Free Republic

Rwanda said top French politicians should "answer for their actions" as it named them in a report accusing France of arming and advising extremists in the 1994 genocide. The two-year investigation said France helped the extremists who carried out the genocide and even took part in some of the killings. It named François Mitterand, France's late former president, and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin among 33 military and political leaders.

A scandal over apparent efforts made by Jacques Chirac and his former prime minister to dash the presidential hopes of his rival Nicolas Sarkozy gathered pace yesterday after evidence emerged suggesting that the current interior minister was aware of the alleged plot. Michèle Alliot-Marie, 61, defence minister when Mr Chirac was president, is expected to be questioned and perhaps placed under investigation after new evidence suggested she was aware of the attempt to smear Mr Sarkozy and failed to inform him. Michèle Alliot-Marie was defence minister when Jacques Chirac's was president The so-called Clearstream affair surrounds allegations that several high-profile...

Paris - Two French magistrates investigating an attempt to smear President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday searched the Paris residence of former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who has been implicated in the affair by a former espionage official, France-Info radio reported. The search by judges Jean-Marie d'Huy and Henri Pons followed testimony by a former senior official in France's counter- intelligence service, General Philippe Rondot, that Villepin was behind the attempt to implicate Sarkozy in an affair involving illegal payments into foreign bank accounts. According to the internet site of the daily Le Monde, Rondot told the two judges...

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said the United States should pull out of Iraq within one year and work with Iraq's neighbors and Europe to resolve the crisis. Villepin, in a speech Friday at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government on Friday, said the United States' true strength "isn't its army." The United States in the 20th century constructed an economic and cultural model "and forged an ideal of modernity that inspired the admiration of the rest of the world," he said. "For us you represented the camp of freedom. You were the guarantors of...

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin on Friday urged the United States and other foreign nations to withdraw from Iraq in 2008 and said the war had "shattered" America's image abroad. The Iraqi conflict, which has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and some 3,200 U.S. troops in the past four years, is sapping the power of the United States to peacefully influence other players in the troubled Middle East, he said. "The war with Iraq marked a turning point. It shattered America's image," said Villepin, who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It...

Backbenchers from France's ruling centre-right party pleaded with their leaders yesterday to end a feud that was undermining their campaign to beat Segolene Royal, the Socialist candidate, to the presidency next spring. President Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, his Prime Minister, were the main targets of the MPs from the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) because of their hostility to Nicolas Sarkozy, the popular party leader... The 51-year-old Interior Minister is the favourite for the candidacy among a big majority of MPs and of 77 per cent of the Gaullist party's supporters, according to an Ipsos poll yesterday... However,...

Do you agree with French PM Dominique de Villepin that a "war on terror" is not needed? Yes No

Russia on Friday cast new doubt on the prospects for the Bush administration’s efforts to punish Iran for refusing to suspend its nuclear program, even as European leaders expressed wariness at moving quickly to impose sanctions. In Moscow, officials expressed regret that an Aug. 31 deadline had passed without an agreement by Iran to halt its efforts to enrich uranium that could be used for building nuclear weapons, as American and European officials believe Iran intends to do.

The Prime Minister of France, Dominique de Villepin, arrived in Beirut by helicopter Monday in order to meet with senior officials in the Lebanese government about the current situation on the border with Israel. (AFP)

Aircraft manufacturers regularly conduct stress testing of the vital components and systems of their new airplanes, to make certain they can withstand the forces that will come with actual use. Lately, the troubles of Airbus have been applying a stress test to French and EU politics, and the results have been ugly. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, the poetry-writing, Napoleon-loving dandy is Is showing signs of wear. He has staked a lot of political capital on state support of French big business threatened by international competition. Tuesday, an uproar of “rare intensity” caused the presiding officer in the French...

A day after Mr Chirac denounced the so-called Clearstream affair as a "dictatorship of rumours", Le Monde newspaper published notes of General Philippe Rondot that pitched the 73-year-old President into the centre of the scandal, which continues to blow the lid on the way power is exercised in the dying days of his inglorious 11-year presidency. Mr Chirac and his protege, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, are accused of covertly instructing a French intelligence official to secretly investigate their internal party rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in an apparent attempt to ruin his chances of becoming president. ............. General Rondot...

Engulfed by scandal and fighting to save his job, the French prime minister made an emotional outburst in parliament yesterday, portraying himself as the victim of a "shameful" smear campaign.Dominique de Villepin made no attempt to conceal his anger and distress as he denied claims that he ordered an intelligence chief to investigate anonymous - and, as it transpired, false - corruption charges against his presidential rival and number two in government, Nicolas Sarkozy. On the toughest day of his 11-month premiership, Mr de Villepin told the Paris parliament: "Enough is enough." Facing the Assemblée Nationale before an emergency cabinet...

THE French Government defiantly shrugged off yesterday the accusation that Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, used a senior intelligence officer in a campaign to smear his political rival.President Chirac resisted calls to dismiss M de Villepin over his handling of an investigation into a campaign against Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister and arch enemy of both men. M Chirac’s aides made it known that there was no question of replacing M de Villepin, who has become the focus of the so-called Clearstream affair, a long-running scandal involving an investigation into a list of bogus bank accounts. The latest revelations...

Chirac's waning days hurt France and beyondA lame-duck prime minister whose time looks to be running out; feuding and power-hungry personalities convulsing Government; ministerial reputations tarnished; the pervading sense that a long-running regime is reaching its end: not Britain, but France. If Tony Blair had a moment of contemplation during his various ministerial crises and gazed across the Channel, he might experience a frisson of Schadenfreude at seeing an adminis-tration in worse straits than his own. The cause of its current troubles is a dirty tricks row involving France’s three most prominent politicians. The claim that Dominique de Villepin, the...

Under the contrat première embauche (CPE), employers would have been able to sack workers under 26 during their first two years in a job without giving a reason... Having initially backed his preferred successor, Jacques Chirac predictably havered, then ceded to pressure from the street. Yesterday, he announced that the CPE, which was rammed through parliament in March, would be abandoned in favour of less controversial measures to create jobs in a country where youth unemployment is more than 20 per cent. This surrender puts paid to any significant reform at least until after the presidential election in May next...

The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, was clinging to office last night amid a series of humiliations in his battle to force new job laws on a hostile public.At least a million demonstrators took to the streets for a fifth day of protest, demanding the repeal of the law providing for contentious "first job contracts" (CPE). Marches and strikes were staged as students and trade unions rejected concessions ordered by President Jacques Chirac. Violence flared again last night in Paris, where organisers claimed 700,000 people were on the march. Police put the figure at 80,000 and official estimates of...

FRANCE'S Constitutional Council last night approved a controversial youth jobs law, leaving the president, Jacques Chirac, with the risk of signing it and causing massive civil disruption or withdrawing it and losing his prime minister. The First Employment Contract (CPE), which allows employers to sack workers under 26 without explanation at any time during a two-year trial period, has triggered a general strike and record demonstrations across the country. After the council ruled the law valid yesterday, Mr Chirac now has nine days to sign it. The council's decisions are binding, with no appeal allowed. The council's nine appointed members,...

THE CURRENT WAVE OF PROTESTS in France is regularly misportrayed as a pale remake of the 1968 student revolt that brought down Charles de Gaulle. The comparison gets it awfully wrong.True, we are witnessing a ritualistic springtime skirmish between students and the authorities. But there is an ironic ideological twist: It is the French government that is advocating change while students on the moral barricades are defending the status quo.As the conflict gathers steam, it offers a historically recognizable ballet--the government confronting student and trade-union demonstrators. This political trope enjoys special legitimacy in France, where factions and interest groups marginalized...

Wednesday's developments in diplomatic efforts on halting Iran's quest for nuclear technology: • Europe, backed by the United States, rejected Iran's request for talks on its nuclear program, cranking up international pressure on Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment.• Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said "there's not much to talk about" until Iran halts nuclear activity, saying the Islamic republic and its current leaders are not trusted with such technology. Rice met in Washington with the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana. • Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accused the West of acting like the "lord of the world" in...

France's public debt is spiralling out of control, according to a report commissioned by the French government... The debt stands at €1,117 billion, representing 66 per cent of France's GDP ... The staggering figure encompasses the debt accumulated by the state and local authorities, as well as social and health insurance bodies, over the past few decades. However, it does not include the upcoming time bomb of civil servants' pensions. Over the past ten years, the French debt has increased its claim against GDP by over 10 percentage points. France saw the worst debt evolution among the then 15 EU...