Mr. Roland Freudenstein:

Absolutely, it is a nice city and my humorous response to this of course was to ask what people had against this decision. I called them classical Carolingian western Europeans, who do not trust the Ossis or the new member states and how this would have been such a beautiful gesture and so on. However, the significant part of that story is that people actually thought it to be credible and this should make us sad. The French actually have no problem with a single seat, as long as it is Strasbourg. I do not see any change in the near future but I acknowledge having the two-seat policy again is water on the mills of the populace and I understand it is a total waste. There have been petitions and attempts to change this but there is no way to do so.

Moreover, the more troublesome is the position of France domestically, economically and vis-à-vis its partners in the European Union, the more the French will dig in on this question. There is no way the present French Government will change the two-seat policy. The more troublesome is the position of France from an economic perspective, the more symbolic politics plays a huge role. For example, members should consider the audiovisual exemption, the exception culturelle now being raised in respect of the question of the mandate for the coming trade talks between the European Union and the United States. As experts tell me in Brussels, from an economic perspective there is very little to this at all and the Americans or Hollywood never insisted on having the audiovisual sector included. However, France made a huge point of insisting on an exemption for the audiovisual sector for purely symbolic reasons. This tells me the Strasbourg-Brussels question is not going to change in the near future.