Every war has a silver lining

Europe's leaders are burying awkward domestic issues as they don their statesman cloaks, reports CATHERINE FIELD.

PARIS - European politicians who have been down on their luck or in need of a break are enjoying a windfall from the September 11 crisis, seizing the opportunity to display statesmanship, reassure the public and silence their critics.

The biggest beneficiary has been British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been cast as Europe's man of the hour.

True, before September 11, Blair was hardly a lame duck, having just won a crushing second electoral victory.

But the kind of issues that under normal times would have sapped him and strengthened his critics - Britain's decrepit health service, the collapse of its privatised rail operator Railtrack, the near failure of the Ulster peace process - have all been shelved for national unity.

Blair has so far performed almost flawlessly, wielding diplomacy, guns and religious tolerance to win influence in Washington and design an anti-terrorism campaign that combines military force, good policing and international cooperation.

Three out of four Britons support the bombing of Afghanistan, and Blair is supported by 88 per cent of the electorate, a figure matching that of Winston Churchill during the Second World War, according to an opinion poll published by the Guardian.

"If Blair is compared with Churchill today, it's not just because of his ability to represent the British people, it's also because of his dimension as a statesman," said political analyst Nicholas Jones.

"An hour and a half after the attacks, while Bush was sheltering in a bunker, he [Blair] was saying on television that the attacks in New York and Washington were acts of global terrorism and that the reply also had to be global."

In Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has placed worries about the country's slumping economic performance and tenaciously high unemployment rate firmly in the background.

And he has used the crisis to tell the public that Germany can now take its place at the table of democracies, willing to send its armed forces to defend its interests and values.

"Through the help and solidarity of our American and European friends, we were able to overcome the aftermath of the Second World War," he told the Bundestag.

"We Germans now have an obligation to meet our new responsibilities. This also includes, and I say this unambiguously, involvement in military operations in defence of freedom and human rights."

Schroeder's biggest weakness was the potential loss of his able Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, a member of the Greens, the junior partner in coalition with the Social Democrats.

But Fischer was saved when the Greens voted after a bruising internal debate to let German troops join any international military action against terrorism.

In France, President Jacques Chirac was on the ropes before September 11, battered by competition from Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and facing rising pressure to testify in probes into corruption scandals rooted in his 18-year spell as Paris Mayor.

But the terrorist attacks have enabled to him to console Bush, shake the hands of New York firefighters and reassure the French public with strong, avuncular speeches.

This is a role that has always been Chirac's strongest card, and it could pay clear dividends in next April's election race.

Chirac's post-September 11 survey approval stands at 65 per cent, an increase of 15 per cent.

Two-thirds of the public believe Chirac, a conservative, is doing a better job of managing the crisis than Jospin, a Socialist.

The crisis no doubt played a part in the decision last week by France's highest court of appeal to uphold Chirac's presidential immunity, which will enable him to fend off for as long as he remains head of state demands that he testify in the graft inquiry.

"In the current climate, you can hardly imagine the President chairing a meeting of the inner cabinet on Afghanistan one day, then facing a grilling by investigators the next," a gleeful Chirac aide said.

Among the European Union's "big four" countries, the clear loser is Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who committed one of the biggest diplomatic gaffes in recent memory by telling journalists that Islam was inferior to Western religions.

He has been accused by the Italian media of being sidelined by Bush in the US-led war in Afghanistan, with the daily La Repubblica citing his disastrous remarks as one reason for "The Italian Decline".

Map: Opposing forces in the war against terror

Afghanistan facts and links