The day before the election, the Wall Street Journal noted that French President Jacques Chirac, despite his “differences” with Bush over the years, sees a big silver lining to a second Bush term.
For Mr. Chirac, a Bush victory could make it easier for him to achieve some key goals — such as unifying Europe as a counterweight to U.S. power — owing to Mr. Bush’s role as a lightning rod for mistrust and antipathy in Europe, says Francois Heisbourg, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris.
“Four more years of Bush, and I suspect there will be a lot more unity in Europe,” Mr. Heisbourg says.
As it turns out, this was exactly right. Chirac is getting exactly what he wants as a result of Bush’s Election Day victory. The dollar continues to tumble to record lows against the euro and France’s government, as Stéphanie Giry reported this week, couldn’t be happier with four more years of Bush.
[A] second term of Bush’s unilateralism may now help justify Chirac’s continued reluctance to get involved in Iraq, bolster his campaign for a stronger European Union and an international system that can check U.S. power, and maybe even boost Chirac’s chances for reelection in 2007.
Despite the two men’s conflicting sensibilities and worldviews, for Chirac, Bush’s reelection is “a fairly comfortable result,” says Guillaume Parmentier, an expert on U.S.-French relations at the Institut Français des Relations Internationales in Paris. Bush’s victory essentially extends Chirac’s excuse for continuing to keep France out of Iraq. It would have been awkward for Paris to deny a conciliatory, multilateralist Kerry assistance with Iraq’s reconstruction. But, with Bush still at the helm, Chirac can remain intractable.
The EU will be stronger, the euro will be more valuable, and French voters (who will vote for president again in 2007) will continue to be impressed with Chirac because he doesn’t get along with Bush, whom they hate more. If Republicans were voting for Bush to make things more difficult on France, they backed the wrong guy.