THE ROVING
EYE Off
with King Sarko's head By Pepe
Escobar
He posed in spectacular
grandeur as the neo-imperial Liberator of
Libya - only a few years after Colonel Muammar
Gaddafi helped finance his 2007 election campaign
with a cool US$65 million.
Profiting from
a mysterious alliance between the Holy Ghost and
an African chambermaid in New York, he got rid of
the unstoppable challenger to his re-election,
former International Monetary Fund director
general and international sex fiend, Dominique
Strauss-Khan.
And still, this Sunday,
French voters - in a Facebook-style remix of the
fall of the Bastille - are bound to yell "Off with
his head".
Why? Hubris. French President
Nicolas Sarkozy, aka neo-Napoleonic King Sarko,
former king of bling bling, "Chouchou" to
[Italian] First Lady
Carla Bruni, may be his own worst enemy. [1]
A Ritzy lifestyle Bashir Saleh
is Gaddafi's former chief of staff and former
president of the Libyan sovereign wealth fund. He
was the go-to guy when the regime decided to
finance Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign.
King Sarko, predictably, denied everything
and said he would sue the French website,
Mediapart, that revealed what many already knew.
Yet this Thursday, former Libyan prime minister
Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi confirmed it all over
again. And that's exactly what Gaddafi's son and
former darling of the London School of Economics,
Saif al-Islam, had said in March 2011: "Sarkozy
must give back the money he accepted from Libya to
finance his presidential campaign."
Saleh
is now under Interpol watch, but he remains in
France, authorized by the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) rebel regime in Libya that
otherwise is pursuing him ... He happens to
maintain a cozy 4 million euro (US$5.2 million)
abode near the Swiss border, with a view to Mont
Blanc.
All that protected by the police of
King Sarko, who said everything is going on "with
the full agreement of president [of the Libyan
Transitional Council] Mustapha Abdel Jalil". Life
is good; this week Saleh was spotted hanging out
at the Ritz in Paris.
My vote is for
Carla The French presidential campaign
came to the proverbial anti-climax this week in an
almost three-hour long debate between King Sarko
and Socialist Party challenger Francois Hollande.
Trillions of bytes hit the screens describing the
debate essentially as "tense". No KO was
delivered. Sarko behaved like a Duracell bunny on
crack, while Hollande - with the charisma of a dry
sausage - actually looked solid and relatively
precise.
Lies were given free flow. Sarko
defended his job creation record. In April 2007,
he was promising only 5% of unemployed after five
years as president. Today, France has 9.4%
unemployed among the active urban population.
After five years of Sarko, the ranks of the French
unemployed rose by one million.
As the
macarron to complement the cafe, centrist
Francois Bayrou - who got 9.1% of the votes in the
first round - manifested his repulsion towards
Sarko's campaign to seduce the extreme right and
announced he would vote for Hollande.
By
the way, no less than 33% of French voters sat out
the first round, preferring instead to concentrate
on the geopolitical ramifications of consummate
top model Carla Bruni's looks. [2]
The
real winner of the first round - a toxic political
Hellfire missile, no less - was the French extreme
right, via the National Front (18% of votes)
"normalized" by savvy businesswoman Marine Le Pen,
the daughter of founder and certified fascist
Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The National Front's
growing influence since the 1980s all across
European extreme right circles is simply
astonishing. The cancer has spread everywhere,
from France to Italy, Britain, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, Denmark,
Finland and even Greece.
Xenophobia and
Islamophobia are alive and kicking across a
fearful, mired-in-crisis Europe. In Austria, the
extreme right, after years under the charismatic
Jorg Haider, is now totally normalized and
legitimized.
In the Netherlands, under
uber-Islamophobe Geert Wilders, the PVV (Partij
voor de Vrijheid - Party for Freedom) got 24% of
votes in the 2010 elections and was part of a
conservative coalition in power that ended up
breaking down because, once again, of Wilders.
In Scandinavia, the extreme right is on a
rampage; in Sweden, for instance, the Swedish
Democrats (nice Orwellian touch) for the first
time entered parliament.
One can't go
wrong campaigning as an extreme right-winger in
Europe; it's enough to rail against globalization
and "brown" and "black" immigrants; denounce
corrupt elites; demonize Islam; warn about
national identity in danger because of
multiculturalism; and essentially pose as
"anti-system". It's as if the specter of Nazi
Germany was hovering from the south of France to
the Carpathian mountains.
No wonder when
an extreme right-wing party reaches 15% of voters
nationally, conservative parties scramble to adopt
their policies. That's exactly what King Sarko
tried in France; after losing the first round, he
said wily Marine Le Pen was "compatible with the
republic". Yet it didn't gell - because millions
of voters were in fact nursing another kind of
fury; their Europhobia.
Europhobes,
unite The eurozone crisis, countries going
bankrupt, non-stop orthodox "austerity",
unemployment, the iron hand of rating agencies and
budget technocrats, widespread economic horror;
millions of French, like other Europeans, blame
Brussels for it. And King Sarko happens to be part
of the hated elite - as 50% of the "Merkozy"
couple, along with German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, who is, in theory, trying to "save"
Europe.
So an extra problem for the bling
bling king was that he was not, and was never,
able to sell a political, cultural and social
project, his vision for Europe. Or at least point
to how to recreate post-crisis Europe (assuming
the crisis will vanish soon, which it won't).
Hollande may be a cold cucumber, and his
prescriptions may be "outdated" - as King Sarko
and The Economist accused; but at least this
return of the socialists to power in France may
shake up the whole groggy chessboard.
The
European Union will forcefully have to re-examine
the Franco-German axis in its "post-Merkozy"
stage; this is the axis that actually rules over
Europe. There's a lot of talk in Paris and Berlin
of "continuity". It did happen before, between
Giscard d'Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, and between
Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl.
But
the real challenge is what a Hollande presidency
could do for a more social, and more egalitarian
Europe. The Economist - that is, the financial
interests of the City of London - has been so
sorry for King Sarko, who was trying to "save" not
only France but also Europe. That's nonsense.
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