Sarkozy’s ‘Southern strategy’: French president says ‘too many foreigners’

Fighting an uphill reelection campaign, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared Tuesday that there are too many foreigners in France.

"Our system of integration is working increasingly badly, because we have too many foreigners on our territory and we can no longer manage to find them accommodation, a job, a school," Sarkozy said on a three-hour French TV debate show Tuesday, the Guardian reported.

The startling remarks from the son of a Hungarian immigrant came just two days after the center-right leader sparked alarm in both France's Jewish and Muslim communities by saying French state schools should not serve "halal" or kosher meat.

Analysts of French politics said Sarkozy's nationalistic comments can be easily explained, if not necessarily excused: polls currently show Sarkozy to be running in second place behind Socialist Party challenger Francois Hollande. Sarkozy is trying to knock off the current third-place challenger, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, daughter of age-old right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen, before the first round of voting on April 22nd.
"The biggest threat for Sarkozy is to go down in polls so much ... that Le Pen goes to a second round," Justin Vaisse, a French expert at the Brookings Institution, told Yahoo News Wednesday.
Polls currently show the Socialist Party's Hollande at about 30%, Sarkozy at about 25%, and Le Pen at about 17.5%, Vaisse said.Sarkozy, in his 2007 presidential campaign, was brilliant at poaching voters from Le Pen's far-right constituency, Vaisse said. "It's almost a 'Southern' strategy, sending signals that are not racist per se, but that appeal to national identity and 'damn the foreigners'" sentiment

viva la france

watch out for quebec doing the same