France Peresidential Elections 2012: TV Debate

The Socialist François Hollande has emerged with the upper hand from a bruising TV duel with the rightwing president Nicolas Sarkozy, as the two held their last rallies in the final 24 hours of campaigning before Sunday's presidential vote.

The first opinion poll for LH2 Yahoo showed French viewers of the live TV debate found Hollande to be the more serious candidate and also the nicest, most sincere and closest to their daily concerns. Sarkozy was seen to have been more dynamic and competent. Hollande was most convincing on the issues that worry voters the most: jobs, making ends meet as well as education, while Sarkozy was seen to be better on Europe, immigration and reducing France's debt.

Over 17 million French people watched the almost three-hour live TV presidential debate, more than watch an X Factor final in the UK, but fewer than tuned in to watch Sarkozy take on the Socialist Ségolène Royal in 2007.

Sarkozy is trailing Hollande by five to eight points in the polls and a classic televised battle of the personalities had been seen as his last chance to turn the election around and win over the large majority of France's 6.4m far-right voters he needs to have a chance at re-election.

Pollsters were sceptical that Sarkozy, who at times had seemed riled and on the defensive, would have done so. French presidential debates do not usually yield an outright winner, and some called this a draw.

But most commentators felt Hollande had won on points, delivering the most memorable lines, including repeating: "I, as president of the republic …" 16 times in a bid to gain in leadership stature. Newspaper columnists felt the debate would not produce an "earthquake" for the struggling Sarkozy, the most unpopular president to seek re-election in France. Hollande was seen to have cemented his advance.

He was given a further boost when the centrist François Bayrou, who took 9% of the vote in the first round, broke with his party's tradition and said he would vote for him. This was a blow to Sarkozy, who needs to secure as many Bayrou voters as possible.

If the TV slanging match was full of bile – Sarkozy called Hollande "a little slanderer" and Hollande told him "you'd be hard pressed to pass yourself off as a victim" – the political reaction afterwards was just as laden with invective.

Nadine Morano, a rightwing minister and Sarkozy ally, said the exchange with Hollande had been like "extracting pus". Sarkozy's special adviser called Hollande "grotesque". Jean-Marc Ayrault, tipped as a possible Socialist prime minister, said Sarkozy had been aggressive. Hollande said the nature of the debate had reflected the fracture, aggressiveness and tensions in society "after five years of Sarkozy".

But Sarkozy insisted that the election was on a knife-edge and all was to play for. "The opinion polls are lying. An election has never been this open … It's even more open after the debate," he told French radio.

He then gave a highly personal interview seemingly to show himself as more human and close to the people, saying he was so "rubbish" at technology that he didn't know how to work the three TV remote controls at home, and suggesting if his wife, Carla Bruni, wasn't with him he could barely operate the television.

At his final major rally in Toulon, he said the "left and its laxity" had "ruined" France.

Hollande, before giving his final open-air rally in Toulouse, was deliberately cautious about Sunday's vote, warning that nothing was won. Some observers have predicted the result could be closer than polls suggest.

Meanwhile, media fact-checkers were poring over the highly technical parts of the TV debate, when the candidates hurled statistics at each other. One French site calculated that Sarkozy mentioned a figure every 47 seconds and Hollande mentioned one every 1 minute, 36 seconds, although not all were accurate.

The final runoff vote takes place on Sunday.

@Guardian

by Angelique Chrisafis

Turkey-France Clash

Turkey has launched a bitter attack on French president Nicolas Sarkozy's and France's leadership of the military campaign against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, accusing the French of lacking a conscience in their conduct in the Libyan operations.

The vitriolic criticism, from both the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the president, Abdullah Gül followed attacks from the Turkish government earlier this week and signalled an orchestrated attempt by Ankara to wreck Sarkozy's plans to lead the air campaign against Gaddafi.

With France insisting that Nato should not be put in political charge of the UN-mandated air campaign, Turkey has come out emphatically behind sole Nato control of the operations.

The row came as France confirmed that one of its fighter jets had destroyed a Libyan air force plane, the first to breach the no-fly zone since it was imposed on 19 March. The Libyan G2/Galeb trainer aircraft was destroyed by an air-to-ground missile just after it landed at an air base near the rebel-held town of Misrata, a French military spokesman said.

The clash between Turkey and France over Libya is underpinned by acute frictions between Erdogan and Sarkozy, both impetuous and mercurial leaders who revel in the limelight, by fundamental disputes over Ankara's EU ambitions, and by economic interests in north Africa.

The confrontation is shaping up to be decisive in determining the outcome of the bitter infighting over who should inherit command of the Libyan air campaign from the Americans and could come to a head at a major conference in London next week of the parties involved.

Using incendiary language directed at France in a speech in Istanbul, Erdogan said: "I wish that those who only see oil, gold mines and underground treasures when they look in [Libya's] direction, would see the region through glasses of conscience from now on."

President Gül reinforced the Turkish view that France and others were being driven primarily by economic interests. "The aim [of the air campaign] is not the liberation of the Libyan people," he said. "There are hidden agendas and different interests."

Earlier this week, Claude Guéant, the French interior minister who was previously Sarkozy's chief adviser, outraged the Muslim world by stating that the French president was "leading a crusade" to stop Gaddafi massacring Libyans.

Erdogan denounced the use of the word crusade yesterday, blaming those, France chief among them, who are opposed to Turkey joining the EU.

Senior Nato officials are meeting in Brussels for the fourth day in a row to try to hammer out an agreement on who should assume command of the no-fly zone over Libya from the Americans who are determined to relinquish command within days.

Sarkozy has agreed to give Nato military planners operational command of the campaign, but refused to grant the alliance political and strategic control, insisting this should be vested in the broader "coalition of the willing" taking part.

Turkey has responded by blocking Nato planning operations for Libya while stressing that Nato should be given "sole command", senior Nato diplomats said.

Turkey, Nato's second biggest army after the US and its only Muslim member, appears bent on winning the argument. It is already taking part in Nato patrols in the Mediterranean to police an arms embargo on Libya. It wants to limit and shorten the air campaign and proscribe ground attacks on Libya by Nato aircraft. If Nato is given political command of the air effort, Turkey would be able to exercise a veto in a system run on consensus.

The US's top military officer in Europe, Admiral James Stavridis, Nato's supreme commander Europe, has gone to Ankara to try to mediate a deal.

The Turks are incensed at repeated snubs by Sarkozy. The French failed to invite Turkey to last Saturday's summit in Paris which presaged the air strikes. French fighters taking off from Corsica struck the first blows. The Turkish government accused Sarkozy of launching not only the no-fly zone, but his presidential re-election campaign.

While the dispute over Libya is substantive and political, it also appears highly personal, revealing the bad blood simmering between the French president and the Turkish prime minister.

Sarkozy went to Turkey last month for the first time in four years as president. But the visit was repeatedly delayed and then downgraded from a state presidential event. He stayed in Turkey for five hours.

"Relations between Turkey and France deserve more than this," complained Erdogan. "I will speak with frankness. We wish to host him as president of France. But he is coming as president of the G20, not as that of France."

While the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is also opposed to Turkey joining the EU, she has voiced her objections moderately. Sarkozy has declared loudly that culturally Turkey does not belong in Europe, but in the Middle East.

France has blocked tranches of Ankara's EU negotiations on the grounds that it should not be seen as ever-fit for membership.

Old-School Code of Trust Ruined

Here's an article by John Hughes,former editor of The Christian Science Monitor/Pedram

The WikiLeaks dump of US embassy cables last month was a reckless act. It is a far cry from the responsible reporting on foreign affairs with which I am familiar.When I was the State Department spokesman in the Reagan administration, Bernard Kalb, then diplomatic correspondent for NBC, called me about a tip that the bad guys in Beirut, Lebanon, had captured and were holding an American CIA officer.


“Bernie,” I said, “I’ll only talk off the record about that.”
“No way,” Bernie replied, “If it’s off the record I can’t use it.”
“Well, that’s the deal,” I said. “See what your network says.”

The network agreed to the deal. I told Bernie that the officer being held was the CIA station chief in Beirut. We didn’t know whether the captors knew of his CIA association. If Bernie went with the story, the officer would certainly be killed. Honorably, the network did not run the story. Sadly, the captors tortured the officer, discovered his identity, and killed him.
The importance of relationships:
That was a classic example of trust between a diplomatic correspondent and a government official. It is the kind of relationship observed regularly between State Department officials in Washington and US diplomatic correspondents.
Sometimes the journalist is checking out a questionable rumor. Sometimes the diplomat is offering background on a situation that for good reasons cannot then, or ever, be made public. For example: Dissidents given secret sanctuary in a US embassy; a foreign diplomat barred from travel because he is actually a high-ranking intelligence officer recruiting American nuclear scientists; US diplomats caught outside the US Embassy in Tehran when it was seized by extremists, but hidden safely for months by diplomats of other countries.
Exchanges and agreements between responsible journalists and senior diplomats go on each day with clear understanding about what can, or should, be published.

The consequences:

Many of the cables revealed by WikiLeaks are of little consequence. In many respects the dispatches to Washington of US diplomats abroad echo the work of foreign correspondents. They report on formal discussions with foreign leaders, then attempt interpretations of what the motives and intentions of foreign governments may really be.
The peccadillos and peculiarities of a foreign head of state may be useful to chronicle.

One cable referred to Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and its president, Dmitry Medvedev, as Batman and Robin. Mr. Putin was not amused. But Russia is hardly likely to sever diplomatic relations. Another embassy cable lauded French President Nicolas Sarkozy as a sturdy friend of America, but also called him “mercurial.” Half a dozen French columnists might have written the same thing.
As one of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s foreign counterparts told her: “You should see what we say about you.”
Disclosure of US moves to remove a Pakistani stockpile of highly enriched uranium is much more significant. Working to keep such material from hostile hands may have been immensely important. Revealing it may jeopardize that effort.

Similarly, reports that Arab leaders privately urged the United States to take out Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity can hardly have resonated well in their capitals. During my stint in government I sat through many meetings in foreign capitals with heads of state who blasted rivals and other governments but who in public proclaimed lasting friendship with the same characters and entities.
Trusted diplomatic correspondents know how to garner information and inject their dispatches with depth and detail without embarrassing sources that must be protected.
WikiLeaks’s indiscriminate dumping of tens of thousands of purloined classified documents into the public domain for friend and foe to read is neither responsible journalism nor does it strike a blow for transparency. It is the work of a politically motivated activist intent on doing America harm.


John Hughes, a former editor of the Monitor, writes a biweekly column.