2023-06-28 19:15:38
It was not necessary to be late Tuesday, June 27 evening to hope to attend the ceremony of awarding an honorary doctorate to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. A line of students stretched from 27 rue Saint-Guillaume to the surrounding streets more than an hour before the event.
After Vaclav Havel in 2009 or Lula in 2011, the former chancellor is only the fifth political figure to receive this honorary title awarded to “personalities of foreign nationality because of eminent services rendered to the arts, letters, sciences and techniques, to France or to the establishment which awards the title”.
For Merkel the European
It is “a very, very great European” that the Paris Institute of Political Studies has chosen to honour. “In three words that have become historic, you have saved the honor of Europe”, sends him the director of the establishment, Mathias Vicherat. ” We make it ! » (” We’ll get there ! “), launched the Chancellor in August 2015 about the integration of refugees from the Syrian civil war arriving in the country. Never mind the fact that she abandoned this formula in 2016. She then judged that ” too many things “ had been put ” inside “not doing “just a simple slogan, almost an empty formula”.
“The links between Sciences Po and my political work are obvious”, loose the Christian Democrat, recalling that the four French presidents she rubbed shoulders with went through this school. In front of “different challenges and different individual approaches”, she underlines “the spirit of Franco-German friendship” and his constant desire to find “common solutions”.
Financial crisis of 2008, annexation of Crimea and part of Donbass in 2014, refugee crisis of 2015 then Covid-19 crisis in 2020, Angela Merkel will have faced all types of events during her four mandates . How ? Leaving no room “to the far left, to the far right or to violence in the name of religion”. By striving to “seeing reality through the eyes of the other”, and thanks to the culture of ” compromise “ and that of doing “concessions by conviction” of their usefulness.
Avoided subjects
Not a word, however, about its mixed record in the fields of energy or its attitude vis-à-vis Russia. “It’s part of his mark, sweeps away Arancha Gonzalez, dean of the school’s School of International Affairs. We do not sue on what worked or not, it is not up to us to judge. “We simply want to honor someone who has marked Europe,” concludes Mathias Vicherat.
To end this evening, the one who led Germany for sixteen years offered herself a stroll to the Boulevard Saint-Germain. On the other side, in the new campus of the Parisian school, she found the former French presidents François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy for an evening in her honor.
Angela Merkel will bring back an original gift in her souvenir suitcase: a copy of a former student of the IEP in Paris on Franco-German friendship, that of a certain François Mitterrand.
#Angela #Merkel #honored #Sciences #Paris