In E.U. Roma Policy Clash, Many Get a Bruising

By STEPHEN CASTLE
Published: September 17, 2010

BRUSSELS — Once again, it’s all about Nicolas Sarkozy.

In the aftermath of the worst-tempered gathering of European Union leaders in recent years, the bloc’s officials are calculating the fallout from an extraordinary display of pyrotechnics by the French president.

Aggressive, outspoken and selective in his use of facts, Mr. Sarkozy deployed attack as the best form of defense against charges that French deportations of Roma breached European law.

In doing so Mr. Sarkozy put his accuser — the European Commission — on the defensive, deftly exposing how few European leaders will come out to support the bloc’s executive arm when it is under fire.

In the process, however, Mr. Sarkozy derailed a summit meeting of E.U. leaders, transforming what was supposed to have been a cerebral discussion of European foreign policy into a public display of mudslinging and European divisions.

As France prepares to take the presidency of the Group of 20, the temperament of the French president is back in the spotlight.

Some officials now say they could see a train wreck looming as soon as they read the words uttered on Tuesday by Viviane Reding, the E.U. justice commissioner. Ms. Reding found that assurances from French ministers about their policies on the Roma were contradicted by the leak of an official circular showing that the ethnic group had been specifically singled out by the French government — in direct contradiction to E.U. law.

Angry that she had been misled, Ms. Reding was unusually blunt in her public response. Though she won support at the time, she overplayed her hand by referring to “a situation that I had thought that Europe would not have to witness again after the Second World War.â€