Kieran Lawrence looks at autonomous weapons and the effect they could have on modern warfare
Continuing a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Angela Merkel
Ben Bland examines the fallout from the Iowa caucuses and looks forward to the New Hampshire primaries.
Izaak looks at Cameron's pronouncements of morality and asks what this means in the age of austerity?
In the first of a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Nicholas Sarkozy...
Nicholas Sarkozy, a man whose stature has led to many comparisons with Napoleon, seems to wish to imitate the Little Corporal on a more substantial level, enthusiastically pushing for more vigorous intervention in Libya as well as leading France into dealing with the recently concluded Civil War in the Ivory Coast.
While both conflicts have humanitarian rationales: it is doubtful that Gaddafi, dictator of Libya for thirty two years would have been merciful to the Eastern rebels while French and United Nations troops in the Ivory Coast have returned the legitimate President to power after Laurent Gbagbo refused to give up power upon losing recent elections.
However it is also clear that Sarkozy is angling to boost his rock bottom poll ratings in the face of an impending 2012 Presidential election. Having avoided the Iraq quagmire the French public is far less war weary than their British counterparts thus giving Sarkozy the chance for a Thatcher-esque Falklands moment.
Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa, to give him his full name has been President of France since 2007 as well as being, like all recent French Heads of State, the Co-Prince of the microstate of Andorra. During Jacques Chirac’s Presidency he worked twice as the Minister for the Interior with a brief fourteen month intermission working as the Minister for Finance.
While his first term as Minister of the Interior he sought to ease tensions with the French Muslim community by setting up the French Council of the Muslim Faith with which to create a start a dialogue through. These endeavours however were compromised when in 2005 he called the predominately North African rioters in Paris a “rabble” and talked of cleaning out undesirables in a Paris suburb with a high powered hose.
In 2007 he ran for President at the head of the centre-right UMP against the Socialist Party’s Ségolène Royal. After a election very different from British ones: a turn-out of over eighty percent and less trivial election coverage from the media owing to France’s strict privacy laws and the ban on polls in the run-up to an election, Sarkozy emerged victorious. His pledges to crack down on immigration and crime as well as to push through economic reforms to reduce France’s ten percent unemployment rate earned him 53% of the vote and over two million more votes than his Socialist rival.
While many outside France would automatically think of Sarkozy’s marriage to the glamorous Carla Bruni when thinking of his presidency, the previously mentioned French privacy laws and Gallic custom of leaving the private life of their politicians’ private means that she isn’t half as prominent in the French public eye as the international one.
Despite being a centre right politician who substantially cut heritance tax the credit crunch turned him into proponent of state intervention as he declared that “laissez-faire capitalism is over”, called for the end of the “dictatorship of the market” and pledged to create 100,000 state subsidized jobs. However Sarkozy is hardly a flag waving socialist having raised the retirement age from sixty to sixty two as well as expelling hundreds of Eastern European travellers.
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