Word: villepin
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...disparate cast of characters across French society echoed Pruvost's defense of Bouton. Former conservative prime minister and Sarkozy archrival Dominique de Villepin lashed out at the "hysteria characteristic of how this crisis has been handled," and warned against "the search for a scapegoat" as an easy response to it. Michel Marchet, an official with the Communist-affiliated CGT labor union and thus no friend to de Villepin or to big capital in general, stressed that his organization "does not want Daniel Bouton to leave...
...Critics of such tough talk point to Iraq as evidence that diplomatic swagger can lead policy astray. "We mustn't send the wrong signs to the Bush Administration; it doesn't need us to be encouraged towards war," sarcastically warned former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, whose impassioned anti-invasion speech at the United Nations in February 2003 gave wings to his political career before Sarkozy's ascent stymied it. "There are rules on how to use force," concurred Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which leads negotiations with Tehran. "I would hope that everybody would...
...sidence. The French, after all, are notoriously averse to change and have a proven record of stopping reforms in their tracks - just ask Jacques Chirac, who in 1995 saw his modest plans for reforming the welfare state rejected by hundreds of thousands of angry protesters; or Dominique de Villepin, whose even more modest efforts to tweak the French youth labor market some 10 years later were similarly rejected. Even when the French do not bring down governments with their feet, they bring them down with their ballots - in every parliamentary election since 1978 and before 2007, the French voted...
Last year, when Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin proposed a very modest reform to address the 21.5 percent youth unemployment rate that would have given young employees slightly less job security, widespread student street demonstrations caused the reform bill to be withdrawn. The obvious conclusion drawn from this experience by French politicians was that any further moves toward reform would have to be deferred until the Presidential election and perhaps a fresh round of parliamentary elections. (Sarkozy himself, seeing a chance to undermine his rival, Villepin, opposed the reform.) As for the French youth, a recent poll shows that...
...Let’s show that we have strong proposals and strong convictions. There is no power in standing alone. There is only organized shared power,” Villepin said...