Blair On The Rebound? Chirac On The Long Fall?

[Annie]

Couldn't happen to nicer guys:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,7369,1506732,00.html

Best of times, the worst of times at Elysée

Jon Henley in Paris
Wednesday June 15, 2005

Guardian
There was, tellingly, no joint press conference. An apparently warm handshake on his arrival at the Elysée Palace soon after noon, yes; an impassioned plea to business leaders for help on Africa, of course; a nervous joke that fell predictably flat, that too.

But when Tony Blair faced the television cameras and the microphones yesterday to recount what had been billed as perhaps the most bitter diplomatic ding-dong so far between himself and Jacques Chirac, he did so a good hundred yards away from the French president - and on home ground, at the residence of the British ambassador in Paris.

If he felt at all relieved to have escaped his wounded opponent's den and regained the sanctuary of a building resolutely British ever since the Duke of Wellington acquired it in the name of the Crown a few months before Waterloo, the prime minister hid it well.

"There are a lot of you," he said, bouncing in red tie and grey suit into the residence's gilded ballroom to report on an "excellent and constructive meeting with Jacques Chirac on next month's G8". He then added hastily: "Although I don't say that to distinguish it from anything else."

The problem, of course, was that there was a lot else. The occasion was a momentous one. Tony and Jacques have rowed before, over the common agricultural policy and Iraq in particular: Tony has called Jacques "a demagogue"; Jacques has called Tony "badly brought-up". But the stakes have rarely been as high as these. On this latest trial of strength between the two leaders, the pundits say, could rest the future shape of the European Union.

Even the most Gallic of French commentators are now admitting that Mr Blair is Europe's coming man (Mr Chirac, plainly, is on the way out). You only have to look at the numbers the French papers trumpeted all last week: "Le Blairisme" works; " le modèle social français " does not. Mr Blair, freshly re-elected and revelling in the domestic plight of both Chancellor Schröder and President Chirac, is cooking up a Third Way for Europe.

The winner of the current Blair-Chirac spat, ostensibly over Britain's EU rebate and France's EU farm subsidies, will, this argument runs, dictate the very nature of the union over the years and decades to come: an Anglo-Saxon supermarket of free trade and minimal rules, or a protective Gallo-Germanic retirement home for ageing and undynamic economies. That, at least, is the way it is being rather gleefully painted here.

Arriving shortly after noon in the gravel forecourt of the Elysée, a hundred yards down the stately if boutique-filled rue du Faubourg St Honoré from the British embassy, Mr Blair was, therefore, welcomed with the excessively firm handshake of a desperate man.

Jacques Chirac, having gambled and lost France's referendum on the EU constitution, is currently the least popular president of France since pollsters started measuring such things in the late 1970s. Humiliated at home, where in the words of one commentator he has "finally lost all the credibility he never had", he has yet to establish how much the referendum defeat will weaken him on the European stage. But he must have a pretty shrewd idea.

But Mr Blair, oddly, did not appear entirely at ease either. Granted, he takes up the rotating EU presidency next month, which must help at times like this, but he nonetheless stands alone against all 24 other EU member states, none of which thinks Britain's rebate is any longer justified (largely because, an irony of sorts, Blairism has performed such wonders for the British economy).

But he got into his stride at a UN-organised meeting at the Elysée of 140 business leaders from around the world aimed at encouraging the private sector to help lift Africa out of poverty. He told the meeting on the Global Compact, a voluntary UN charter of corporate ethics: "We have moved a very long way from the days when business was seen as creating the problems of the world. I think most people accept a strong and vibrant business sector is part of the solution."

There followed a working lunch with UN secretary general Kofi Annan and Mr Chirac, a quick hour of interviews with the French media at the embassy, and a return to the Elysée for the real business of the day: the tête-à-tête with the president. "It was very difficult," he cheer fully admitted later. The meeting was "immensely amicable", but "there is a sharp disagreement".

In essence, Mr Blair said, "there can be no reconsideration of Britain's rebate without reconsideration of the reasons for the rebate", which are that Britain got a lousy deal when it first joined the EU. Also, the EU is spending money on all the wrong things (like agriculture) when it should be investing in the right things (like science, technology, R&D) that will help it compete in the future.

Mr Chirac, who was once an agriculture minister and knows all about the importance of the farm vote, disagrees vehemently. He is also, some might say, trying to stoke this latest row to distract attention from his humbling referendum defeat. But the pair have long been building up to yesterday's confrontation.

They last rowed bitterly over the CAP in October 2002, when Mr Blair asked the president: "How can you defend the common agricultural policy and then claim to be a supporter of aid to Africa? Failing to reform the CAP means being responsible for the starvation of the world's poor." Mr Chirac was livid. "You have been very badly brought up," he retorted. "No one has ever spoken to me like that."

Until now, the two leaders' relationship has proved remarkably resilient. But perhaps no longer. "What has changed," Mr Blair said carefully in response to a French journalist's question, "is that it is no longer possible to run Europe in the way it used to be run." There you have it, Mr Chirac.