EUROPEAN DIARY:Straight talking on issues such as France's expulsion of Roma can break through the listless convolutions of debate in Brussels
THE SUMMIT lunch was good, said German chancellor Angela Merkel, but only the food. Raised voices were heard from the dining room as French president Nicolas Sarkozy let rip at European Commission president José Manuel Barroso over a spiky attack from the commission on the wave of Roma expulsions from France.
The confrontation was inevitable. Barroso’s justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, had compared Sarkozy’s Roma policy to the grim persecutions of the second World War. Her words seemed calculated to wound – and they did. When he met his European counterparts in Brussels last week, the French leader was seething at implicit links drawn between his policies and the Holocaust.
If bickering between Brussels and member states is nothing new, the exchanges reached an intensity rarely seen in public. In the first instance, the affair centres on official discrimination against a group of people blighted by poverty, segregation, poor health and low educational achievement. It also smacks of a power play between a leader desperate to portray himself as a tireless man of action and an institution whose members don’t want to be taken for patsies.
At issue is a campaign by Paris to deport thousands of Roma gypsies to Romania and Bulgaria – 8,300 of them so far this year, on top of some 10,000 in 2009. Such expulsions are not confined to France – Italy has conducted similar evictions, and accounts of discrimination elsewhere in the EU are rife – but they raise persistent claims that Sarkozy is deploying a blatant populist ruse to boost flagging public support.
The commission was at first reluctant to intervene, saying the matter was for individual states. Unable to sustain that line for very long, its initial comments on the expulsions were guarded, and any deviation from neutral language was clouded in diplomatic nuance. This is usually the case whenever tensions with member states surface.
For example, there was but glancing criticism of France in Barroso’s heavily promoted “state of the union” address to the European Parliament a fortnight ago, a speech in which he merely warned against reawakening the ghosts of Europe’s past. At the same session, Reding was noticeably subdued.
All that changed seven days ago, when Reding claimed in the commission press room that the policy recalled a situation not seen in Europe since the Nazi era. Her voice rising as she berated the Sarkozy administration, the Luxembourger commissioner emphasised expressions such as “disgrace” and “disturbing” in her attack. “I personally have been appalled by a situation which gave the impression that people are being removed from a member state of the EU just because they belong to a certain ethnic minority.”
This was sparked by the emergence of a leaked memo that showed the French interior ministry ordered police to single out Roma gypsies in a campaign against illegal camps. This was at odds with French claims to the commission that Roma were not specifically targeted.
Still, Reding’s remarks met with astonished outrage in Paris, an anger that was not dimmed by the withdrawal of the Nazi allusion by Barroso and the commissioner herself. The other criticism stood, including the assertion that French ministers were duplicitous in their dealings with Brussels, as did the threat of legal action against France.
In diplomatic circles, Reding was held to have jumped off at the deep end, but her remarks reflect a widely held sense of unease at the ferocity of the French campaign against the Roma. Is this not a case of a powerful president using the forces of state to prey on very vulnerable people for easy electoral gain? It is a question many ask.
Sarkozy, himself the son of a Hungarian immigrant, was all wound up when he arrived in Brussels early on Thursday morning. By lunchtime his mood hadn’t changed a jot, and he still hadn’t calmed down by the late afternoon. “The comparison with World War II and what happened in our country – it is an insult. It is a wound. It is a humiliation. It is an outrage,” he told reporters. “We don’t talk this way between European partners.”
Well, this case shows that straight talking sometimes breaks through the listless bureaucratic convolutions which often cut the life from debate in Brussels. Nor is it the first time that Reding, who spoke after consultations with Barroso, and with his support, has led the charge for him on a sensitive topic.
Earlier this year, when Germany prevaricated over special fiscal aid for Greece, it was Reding who urged Merkel on in public. “Have a little courage, Angela,” she said at one point.
For Barroso, often accused of bowing to the will of the major member states, the affair lays down a marker that he will not be a pushover if any other leaders try to follow Sarkozy’s steps.
An important signal, yes, although its critics would have preferred the commission to take a stand much sooner. That the deportations speak volumes about Sarkozy’s political weakness is another matter. The Roma question hasn’t gone away – and his true colours lie exposed.
