As remarkable as it was for a German vice chancellor, albeit it for the Green Party, to posit Turkish membership as the litmus test of European values, is that he equated moral victory with D-Day, the invasion launched to combat his own country back in the days of the Third Reich.There was a different tone this weekend on Omaha Beach, the actual site of the Normandy invasion, where several Western leaders gathered to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the allied offensive to free the European continent from Nazi occupation. Although the occasion was solemn and important, certainly European leaders present had their minds on a different impending battle -- that for control of the European Parliament. Nicolas Sarkozy, host of the event, was mocked in both his own and in the British media for trying to lionize Barack Obama -- a man whom he once criticized as inexperienced and indecisive. The French president has no doubts about this American's flair for the cameras and tried unsuccessfully to lure him to dinner during his stay. In the ended he had to settle for a 20-minute working lunch.
Mr. Obama was clearly trying to avoid being manipulated into endorsing Mr. Sarkozy's Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), ahead of Sunday's Europe-wide elections for a new crop of MEPs. The German head of state is traditionally excused from D-Day celebrations, but the US president was equally careful in sidestepping Berlin during his brief stop in Germany to pay homage to the concentration camp victims at Buchenwald. He did meet Chancellor Angela Merkel during the tour of a church of “Our Lady” in Dresden whose restoration in the 1990s from wartime dereliction became a symbol of East-West German unification. Clearly the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, in his own desperate fight for political survival, was trying to evoke his country's famous special relationship with the US when he committed the embarrassing but charming malapropism and referred to the site of the Normandy beachhead as “Obama Beach.”
It would be fanciful to attribute Mr. Obama's standoffishness in France to Mr. Sarkozy's more recent advice to the new president to mind his own business on the question of Turkish membership. Mr. Obama, on the event of his visit to Turkey last April, had urged European leaders assembled in Prague to concentrate their minds on Ankara's accession. It was a remark that went down among German and French conservatives, about to fight an election, like a lead balloon. It was not a question of Mr. Obama engaging in tit for tat retaliation, refusing to lend the aura of his charisma to a generation of leaders so palpably off message on the question of Turkey. Rather it would have been wrong for a US president to hobnob with politicians on the eve of an important poll.
Even so, one can still speculate that Mr. Obama would not have been disappointed if the European right had done that little bit worse in Sunday's balloting. Mrs. Merkel took a slight knock but is regarded as having kept her grip on power despite the recession. Germany seems to typify the trend elsewhere in Europe, where the electorate (the ones that managed to turn out) appears to have no great confidence that the traditional center left can see their countries out of the current crisis. Instead they are embracing either the centre right or more radical alternatives. The real winner was Mr. Sarkozy himself, who saw his party increase its lead from 17 to 30 seats. However, France's green party, Europe Ecologie, outgunned the socialists in Greater Paris and nearly overtook them in the rest of the country. Britain's Labour Party took the expected pounding with two seats slipping to the anti-immigrant far right.
Europe has not, therefore, taken Mr. Obama's advice to heart and elected a parliament more sympathetic to Turkey's membership. In an economic climate where many are concerned about hanging on to their jobs, it would be foolish to expect otherwise. Ankara should be making the case that a Europe with Turkey will be more prosperous than one without. It can hope that with the votes now counted, European conservatives will be more receptive to that message. And it should hope, too, that Barack Obama will not abandon the fight.
