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Sunday, May 06, 2007

Surprise! France to Elect U.S.-Friendly President

Washington, DC (TLS). Last-minute polling in France's important Presidential elections show that the country is set to elect its first admittedly pro-American President in many years. French voters will go to the polls today to elect a successor to Jacques Chirac, who is retiring.

French-American relations have been strained, particularly as a result of the Iraq War. Chirac certainly made no friends in the U.S. by condemning Americans for the war, charging that we were invading Iraq 'only for the oil,' when it was Jacques Chirac himself who had been making under-the-table deals with Saddam Hussein for his oil.

Even more damaging was the revelation that Chirac secured Saddam's oil by giving him the capability of developing nuclear power. France provided Iraq with its very first nuclear reactor under the leadership of Chirac.

All polls indicate that conservative Nicolas Sarkozy will beat Socialist Segolene Royal in a landslide.

This political campaign bears at least some significance for the upcoming U.S. election cycle. Hillary Clinton is a Royal-styled European Socialist who even uses some of the same rhetoric Royal has unleashed on the campaign trail, referring to windfall profits of private enterprise as opportunity for government to pad its coffers.

Royal has, in fact, demonized private enterprise in France. While Hillary Clinton has not used quite the same acerbic terminology of Royal, she has yet repeatedly pointed to the profits of the oil companies, claiming that 'we will take that money and put it into a national resource for funding alternative sources of energy.'

The French, however, have obviously grown weary of Socialism and will for the first time in several generations elect a solid conservative who views close ties to the U.S. as a virtue and not a vice.

In spite of the fact that Socialist candidates in France get the backing of the less popular Communist Party, this will still not be enough to stem the tide that is breaking in Sarkozy's favor.

Perhaps with this encouraging change in Europe, there will finally be some realistic, hard-hitting proposals for dealing with the near-civil-war-like conditions that exist in France at the hands of Muslim extremists.

We can only hope that Mr. Sarkozy will join the U.S., Great Britain, Australia, and the Eastern European block in the fight against global terrorism. This would be the best news to come out of Europe in many a day.

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