A beleaguered French President Nicolas Sarkozy hopes to use a prime-time TV appearance this week to claw back public support after polls showed a majority of French people think his first year in office has been a failure.
The anniversary has been marred by government infighting, policy U-turns and record low opinion polls, with the public confused over what Sarkozy’s critics call jumbled and piecemeal reforms.
A survey published on Monday by the daily Liberation found that 59 percent of respondents saw Sarkozy’s first year as a failure. This followed a poll for the Journal du Dimanche that broke 50-year records with the lowest approval ratings registered by a modern president after a year in office. In a bruising verdict on the man who styled himself as the only person brave enough to radically reform France, 79 percent felt he had done nothing to “improve the situation of France and the French.”
Even some in his own ruling center-right UMP party are rebelling. The president read the riot act to his squabbling cabinet last week, threatening to sack any minister who did not stick to an agreed line. This followed public slanging matches and U-turns, with the government forced to backtrack on unpopular measures such as scrapping subsidized railcards for large families
“This is a government that’s all over the place,” said Herve de Charette, a UMP member of parliament and former foreign minister.
Over the past 11 months, Sarkozy has fought battles on all fronts, opening up reform on pensions, the legal system, education, health, unemployment benefits and the public sector.
Sarkozy’s party spokesman and adviser Dominique Paille said he would use tomorrow’s TV interview to explain his reforms. Most of the hardest reforms, such as general pensions and healthcare, remain to be made and the economic downturn leaves little room for maneuver.
Paille said: “The French like reform as long as it doesn’t touch them personally.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
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