Hot dogs for Bush and Sarkozy - but no sign of Cecilia
Monday, 13 August 2007
Print
Email
President George Bush and President Nicolas Sarkozy ate hot dogs and went for a ride on a speedboat together in Maine at the weekend, restoring the chummy Franco-American presidential relations severed by the Iraq war.
Much of the media commentary in France dwelled, however, on the failure of President Sarkozy's wife, Cécilia, to turn up at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport for what was, in theory, an informal lunch invitation from one first lady to another.
Mme Sarkozy apologised to Laura Bush by telephone and said she was suffering from a sore throat. The Elysée Palace was, however, obliged yesterday to quash rumours that Mme Sarkozy had returned home early from the luxury ranch in New Hampshire where she has been holidaying with M. Sarkozy and two of her children.
The lunch, or picnic, at Kennebunkport was the first encounter between the two presidents since M. Sarkozy was elected in May. After a lunch of hot-dogs and hamburgers, the President's father, the former president, George Bush Snr, took the wheel of the family speedboat.
The meeting marked the restoration of friendly, personal relations between American and French heads of state, interrupted by former president Jacques Chirac's strenuous opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Although the two presidents rebuilt a working relationship, the US President famously let it be known that M. Chirac would "not be coming to the ranch any time soon".
Before his election, M. Sarkozy said he disapproved of the "arrogant" manner in which President Chirac had resisted the US policy in Iraq. The handshakes and back-slapping in Kennenbunkport in Saturday do not signal any weakening of French opposition to US policy in Iraq. They were nevertheless important to M. Sarkozy as another sign that the Chirac era is over.
"France and the United States have been allies and friends for almost 250 years," M. Sarkozy said. "When you see, on the French Atlantic coast, all those cemeteries with white crosses, you are reminded of the young Americans who came to die for us. In a family, you can have disagreements but are still in the same family," M. Sarkozy said. France was in the "same family" as the "great American democracy".
Before the French president arrived, Mr Bush told journalists - in an apparent dig at M. Chirac - that he liked M. Sarkozy's "straight-talking". "He says what he thinks," he said. President Bush said the US and France had "had their disagreements, on Iraq especially" but had always found "ways of working together".
Even before M. Chirac stepped down, France and the United States have been working closely together on a range of issues from Afghanistan to Lebanon. But the Kennebunkport meeting was closely watched in France, for signs that M. Sarkozy would be less independent-minded than his predecessor.
The former Socialist minister for Europe, Pierre Moscovici, said yesterday it was entirely correct for M. Sarkozy to establish good relations with Mr Bush.
"However, this is a president who has committed an enormous number of errors and it would be a serious mistake to strike up an open friendship ... Nicolas Sarkozy should be talking to him with great firmness."
In an opinion poll yesterday, only one in three French people said they would like to see much closer diplomatic relations with the United States. The same poll showed M. Sarkozy's approval rating to be still stratospherically high at 64 per cent.
