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Last Updated: Monday, 7 February, 2005, 05:49 GMT
European press review
Monday’s European papers’ ‘dish of the day’ is undoubtedly Rice. Condoleezza
that is.
Several German dailies criticise an opposition leader for blaming the rise
of the far right on the government.
And a Spanish daily would like to see the IRA change bullets into ballots.
Rice with French fries, sauerkraut and caviar
France’s Liberation looks forward to the arrival in Paris on Tuesday of US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, ahead of President Bush’s coming visit.
Ms Rice, the paper says, “will stamp the seal” on the US “wish to turn over
a new leaf”.
Paris, it adds, “has for the past few months held out its hand to a
Washington which has been slow to grasp it”.
But now “is a good time”, the paper believes, “because the new Bush
administration wants to succeed where the old one failed”, and “break out of
its international isolation”.
“Still,” the paper concludes with more than a hint of irony, “Miss Rice is
coming to Paris with her smile, a veritable dove of peace from the home of
the brave – and besides there never was any war.”
Switzerland’s Le Temps points out that this is the same Condoleezza Rice
who, as the paper puts it, “chose to ignore the Germans” and “promised to
punish the French” as the president’s national security adviser during Mr
Bush’s first term, is now “wafting through Old Europe like a breeze with
invitations to join the US-British coalition”.
Germany’s Die Welt notes that the secretary of state has had “almost nothing
but praise for Old Europe” since she began her current tour of European
capitals and the Middle East.
“Clearly,” it believes, “her boss in the White House is preparing to mend
and reactivate the transatlantic alliance, especially with Germany and
France.”
Austria’s Die Presse praises her “wise move” in starting her approach to
Europe with what it calls “verbal disarmament”.
Moscow’s Kommersant hits a disgruntled note.
The secretary of state’s “lightning visit”, it says, “means that the
decisive word on the eve of the Palestinian-Israeli talks belongs, as ever,
to Washington, while Moscow’s positions have not been consolidated at all”.
“This means that America’s role will remain unchanged”, the paper warns,
“and the influence of the other members of the (Middle East) quartet – the
EU, the UN and Russia – will be reduced to zero.”
Blaming Gerhard
In Germany, in an interview with the Sunday paper Welt AM Sonntag, Bavaria’s
regional Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber said the rise of unemployment under
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has provided a “breeding ground” for extremism.
Mr Stoiber, who is also the leader of the opposition Christian Social Union,
CSU, went on to call unemployment “the main reason for the resurgence” of
the far-right National Democratic Party, NPD.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung believes the remarks are misguided.
It acknowledges that mass unemployment can lead to radicalisation on the
Left as well as the Right, and that the NPD recently scored an “electoral
success” in the eastern state of Saxony.
“But CSU chairman Stoiber is playing a dangerous game,” it says, “in
retrospectively making an irrational electoral decision look rational by
presenting it as a natural consequence of the government’s policies.”
“In this way the voters who went astray will certainly not be tempted back
to the path of democracy,” the paper warns.
The Berliner Zeitung agrees.
The Frankfurter Rundschau is particularly scathing in its verdict.
“So Schroeder is to blame for the Nazis,” the paper says. It goes on to
point out that the man it terms “the Bavarian”, is “the first to come up
with such nonsense”.
Edmund Stoiber has demonstrated, it adds, “that his aversion to Schroeder
makes him lose all political decency”.
Little Turkish delight left
With France’s ruling UMP party at odds with its most prominent member –
President Jacques Chirac – on the prospect of Turkey’s full EU membership,
Paris’s Le Monde ponders one of the contentious issues raised during a visit
to Turkey by a delegation led by the president of the French parliament,
Jean-Louis Debre.
The paper quotes Mr Debre as telling Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
that “Turkey’s attitude to the Armenian genocide” of 1915 “poses a real
problem for France”.
To which Mr Erdogan replied, it notes, that he was “disappointed” with
Paris’s position” and “did not know that 400,000 (dead) Armenians could
decide the referendum” Paris intends to hold on Ankara’s membership bid.
“Despite this lively exchange,” the paper adds, “Mr Debre believes he ‘may
have done some useful work’ on the Armenian question, since the Turkish
authorities say they are willing to ‘consider’ a proposal to give access to
its archives to an international commission of historians”.
IRA
Writing from the only western European country sharing with the UK the
problem of violent separatism, Spain’s El Pais thinks it “unlikely” that the
IRA will return to what the paper calls “sectarian violence” even though it
has withdrawn from the Northern Ireland peace process.
“Experience teaches us”, it says, “that the recycling of the professionals
of the gun and the dynamite” is “a complex and drawn out process”.
“The disarming of the sectarian group,” it argues, “would lay down the
foundations for the demilitarisation of Northern Ireland and signal the
start of a normality desired by all but a handful of people.”
The European press review is compiled by BBC Monitoring from internet
editions of the main European newspapers and some early printed editions.