct constitution to placate protectionists in the isolationist left in France.

Most bizarrely of all she insists that Iran has no right even to develop civilian-use nuclear power -- a position that groups her with neo-cons in Washington and ultra-Likud hawks in Israel.

Royal was invited to London to meet British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Brown, but refused to come. In contrast, Sarkozy has built a wide network of friends and contacts across Europe in his three-year bid to become president. A frequent visitor to London, he and his wife have met the Browns and Blairs. He has spoken at the Christian Democratic Union summer school in Germany alongside Merkel and is close to the liberalizing center-right EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

Sarkozy has refused to meet the British Conservative leader David Cameron given his party's policy of quitting the association of center-right parties in Europe, which has provoked anger in the new ruling parties of the European right.

He has made no secret of his wish to normalize relations with the US after the chilly Chirac years. He will support Merkel's push to harmonize European and US norms on products and services to help increase the US$3 trillion worth of transatlantic trade. In his book Temoignage, Sarkozy argues that to get France on the golden road of growth and jobs and catch up with Britain's economic performance since 1997, French foreign economic policy will have to become more Blairite.

Sarkozy's language on the European constitution also dovetails more with Labour's thinking than his socialist rival's. He wants small amendments to existing treaties to allow some commonly agreed changes to make EU institutions work better. He argues for the centrality of parliaments as the locus for European decision-making. He will put off until later discussions on the European budget and other contested aspects of the European constitution where serious differences remain between London and Paris.

As soon as he became interior minister, Sarkozy closed down Sangatte refugee camp in northern France at the mouth of the Channel tunnel, after years of failure by the UK to persuade the French to move. He is a man who wants to do rather than be. Like Brown, he is the object of highly personal attacks. The racist Jean Marie Le Pen attacked him for not being properly French, a reference to Sarkozy's Hungarian father and partly Jewish background.

Royal may still win if all the far left and Bayrou centrist votes come her way tomorrow. But she has disappointed many on the European left with her erratic foreign policy line, especially her embrace of anti-European politicians of the French left such as Jean-Pierre Chevenement. Just as Thatcher found a supporter when Argentina's junta invaded the Falklands in the socialist Mitterrand, Prime Minister Brown will find center-right President Sarkozy a man he can do business with despite their adherence to opposing political families.

Denis MacShane is a British Labour member of parliament and was Britain's Europe minister until 2005.
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