Daily Times, Pakistan
March 23 2007
EDITORIAL: Chirac, Bush and Musharraf: overstaying their welcome?
President Jacques Chirac of France has retired from politics after
two terms in office. The ambience in which he leaves says he did not
live up to his promises, that he spoke big words but was half-cocked
and ambivalent when it came to implementing them. In France,
presidents are elected for six-year terms, and he had his two terms,
meaning that the French people still thought he could do something
for them after a lacklustre first term. But he leaves France at the
bottom of the economic heap among the big six who conceived the idea
of Europe as a super-state at Rome fifty years ago.
In 2003 when Mr Chirac opposed President Bush’s planned invasion of
Iraq, his popular rating was over 60 percent; today it is less than
half that because France has malfunctioned economically and the
population is scared stiff of the high rate of unemployment and the
social unrest it has brought in its wake. In foreign policy, though,
he formed the opposite pole in Europe to President Bush and reached
out to President Vladimir Putin of Russia to check the US at the
global level.
The good side of Mr Chirac will, alas, be clouded by his failure to
take the tough decisions on the French economy. He is a connoisseur
of the non-Western world and is a collector of no mean stature of
third world artefacts. It is a commentary on his enduring ambiguity
that while the French government passed new laws against Turkey (via
punishing those who deny the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks)
he stood for the inclusion of Turkey in the European Union. His
sympathy for the Arabs went hand in hand with his intense dislike of
those who hate the Jews in France. It was his knowledge of the Arab
world that inclined him to oppose Mr Bush’s adventure in Iraq. And he
was soon proved right.
We must understand President Chirac’s ambivalence closely to
understand another president in Pakistan whose lack of clear
direction has brought him to the end of his tether. Was Chirac from
the Left? Yes, once he was. Was he a centrist? He was that too. Did
he favour economic reform in France to wean its people away from
dirigisme or a high-spending, high-taxing state? Yes, he wanted that.
Was he in favour of following the more successful model of the United
Kingdom with low-taxation and low unemployment? No, he thought
Britain’s laissez-faire was not for France. He said reform was
unavoidable; but he also said all was already in perfect equilibrium
and needed little change.
Mr Chirac was 30 years in government in one ministerial capacity or
the other; he was prime minister under a declining earlier president;
he was once the mayor of Paris too. What was the secret of his
electoral success? A constantly flexible approach that gave him space
for movement but satisfied no one completely. His ideological
incoherence and his political opportunism became his trademark
towards the end. An earlier president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, has
written that Mr Chirac betrayed his own partyman to support him in
1974, but then ditched him in 1981 to make Mr François Mitterrand
oust him from the presidency.
It seems that this decade is not of the presidents. Neither Mr Putin
in Russia nor Mr Bush in the United States is the ideal ruler. In one
case, the unpopularity is being concealed behind strong-arm
governance and nationalism; and in the other, the people have already
expressed a negative view electorally in 2006. The other president in
trouble is President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan who chose to be
ideologically incoherent just like Mr Chirac and has ended up, after
seven years in power, being constitutionally incoherent too. That was
not how it started.
President Musharraf kicked off very upbeat and in step with the
aspirations of a nation tired of war and economic downturn under
elected governments. He was also a relatively liberal ruler and
promised to bring solace to a civil society increasingly bullied by
extremists empowered by the state earlier. But the dualism was
manifest quite early in his governance. He declared himself a
`moderate’ who was determined to bring the country back to its normal
state. But in the same breath he ruled out any cooperation with the
liberal mainstream political parties to give himself a leg-up in an
environment that was beginning to challenge his legitimacy.
General Musharraf’s efforts to relieve the hunted minorities were
undermined by persisting duality. He wanted to please everyone. He
thought he could rule in tandem with a party that did not believe in
his liberal worldview and ended up dividing it ideologically.
Although he vowed he was a transitional figure he never sought to put
together a national government of a liberal orientation that could
ease him out of his heavy responsibility through proper
representation and also relieve foreign pressures on Islamabad. The
result was that most of his undertakings floundered just like Mr
Chirac’s, starting with Kalabagh Dam and ending with Balochistan.
President Musharraf lifted the economy from its trough but he could
never establish law and order long enough to attract domestic or
foreign investments. He fought extremism but it actually increased on
his watch and Pakistan was reduced to a killing field of sectarian
violence as never before. People who welcomed him to power never
wanted him to become besieged as he is today. Now they wonder at the
admixture of courage and ambivalence in his person and want him to
come out of his trance.
Mr Chirac is gone, Mr Bush will go in 2008. Both are embedded in the
systems created for them by their constitutions. Both belong to
countries with great economic potential and consequent political
flexibility. In the case of Pakistan, the future is uncertain once
again. If the ten-year trough should strike again, unfortunately
another leader will be accused of not using his window of opportunity
wisely. *
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