Sarkozy’s “Astonishing” Olympic Announcement

So it’s official. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, will be attending the opening of the Olympic games in Beijing,

After a “productive” 30-minute meeting with the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, Sarkozy’s office officially released the news on Wednesday that it had already leaked to the French media last Friday.

To many in France, the news will have come as much of a surprise as suddenly discovering that the Pope is Catholic.

Basically it was always on the cards right back in March when Sarkozy first started digging himself into something of a diplomatic hole by saying he was shocked by China’s security clampdown in Tibet and urging Beijing to re-open discussions with the exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

That of course opened a Pandora’s box of speculation and thus began for the next month a huge domestic debate in the media as to “whether he would/should” or “whether he wouldn’t/shouldn’t” attend the opening ceremony.

Sarkozy didn’t really help matters that much by staying silent and letting the rumours rumble along.

He remained tight-lipped in early April when his junior minister for human rights, Rama Yade, said in a newspaper interview that Sarkozy had set three indispensable “conditions” for Chinese authorities to meet before he would confirm his attendance.

Yade later backtracked, maintaining she had been misquoted. That led to (even more) speculation from some quarters that Sarkozy was playing a clever game of testing the political waters without actually getting his feet wet himself.

And then of course a few days later there was the disrupted passage of the Olympic flame through the streets of Paris, when demonstrators forced its journey to be cut short - right there in the glare of the world’s media. Not a peep was heard from Sarkozy’s office at the Elys