Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Why it has to be Sego
It's not just because of her support for extending public ownership, her commitment to democracy, her opposition to the socially destructive Anglo-Saxon economic model, or even her good looks and all-round niceness. Segolene Royal deserves to win the French Presidential election because on the defining issue of our times- the Iraq war- she was right and her opponent, Nikolas Sarkozy was wrong. It's true that Sarkozy has admitted his error in supporting the illegal US-led invasion, yet the fact remains that if he- and not Jacques Chirac- had been President in 2003, France would have become embroiled in the catastrophic conflict. If Sarkozy could get Iraq wrong, why should the French people trust him to get other decisions right? The simple truth is that anyone who supported the Iraq war is either too stupid or too malevolent to hold public office. And that applies not only to French supporters of the war, like Sarkozy, but also to British ones like Gordon Brown and David Cameron.
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In Sunday's Observer, Denis MacShane MP, of The Henry Jackson Society and the Euston Manifesto, followed the precedent set by his colleague in both of those enterprises (and in what ridiculously still purports to be the Labour Party despite containing such people), Gisela "Vote Bush" Stuart MP. I mean, of course, that he endorsed Sarkozy over Royal.
How could he not, whether as a Jacksonite or as a Eustonite? After all, France's seat on the UN Security Council, as well as her formidable military might (including nuclear weapons), would then be placed at the service of the neoliberal economics and the corresponding neoconservative geopolitics advocated under those and the other pseudonyms (New Labour, the Cameroons, the Orange Book Tendency) of this country's indivisible Court Party, itself a mere branch office of the junta centred on the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century. Sarkozy's court is another such branch office.
Now, this might all happen under Royal, Blairite that she is. But it would certainly happen under Sarkozy. Therefore, every eliminated candidate's supporters, as well as any Gaullist properly so called (which Sarkozy simply isn't), should vote for Royal, and, when she wins, should never let her forget that she owes her position to the alliance against neoliberalism and neoconservatism, from Trotskyists to monarchists via Gaullists, and including the all-important supporters of Bayrou.
This French independence from the junta and its branch offices would be light to the world, and not least to Britain, where, in the many forms of the Court Party, the junta's power has now become more hegemonic than in any other country on earth, even including the United States.
I sincerely hope that enough of Bayrou's supporters switch their votes to Royal. A Sarkozy victory means an end to an independent French foreign policy. General de Gaulle would turn in his grave.
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