Bush polarises aspiring leaders

George W. Bush

PARIS - True to his right-or-wrong approach to life, George W. Bush is polarising the next generation of political leaders in France and Britain, who are shunning or embracing the US President as they prepare their run at power.

With elections due next year in France and Britain's ruling Labour Party gripped by a leadership struggle, would-be presidents and prime ministers are staking out radical positions on the Oval Office's controversial incumbent.

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose bid for the presidency in elections due in April and May is considered a certainty, has stirred a fierce storm by styling himself as pro-American and staging a chummy photo-call handshake with Bush at the White House.

Sarkozy, a conservative, won warm praise from parts of the US media for a speech in which he paid tribute to the United States, blasted his own country for arrogance and attacked President Jacques Chirac's decision to block UN approval for the US-led war on Iraq in 2003. "I'm not a coward. I'm proud of this friendship and I'm happy to proclaim it," said Sarkozy.

The leading left-wing contender for head of state, Segolene Royal, lacerated Sarkozy for his stance.

"That means he supports the argument of preventive war, that means he accepts this notion of a war between good and evil, that he tolerates all these attempts at destabilisation in the world," she said. "My diplomatic position [as president] will not consist of going and kneeling down in front of George Bush."

Royal's rival in the Socialist Party, former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, mocked Sarkozy as Bush's future poodle. Chirac, who reputedly loathes Sarkozy, tartly observed that his own stance on Iraq in 2003 had been borne out by events. Chirac added with a stiletto thrust that he had a very good relationship with Bush, which was based on trust, not submission.

The French media have also been briefed by a minister close to Chirac, widely presumed to be Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, himself a likely election candidate, who hissed that Sarkozy had undermined the Government's foreign policy with his grandstanding. "I invite Nicolas Sarkozy to count up to 10 before opening his mouth," said the source.

In London, meanwhile, the head of the opposition Conservative Party broke with decades of tradition to openly criticise the US Administration and demand that Britain assert its influence in its alliance with America.

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11 Conservative leader David Cameron said his party was an instinctive friend of America but warned this did not mean "being slavish in our friendship".

He said that over the past half century, Britain had skilfully played its role as junior partner to America, being supportive but not uncritical in order to exert its clout. "I worry that we have recently lost the art."

Pointedly describing himself as a liberal conservative rather than a neo-conservative, Cameron said US and British foreign policy had fanned the flames of anti-Americanism. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been marked by the flawed belief that military action alone could establish liberty, and prolonged detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay had been an abandonment of civilised principle, he said.

If blogs, phone-in shows and the letters pages are a guide, Cameron's speech has gone down well, attacking the close friendship with Bush that has helped wreck Prime Minister Tony Blair's support.