Who would have ever thought that the snobbish French media would be cheering the victory of Tony Blair and Britain against their own Exalted Leader - Jacques Chirac? That is what happened this past week-end in France. Charles De Gaulle wannabe, Jacques Chirac, was expecting a hero's welcome when he returned to Paris. After all, he had belittled the British Prime Minister's speech at the European Summit as a "pathetic" performance. Jacques probably thought he would be greeted by adoring crowds back home in Paris. However, as reported in "The Guardian", things evolved differently:
The Guardian | Chirac savaged over failed summit:Captain's Quarters blogs:
"As he awoke to a summer heatwave on Saturday morning, after a dawn flight from Brussels, Mr Chirac was instead greeted with headlines depicting him as the principal loser of the summit. Le Monde, the grand old tribune of France's intelligentsia, declared the summit a 'double victory' for Tony Blair. Downing Street officials could barely believe their luck as they read that Britain had buried the EU constitution and succeeded in highlighting the 'anomaly' of how the EU spends seven times more on farmers than it does on 'future' projects, such as science and research."
"The problem comes from Franco-German blindness to the fact that most European countries don't want to tie themselves to a system that benefits the Franco-German center at the expense of their own economies -- among other worries about further integration. The Dutch have recently found out what multiculturalism might bring with the Islamist murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, while the Eastern European nations have firsthand experience with the Socialist economic model and hardly want to support yet another country's pensions with their own GDP. Britain also falls into this latter category, even with its own social spending levels far above that of the US, for instance."
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