By Christopher Dickey Newsweek Does France's new president speak American? Sure looks that way. Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy has defeated his Socialist Party rival, Ségolène Royal, by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent. Royal, the first woman ever to come this close to the French presidency, conceded within minutes. So now the man set to govern the oldest (and arguably the most temperamental) ally of the United States for the next five years is someone whose message will be easy to translate: lower taxes, harder work for more money, greater consumption as the key to more employment and ever tougher measures against criminals and terrorists. Braving derision by political rivals branding him the new “poodle” of President George W. Bush, who has long been as unpopular in France as he is these days in the United States[/b], Sarkozy made a high-profile visit to Washington last September. Just weeks ago, the French candidate published an American edition of his campaign manifesto, “Testimony: France in the Twenty-First Century” (Pantheon[/i]), with a new introduction that makes him sound like the best friend the Yanks have had in Paris since the Marquis de Lafayette. How Sarkozy’s ideas will play with the notoriously protest-prone population he now has to lead is an open question. Testifying to the confrontational mood he brings to the office, police contingents were reinforced today in the same outer-city ghettos that erupted with inchoate, incendiary anger in 2005, while Sarkozy was in charge of public order as the minister of interior. Large contingents of cops were also on hand in Place de la Concorde, the heart of central Paris, in case victory celebrations by the right wing degenerated into outright confrontation between Sarkozy’s supporters and those who hate and fear the man—or just want to use the occasion to raise hell. “The choice of Nicolas Sarkozy is a dangerous choice,” Royal said as campaigning drew to an end on Friday, claiming she had to “sound the alarm” about “the violence and brutality that will be spawned in the country. Everyone knows it, but no one says it. It is a kind of taboo.” Sarkozy responded with undisguised contempt: “Ah, well, she wasn’t in a good mood this morning. It must be the polls.” While Sarkozy’s ability to ram through major changes in the way France and the French do business looms as the imponderable and possibly ominous theme of the weeks to come—he has vowed to push his programs into law in 100 days—his pitch to Americans is clear, concise and conciliatory. Sarkozy writes in the preface to the U.S. edition of “Testimony,” “I have no intention of apologizing for feeling an affinity with the greatest democracy in the world.” Opting more for Bushism than Gaullism, Sarkozy extols the transatlantic alliance with the United States “that enabled France and Western Europe to preserve their freedom.” While he tends to wriggle around the question of French opposition to the war in Iraq, hinting he would eschew the kind of “verbosity” shown by outgoing President Jacques Chirac when Sarkozy was serving in his cabinet, the former interior minister is unquestionably a hard-liner in the wider fight against terrorists. “Now at the start of the 21st century, the United States and France again stand together in the same camp against a serious threat to global freedom.” Every time “terrorism strikes,” he says, “it is freedom that is the target. Facing such a threat, free countries have no choice but to pool their forces and work together.” Indeed, quiet but effective cooperation between Paris and Washington in counterterrorism reached new heights during Sarkozy’s two terms as interior minister, and that’s not the least of the reasons he has been received so warmly in the past by U.S. officials, incl

 

JM, I ain't reading all that!!!!

 

I understand you!
To make a long story short.
Maybe, just maybe, we now have a President able to run our country the way it should have been run for the last 25 years.[:@][:@]

 

Amen brother Jean..and hopefully our realationships with the good peopleof France will be of more brotherly love and cooperation.

 

Maybe you could make importkiller your US ambassador to France then?

 

Do you REALLY want to start WW3??

 

That's the whole idea.The current situation IS an historycal mistake that should now be corrected.