France's new face

PanARMENIAN.Net - His first official visit President Sarkozy is planning to make to Germany, and whatever is spoken about the "new policy", Jacques Chirac's legacy in the home policy of France will still exist for a long while. The truth is that Sarkozy will be more moderate towards Russia than his predecessor was. The "friendship age" is becoming a thing of the past, and even President Putin didn't mean to Chirac what the late Boris Eltsin did. We may say that Sarkozy is the New France establishing its relations with the rest of the world on completely different and more pragmatic bases. The part of his speech where the President spoke about the country's relations with the USA was the most unusual one. "America may count on our friendship, and France will always be near. However, friendship also means a possibility of thinking otherwise, and France will always defend its positions in case of any kind of divergences," he said in his speech. By the way Sarkozy was the only one among the French politicians who has recently met President Bush.

Yet Sarkozy kept the most interesting thing for later. The newly elected President of France is going to establish Mediterranean Alliance together with North African countries. Turkey is not included in this Alliance. If Sarkozy's pre-election statements against Turkey's integration into EU do not undergo any changes, Turkey will have to forget about Europe for the next 7 years. However Turkey's Prime-Minister Recep Erdoghan hopes that "the French President will switch from the pre-election rhetoric to normalization of the relations between their countries, which has lately been far from being warm," Turkish Daily News writes. Turkey strongly hopes that Sarkozy will set a veto on the bill about criminalization of the denial of the Armenian Genocide, and, judging by what was stated in the Turkish-Azeri press, will refuse "hearing the Armenian Community in France". For some reason Baku hopes that the newly elected President will treat Azerbaijan better than his predecessor.

It is clear that our neighbor would love to see Armenia and France in unhealthy relations with each other. However, it should not be forget that France was one of the first countries who spoke against the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and sheltered a big number of refugees. As for Azerbaijan's hope that the new President will bring some negative changes in the relations of Armenia and France, it should be mentioned that the Armenians have done so much for France that the Armenian-French relations do not depend on the Presidents any more.

But unfortunately the elections didn't put an end to some disorder in the country. Ségolène Royal announced on Radio RTL, that if Sarkozy wins the elections, the whole country and first of all the poor suburban areas will suffer a strong wave of violence. Such a provoking announcement was a shock for many French, particularly when this provocation was heard and had its say in the further developments of the events.

After the results of the election were announced cases of a number of clashes were registered between the young and hot-blooded supporters of Royal with the police and with the followers of Sarkozy. Over 400 cars were burned, shop-windows of many magazines were broken. The police had to implement tear-gas to gain control over the crowd, just what it had to do last year when the cities of Paris were in disorder. By the way, that time the situation was taken under control by the help of the very Sarkozy, so he is very unlikely to stand such a situation again. However, with some unknown reasons, implementing force during demonstrations in France and in a number of European countries is not something unusual, while in other countries it is regarded as a violation of human rights…