By Costas Raptis
The video titled “Sarko bourré” is well-known to French internet users. for the statements to the journalists after his private meeting with Vladimir Putin, late, awake and with obvious inability to concentrate.
Many then assumed that the meeting of the two leaders was accompanied by plenty of vodka. But the strong man of the Kremlin, who as a secret of his well-being promotes the recipe “sport nie spirt”, does not drink.
The truth became known a few years later. Sarkozy was not drunk, but destabilized by the personal attack he had received from Putin.
The meeting began with the French president referring extensively to the human rights situation in Russia, the conflict in Chechnya, the assassination of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Gay rights. Putin listened in silence and when his interlocutor finished he allegedly replied gesturing: “Your country is so small and my country is so big. If you keep talking like that about my country, I will crush you. If you change your mind, you will I make you king of Europe “.
Putin particularly likes personal psychological games with European leaders. It is a well-known idea to introduce in front of the cameras his favorite Connie, Labrador breed, to Angela Merkel, who was frozen because she is possessed from childhood by a phobia for dogs. From her predecessor in the chancellery and now head of the NordStream pipeline consortium, Gerhard Schroeder, she secured eternal gratitude not so much for the career opportunities she offered him after his political demobilization, but for his gesture of helping him adopt two Russian girls. Schroeder, who never met a father because he was lost on the Russian front during World War II, was able to become a father himself, after four marriages, thanks to the Russian leader.
In a sense, Sarkozy has learned his lesson: on the one hand, he brought France back into the military wing of NATO, from which he left in 1966 at the initiative of de Gaulle, and on the other hand, he maintained a good working relationship with Putin. Just a year later, he mediated to end the war that had broken out in South Ossetia, in the shadow of the start of the Beijing Summer Olympics.
Fifteen years later, another French president arrives in Moscow claiming the role of pacifist, at a time when, at least as the Anglo-Saxon factor insists, another major post-Soviet war threatens, and humanity is once again in Beijing, this time for the Winter Olympics.
The covert ambition to become “king of Europe” is sure to motivate Macron, as well as any French president before him – especially now that Merkel has retired and her successor is considered diplomatically “useless”.
The Elysian resident, however, will have to come to terms with the actual size – what Putin will, if necessary, remind again with the language of his hands. Two months before the French presidential election, Emanuel Macron is in a hurry to show some great success in the field of foreign policy, in order to raise his shares in the domestic political competition.
It also needs to give tangible content to what it has long proclaimed about “Europe’s strategic autonomy”, at a time when the threatening conflict in Ukraine is creating pressing dilemmas for the EU and France in particular, imposing a transatlantic discipline with which Paris does not always feel comfortable with.
It is not just the fact that the French elite is traditionally distinguished by a “cultural Russophilia” that places it on a different wavelength from the equally traditional Anglo-Saxon Russophobia. economic war that threatens if tensions escalate and the so-called “sanctions from hell” against Russia are escalated, that is, with less “breathing space” inside the Atlantic camp and raised walls against the emerging Eurasian world.
Having been found by … a collision among the victors of World War II that make up the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, France dreamed in the years of de Gaulle of a united “Europe from the Urals to the Channel”. these are very distant – as far as the common Beijing-Moscow-Berlin-Paris antagonism in the 2003 Iraq war is concerned.
Macron’s own rise to the presidency is another step in breaking with this tradition, as evidenced by his personal journey in the international financial sector and his “transcendental” relationship with established French political families, but the objective reality sets its own requirements.
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Source: Capital
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