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May 31, 2005
Is Tony Blair The Last Big Man Standing in Europe?
Jonathan Freedland opines in the June 1, 2005 issue of The Guardian that, Everywhere British Prime Minister Tony Blair looks, he will see dead ends. And yet, in conversations yesterday, Downing Street folk hardly seemed distraught. If anything, they appeared rather cheery. Here's why. They now see a European stage in which Blair is the last big man standing. Jacques Chirac is mortally wounded, while Gerhard Schröder took a drubbing in last week's German regional elections. He could be out by the autumn. Viewed through Downing Street's rose-tinted glasses, that leaves a Blair-shaped hole. He has won a vote while all around him have lost theirs.
More importantly, the optimists note, the trend in Europe is in Britain's direction. For nearly a decade, the old Franco-German motor has been stalling as both nations have struggled economically: new members have been reluctant to follow their example. Enlargement has brought in ex-communist states which prefer so-called Anglo-Saxon liberal economics to the French social model, with its statist protections and regulations. Mr. Freedland said, "The result has been serial defeats for France and Germany, rebuffed on their choice for commission president, rebuffed on the contents of the constitution itself - a document the French scathingly dubbed the constitution Britannique. Symbolically, and most painfully for the French, the unofficial language of the corridors of Brussels is now English." Here's more of his interesting assessment.
Posted by Munir Umrani at May 31, 2005 07:36 PM
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