Bush expects little from trip to Vienna and Budapest

By Laszlo Trankovits Jun 18, 2006, 14:03 GMT

Washington - President George W Bush is well aware that he will face more criticism than praise when he visits Europe next week.

Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnick intends to raise the themes of US human rights violations and the controversial prisoner camp at Guantanamo Bay when the US president arrives in Vienna on Tuesday evening.

US media, which are attaching little importance to the US-EU summit in Vienna and Bush's subsequent trip to Budapest, has noted the announcement of demonstrations planned in Vienna along with the attacks from controversial Austrian politician Joerg Haider.

Haider, governor of Carinthia Province, has termed Bush a 'war criminal.'

'We tend to take more notice of the power of pictures than of political talks,' one US diplomat in Washington said in anticipation of the cool welcome expected in countries where opinion polls give both Bush and the United States low approval ratings.

This is unlikely to bother the president. The three-day trip is intended as a warm-up for talks in July with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany, a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and the subsequent G8 summit in St Petersburg.

Bush intends to discuss a range of controversial themes in Vienna with Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel, who currently holds the EU presidency, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and the EU's foreign policy head, Javier Solana.

These include Iran's nuclear programme, the Middle East, the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as world trade.

'We do not expect concrete results,' Bush's National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley has stressed.

An agreement on cooperation between the US and the EU on education is all that is being signed in Vienna.

The White House is hoping for more to come out of the St Petersburg summit, although Hadley says Bush's presence at the summit with the EU in Vienna has 'symbolic significance.'

Bush has for some time sought to demonstrate his sense of values to his European allies, even if he regards the divided EU as political partners in only a limited way.

In Vienna, Bush wants to talk primarily about divisive trade issues.

The Doha round of World Trade Organization talks were at a 'critical moment,' Bush said days ahead of the visit, adding that Europe had to make 'tough' decisions.

The president was referring primarily to agricultural subsidies. He said the US was prepared to make painful concessions, even though the US agricultural lobby has protested strongly against the cutting of both subsidies and import tariffs.

White House staff do not believe that Bush can make any significant change to European sentiment over the US.

In any case recovering popularity in the US, where it has risen recently after reaching a low, is much more important to Bush than what European think.

But the president's advisers see greater hopes for image-building in Budapest, where Bush will attend the 50th anniversary celebrations marking the 1956 anti-communist uprising in Hungary.

The celebrations will recall the years under communist rule, and for many in the former East Bloc, the US remains the main guarantor for the free world.