CAIRO: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak goes to Paris on Sunday to bid farewell to his long-time friend, outgoing President Jacques Chirac, and sound out potential successors on the future of France s Arab policy.
The last-minute visit represents, from Cairo s view, a chance for Mubarak to salute a fellow statesman with whom he has had at least 30 official meetings over the past three decades and countless telephone conversations. It is a rare gesture of political friendship, said Mustafa Kamal el-Sayyed, a political scientist with the American University in Cairo. The meeting between the two ageing leaders comes as France s and Egypt’s influence in the troubled Middle East is seen as slipping back. Coming from the same generation, the two leaders have always publicly presented remarkably similar analyses of the ongoing crises in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question and the war in Iraq. On his latest visit to Egypt last year, Chirac even remarked at a news conference that the two leaders had the exact same view on all matters in the region, and that either leader could take the other’s questions. A nearly perfect case of political agreement in the French political tradition of Charles de Gaulle, including opposition to the United States, said Sayyed, describing their long relationship. With Francois Mitterrand, there was a similar degree of shared views, to the extent that France s former socialist president chose to spend his last Christmas in the southern Nile city of Aswan at Mubarak’s invitation. He died of cancer two weeks later. When Chirac succeeded Mitterrand, Mubarak was significantly the first foreign leader to be received at the Elysee in Paris, confirming the importance of Egypt as a key player in the Arab world. Mubarak is also one of the last of a generation of Arab leaders with whom Chirac has close personal links, following the passing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Even more unexpected than Sunday s visit, however, is the Egyptian president s decision to meet with the aspirant to Chirac’s mantle, right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy. Scheduled meetings with socialist candidate Segolene Royal and centrist Francois Bayrou were reported in Egypt s top-selling state-owned daily Al-Ahram but not yet immediately confirmed. With the departure of Chirac, it is the end of an era and there is worry about the future, said Antoine Basbous, director of the Paris-based Observatoire des Pays Arabes. French Arab policy no longer makes any sense, he added. The Arab world is much divided and Islam, and its variant Islamism, has become the axis around which a new policy must be formulated.
Israel and the Palestinian question, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon to which France is especially close – and of course the French-speaking countries of North Africa have barely featured in the presidential campaign. The main candidates seem unfamiliar with these questions and they don t want to take risks, said Sayyed, noting that the Egyptian press is laying its bets on Sarkozy to win the second round of voting on May 6. Unlike the others, he is at least not unknown in Egypt, following his 2003 trip to see the grand sheikh of Al-Azhar, Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, over a controversial French law banning the Islamic headscarf in schools. Sarkozy, however, is also seen by the Egyptian press as leaning closer to Israel and the United States than Chirac. During the riots in France s suburbs in 2005 when Sarkozy was interior minister, Mohammed Abul Hamid of the state-owned daily Gomhuriya wrote for those who don t know, Sarkozy is Jewish, in reference to his mother s Jewish father. While Mubarak has never met Sarkozy, he has met rival candidate Royal during a trip to Paris in December. Only Mubarak is still moving in this region, she said at the time, a statement dramatically at odds with the Egyptian opposition’s contention that the ageing president is a symbol of stagnation.
