The president of the French Republic is not having a good tinme of it recently. Firstly his desire to flog arms to his pals in Beijing is not going down well with the rest of the EU, who seem to think that China's complete lack of remorse for the Tianenmen square massacre and its increasingly bellicose statements against Taiwan somehow indicate that China should not be the recipient of advanced European weaponry.
"Politically there are problems and these problems have actually got more difficult rather than less difficult, not least because there hasn't been much movement by China in respect of human rights," Jack Straw told Britain's ITV network.
"And for their own reasons they decided to pass this new law authorizing the use of force in the event of Taiwan seceding," he said. "So it's created quite a difficult political environment."
Indeed...
Of course l'Escroc may get his way here because people are more likely to be worried about the dismemberment of the Euro Stability and Growth Pact which is now apparently optional if your country's name begins with F or G. Almost certainly this is going to annoy the ECB and thus it will raise interest rates (or at the very least not cut them soon) which will encourage France & Germany to do even more deficit spending and breach the pact even more. On the other hand it undoubtledly makes the Greeks and Italians very happy because their complete and utter fabrication of statistics that showed them to be compliant with the Euro Stability and Growth pact have been lost in the general mayhem. Short term this might look like a win for l'Escroc and his German pal but this continual disdain for other EU members is likely to come back and bite M l'Escroc at some point in the future. Given the complaints by variousEastern Europeans recently and the upcoming UK elections, not to mention the way that the Dutch are peeved at the Stabaility and Growth thing, one suspects that this revolt could come sooner rather than later.
The place where the revolt seems likely to occur is over the EU's attempts to increase growth through competition. In particular the plans to liberalise the EU Services Sector seem destined to infuriate l'Escroc if they are implemented because they will make only too clear just how uncompetitive the French services sector is. However given that, as noted above, France and Germany have just annoyed everyone else, it seems likely that this proposal will go through with most of its provisions intact.
Domestically the French unions and other lefties, who have only a tenuous grasp of reality, mathematics and economics, look likely to use this expected defeat with regard to services as ammunition against the EU Constitution.
[A] second public opinion survey, in Le Figaro, confirmed the results of a poll that sent shock waves through Paris on Friday when it showed a collapse in support for the draft constitution.
In both polls, a narrow majority of French voters said they would vote No.
Much of that collapse is tied to an increasingly surreal debate in France about an obscure piece of EU legislation, which proposes slashing the bureaucracy required by language teachers, architects or other "service providers" if they move from one EU country to another.
The "services directive" has become a symbol of French fears that Europe is under the control of an "Anglo-Saxon" cabal, determined to impose Thatcherite employment laws across the EU, and destroy the cosy French system of lavish benefits and worker protections.
President Jacques Chirac, as leader of the Yes camp, has said he believes the directive is "unacceptable", and told Mr Barroso to "silence" members of his commission pushing for economic liberalisation.
Ah yes - another example of people missing "a good opportunity to remain silent" as l'Escroc famously described those Eastern Europeans who dared to suggest that they thought that tyranny was a bad thing and that Iraq should be liberated. This is really rather a pattern for M l'Escroc, other people do persist in saying things that show how much of a hypocrite he is and how hollow his policies are. Although I note that the Yes campaign in France hasn't really got going the Non campaign, as I noted earlier this month, is already putting up posters that link Chirac to the EU Constitution and to the evil, fat-cat bosses and their wicked capitalistic desires to grind the faces of the poor. Since I wrote that post I have seen a lot more NON posters stuck up all over the place and not a single rebuttal. I cannot of course claim this is nationwide, nor can I say that this is going to have an effect on 29 May, but it does tie in nicely to those opinion polls that do show that Nationwide people don't like the constitution.
Finally, just when you thought things couldn't get worse for M l'Escroc a number of his cronies are facing a court case that claims that they took all sorts of bribes and kickbacks. Indeed as Richard North writes:
The case involves Chirac's RPR (Rally for the Republic - now UMP) party, whose officials were alleged to be siphoning off millions of pounds in bribes from construction companies in exchange for contracts worth £2.8bn to build and maintain secondary schools in the Paris area. Altogether, £60m in bribes between 1989 and 1996 - the year after Mr Chirac's 18-year tenure at city hall ended – is estimated to have been paid out
Four former RPR ministers, including Guy Drut - the 1976 Olympic 110m hurdles gold-medallist - 24 company bosses and several high-ranking party officials are among the accused. Civil servants, businessmen and public works executives are also accused of benefiting from the scam, dubbed the "lyceé dossier". Most have admitted that they knew of the scam, and if convicted of a range of corruption offences they could face up to ten years in jail.
Chirac, often known as l'escroc, remains immune from prosecution, or even questioning, for as long as he remains president. And, despite statements by investigating judges in the case that they had "strong and concordant evidence" that he was at the very least aware of the scheme, he has consistently dismissed any suggestion of his being implicated as malicious and unfounded nonsense.
But his credibility is not helped when Michel Roussin, Chirac's chief of staff for more than a decade - both while the president was mayor of Paris and prime minister – is accused of "complicity in and receipt of the proceeds of corruption".
While l'Escroc may not claim to be emperor, he does seem to show many of the traits of previous imperial rulers such as being above the law and being unwilling to tolerate criticism. Wasn't there something about the Ides of March being bad for those with imperial ambitions? and will the French population decide that he is lacking in clothing?
Update:EURSOC has some good discussion of the Barroso-Chirac spat and other problems for l'Escroc