News Analysis: French Elections

I thought I would give you guys some news and views from around the world on the French elections. I'm working on a short blog on the continuing focus on Iran by the Bush administration, but I'm not sure the angle I want to do for it since it has been covered so much by other bloggers, possibly a strict foreign policy angle. But, on to the news.

Le Monde (France)
March 7, 2007
Smiles Do Not Erase the Dissension Between Mrs. Royal and Merkel
By Cecile Calla and Isabelle Mandraud

Divergences "I do not see any," ensured Ségolène Royal, while leaving a meeting in Berling on Tuesday March 6, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "I would say that despite the political differences things went very well," said the socialist candidate at the end of an hour long meeting which was described as "very cordial, I was even going to say supportive." With a handshake, smile, and photograph Mrs. Merkel has, on other side, scrupulously and equally respected Nicolas Sarkozy during his visit to Berlin on February 12. And as in this case, she left the meeting without commenting.

For Mrs Royal this is her last trip abroad before the presidential election, which is of a particular importance due to due to the debate on the reorganization of Airbus, but it also to shore up links with German partners before the French rotation of the European Union presidency in 2008. "This is preparing for at least a year in advance," underlined Elisabeth Guigou, the former minister for European business, during a private conversation with the French delegation...(Read More)

Der Spiegel (Germany)
March 6, 2007
Paris Calls for End to Dual Management at EADS
By SMD, Reuters, Spiegel, DPA

With the French presidential campaign heating up, politicians in Paris are seizing on the Airbus crisis as an election issue. Sarkozy is calling for an end to the dual leadership at parent company EADS and Royal is calling for more state investment instead of job cuts.

French politicians are calling for an increase in state involvement in Airbus. The principle of dual French-German leadership is also being questioned in Paris...(Read More)

EUobserver.com (Belgium)
March 5, 2007
French commissioner worried by presidential election campaign
By Helena Spongenberg

Jacques Barrot, the French EU commissioner, has warned the French presidential candidates that France could lose out if it does not resume its leadership role in Europe.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Barrot, responsible for EU transport, said Europe is in danger of becoming the "big forgotten issue" in the French presidential campaign, at a time when the country needs to get out of its "whingeing, pessimistic and defensive" mindset...(Read More)


Deutsche Welle (Germany)
France's Presidential Elections Face Neck-And-Neck Race
Feb. 27, 2007
By DW Staff

The French election campaign has focused closely on the leading candidates Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy. But the "third man" François Bayrou could upset the first round of voting on April 22.

The latest polls in France show that conservative presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist rival Ségolène Royal are running neck-and-neck. But outside contenders in the vote could upset a clear outcome...(Read More)


Journal Turkish Weekly
France's elections, Turkey's choice
March 4, 2007
By Beril Dedeoglu

As the president has important powers in the French political system, the winner of the presidential elections this May is important not only for France but also for many other countries. The rightist UMP candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, who says that “Together Everything is Possible,” seems to receive the support of the conservative sectors of the electorate. He wants to restore France’s former power and importance.


But having said that, he seems to be supportive of a federal Europe. He affirms that as in De Gaulle’s time, France and Germany should be the EU’s pivots, and he thinks that the UK is an obstacle on the path to full European integration. Sarkozy would be right if the world were the same as in De Gaulle’s time. Today the UK is a member of the EU -- and a powerful one -- even if it doesn’t please France. Sarkozy also affirms that France would be stronger if it joined fully in the dynamics of globalization. He defends globalization and a federal Europe at the same time. Beside this, he promises to take harsh measures to tackle the immigration issue, even though it’s not understandable how he reconciles this with globalization...(Read More)

People's Daily (China)
March 8, 2007
Feminist campaigners split over 'sexy Socialist' Royal
By China Daily and Agence France-Presse

The women of France agree electing a female president would be a giant step forward for a nation which has treated career women poorly.

However, feminists are split over whether presidential hopeful Segolene Royal is the best person to advance their fight for equal rights in a country where a revolutionary heroine is the national symbol...(Read More)

Time Magazine (U.S.A.)
March 8, 2007
Not Your Father's Anti-Immigrant Right
By Bruce Crumley

U.S. comedian Dave Chapelle wrought comic havoc by creating a fictional blind African-American who supports the Klu Klux Klan, unaware of his own blackness. But Farid Smahi is not a comedian, nor is he blind, although he does confound a stereotype: The son of Algerian parents and a longtime victim of anti-immigrant prejudice, Smahi is a candidate in France's forthcoming legislative election — for the anti-immigrant National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

"There is no contradiction in being Arab or black or any other minority and voting Le Pen," argues Smahi, who joined the party a decade ago after having initially backed leftist causes and marching for immigrant rights. "French minorities and banlieue [housing project] residents see they've been manipulated and exploited by both the hypocritical left and sham right for years now. Nothing has changed except the racism. So this time around, expect a lot of people to be casting votes for Le Pen in the hopes that, at last, things may change."...(Read More)

Washington Post
March 5, 2007
Candidate Wants Le Pen on France Ballot
By Elaine Ganley

PARIS -- One of France's top presidential candidates asked mayors and other elected officials on Monday to give their backing to an extreme right-wing politician to ensure he has enough endorsements to run in the spring elections.

Nicolas Sarkozy's plea for goodwill on behalf of Jean-Marie Le Pen _ in the name of democracy _ followed a similar call earlier in the day from Sarkozy's party, the governing Union for a Popular Movement, known as the UMP...(Read More)

Globe and Mail (Canada)
March 2, 2007
Suddenly sexy
By Doug Saunders

PARIS — Until a few days ago, Margot Gardelon's friends were telling her to get with the reality of French politics: Either side with the romantic promise of socialism offered by Ségolène Royal or the stern certainties of a U.S.-inspired conservatism represented by Nicolas Sarkozy. In this year's dramatic presidential election, those were the choices.

The 20-year-old university student was ridiculed, even harassed, for her distinctly unfashionable affinity: She backed an obscure, charisma-challenged farmer named François Bayrou, who proudly called himself a centrist, a concept that has never been taken very seriously in French politics...(Read More)

Mail and Guardian (South Africa)
Feb. 20, 2007
Royal Faces the nation to revive campaign


Ségolène Royal mounted a determined effort on Monday night to revive her ambitions, appearing on primetime TV to defend her campaign to become France's first female president.

Three months ago, Royal (53) a mother of four and the Socialist head of Poitou Charentes region, appeared to represent an unstoppable new face in politics. But her popularity has been dented by gaffes and infighting, with more than 20 consecutive opinion polls in recent weeks showing the public is not convinced. Her right-wing opponent, the Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has a lead of up to 10 points...(Read More)

Muslims and Sharia: The Real Sharia, Democracy, and Patriarchy

By Mona Eltahawy

This essay first appeared on Saudi Debate and then on Muslim WakeUp!, a Muslim blog which “seeks to bring together Muslims and non-Muslims in American and around the globe in efforts that celebrate cultural and spiritual diversity, tolerance, and understanding." On Muslim WakeUp! it was titled “Copenhagen Sharia Conference Celebrates ‘Heresy.’” Mona Eltahawy has worked for Reuters and is a commentator and an internaitonl lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues who is based in New York.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

This summer at the end of a day-long conference in Copenhagen on freedom of expression in the Arab world a young man with slightly faltering Arabic asked to speak to me.

“Would you give me one example of why freedom of expression and democracy are good things?” he asked after introducing himself as Abdel-Hamid. He apologized for what he described as his basic Arabic, explaining that he was born and raised in Denmark to Arab parents.

At first I thought his question was a joke. The other conference speakers and I had spent hours explaining how the sorry lack of freedom of expression had harmed Arab civil society. And surely as a Dane he appreciated the democracy and freedoms he enjoyed?

“No, really, tell me,” he persisted. “Democracy is the rule of the people. Islam is the rule of the Sharia. So what’s good about democracy and freedom of expression?”

When I realized he was serious – and when I began to see the direction his argument was heading – I dragged out my usual defense to his line of thinking: whose version of Sharia, I asked him? Iran? Turkey? Saudi Arabia? Egypt, my country of birth?

“The Sharia of God,” he adamantly replied.

“There is no such thing,” I told Abdel-Hamid.

That was essentially the message at another conference that took me back to Copenhagen in November at which speaker after speaker bemoaned the Muslim fundamentalist reduction of Sharia to a set of laws.

It has become fashionable among radical Muslims in the West to long for the application of Sharia. Abdel-Hamid, my summer Copenhagen interlocutor and adherent to the idea that there was only one kind of Sharia – that of God -, identified himself as a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamist group that wants to reestablish the Caliphate and does not believe Islam is compatible with democracy.

In many parts of the Muslim world, what the State has deemed Islamic is slapped with the label “Sharia”. So when a murderer or a drug dealer is beheaded in Saudi Arabia, it is ostensibly out of adherence to Sharia.

When a dictator or a regime feels the need to burnish their Islamic credentials – often at a time of growing radical Muslim opposition – they make their country’s legislation “more Islamic”. Take Pakistan’s late President General. Zia ul-Haq who in 1979 introduced the Hudood Ordinances, notorious not so much for making Pakistan “more Islamic” but for punishing rather than protecting women who have been raped.

Under the Hudood Ordinances, a rape victim had to produce four male witnesses to prove the crime or face the possibility of prosecution for adultery. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf on Dec. 1 signed into law an amendment to the controversial rape statute to make it easier to prosecute sexual assault cases. Thousands of Islamists gathered at separate events throughout Pakistan to protest the changes.

One has to wonder what kind of Islam those protestors follow and how it came to be so shamefully reduced to an obsession over sex and women.

As the Associated Press reported, under the new law, called the Protection of Women Bill, judges can choose whether a rape case should be tried in a criminal court - where the four-witness rule would not apply - or under the old Islamic law, i.e. the Hudood Ordinance.

And that is exactly the lie at the heart of the calls for Sharia. Why are there criminal courts in which the old Islamic law does not apply? In many Muslim countries, the justice system has been modernized and has adopted either Roman or Napoleonic law, with the exception of one area which stubbornly remains caught in the cobweb of edicts issued by Muslim scholars who lived centuries ago – family law. In other words, in many Muslim countries Sharia is used only to govern the lives of women and children with regards to marriage, divorce and custody of children.

How refreshing therefore it was to hear Emory University law professor Abdullahi An-Nai’m point out that lie at the heart of the calls for Sharia by saying it was essentially an attempt to “protect a patriarchal system by calling it Sharia”.

“I need a secular state to be the kind of Muslim I need to be,” he told the conference.

As Egyptian liberal Muslim scholar Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid noted, “Sharia” these days means nothing more than the “haram” (forbidden) and the “halal” (permissible).

The definition of Sharia as law is based on 500 verses of the Quran, Abu Zeid reminded us – that is just 16 percent of the Quran.

It was a relief to hear Abdel-Hamid’s adamant theory debunked in his own city – and how I wish he was there to hear. But more importantly, Abu Zeid, An-Nai’m and their fellow speakers were crafting the instruments by which all of the Muslims who were present could take the Sharia argument apart.

In a climate of growing right-wing anti-Muslim rhetoric, particularly in Europe, some in the Muslim community find it difficult to stand up to radical Islamist posturing on Sharia. Such hesitation is often based on a mix of reluctance to openly criticize fellow Muslims – so as to not contribute to a further demonization of Muslims – and ignorance as to exactly what the word Sharia means and what the concept entails.

The conference, called “Sharia in a modern context”, was organized by Democratic Muslims, a liberal Muslim group that was launched as an alternative to the voices of radical imams in Denmark during the controversy that surrounded publication of cartoons featuring Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten.

If the talks given by each speaker represented the tools which we could use to dismantle the Sharia argument, then the lives of the speakers themselves were the starkest examples of the danger of Islamist ideology run amok.

None of the speakers lives in his country of birth. That is a sad testament to the dangerously conservative environment in many Muslim countries today. But the speakers’ presence at the conference and at the various western universities where they teach were testaments to their courage and determination to continue their fearless work.

Abu Zeid, Ibn Rushd Chair of Humanism and Islam at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, is former Professor of Arabic literature at Cairo University. In 1995 a Cairo appeals court sided with Muslim fundamentalists who raised a case to demand Abu Zeid divorce his wife on the ground of his alleged apostasy. The fundamentalists accused Abu Zeid of apostasy because of his liberal theories on Islam.
The day the appeals court issued its verdict, I was a correspondent with Reuters News Agency in Cairo. I clearly remember typing an urgent bulletin announcing the verdict while thinking it was time to buy a one-way ticket out of my country.

After the court’s verdict against Abu Zeid, Ayman al-Zawahri – who is today al-Qaeda’s number two but in 1995 was head of the Egyptian terrorist group Islamic Jihad – called for the scholar’s murder. Abu Zeid and his wife, fellow academic Ibtihal Younes, left for The Netherlands where they have lived and taught since.
An-Nai’m, an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights, and Mohamed Mahmoud, who teaches comparative religion at Tufts University in Boston, were both students of Sudanese Muslim reformer Mahmoud Taha who was publicly executed for his liberal views by then President Jaafar Nimeri whose introduction of Sharia was opposed by Taha.

Bassam Tibi, a Syrian-born German political scientist who is Professor of International Relations in Goettingen, received a death threat in Karachi when he told a conference that Sharia was not divine.

His points were particularly pertinent to a Europe increasingly struggling with ways to react to radical Islamists. While lamenting European governments’ habit of turning to the most conservative in the Muslim community to speak on its behalf he vowed “In the name of multiculturalism I will not accept cultural rights as a cover for Sharia”.

“I believe in Sharia as morality not as state law,” he said. “I am not willing to shut up about human rights abuses by Islamists just because of the right wing. They are my enemy too.”

“Islamophobia is the weapon of Islamists to silence critics. I do not believe Europe will become Islamist – that is the fantasy of both Islamists and the right wing,” Tibi said. “Are European Muslims committed to democracy or political Islam and Sharia? The debate should take place in Europe.”

One of the best ways to stimulate such a debate is to highlight the views of the scholars who spoke at the conference both within the Muslim community and outside it.

It is imperative that non-Muslims hear the vigorous debates that are taking place between Muslims over controversial issues such as Sharia. The argument between Abdel-Hamid and me is the best proof that Muslim thought is not monolithic.

How representative are we? That is the question most often asked of those of us who call ourselves liberal Muslims. I will let An-Nai’m and Abu Zeid reply:

“Is my voice the minority or the majority? That is a value judgment,”An-Nai’m said. “The question instead should be is my voice loud enough? Islamists blow themselves up and they make the news. My lecture on human rights doesn’t make the news.”

“Islamic transformation is underway,” he added. “My view is demographically representative of the majority of Muslims but it is not very loud……Who defines what Islam is? Islam is what Muslims make of it. Heresy? I celebrate heresy.”

Abu Zeid simply asked “Who said reformation comes out of the majority?”

“We shouldn’t be ashamed of being the minority,” he added. “Mohammed and his people were a minority at first.”

And if you’re wondering what example I gave to prove to Abdel-Hamid that democracy and freedom of expression were good things, all I had to do was point to him and say “you are my proof”.

Hizb-ut-Tahrir is banned in most Muslims countries whereas in Denmark the organization is legal and operates openly.

Image From:
Middle East Institute