Hmmmmm

Are French voters getting a little tired of car-be-ques?

Nicolas Sarkozy: there are too many foreigners in France

"Nicolas Sarkozy said: '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.'

Nicolas Sarkozy has declared there are too many foreigners in France, deliberately using the rhetoric of the extreme right to regain ground in his difficult re-election battle.

The French president made a three-hour appearance on a TV politics debate show on Monday night, vowing to cut immigration by half and limit state benefits for legal migrants. "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," he said.

Sarkozy, who continues to lag behind the Socialist frontrunner, François Hollande, is more than ever positioning his campaign to the hard right, to court voters from Marine Le Pen's extreme-right Front National. But the tactic appeared to have backfired this week as he was attacked by religious leaders and some within his own party for stoking anti-Muslim sentiment by forcing the marginal topic of halal meat into the centre of his election campaign."

[---]

"Sarkozy, who continues to lag behind the Socialist frontrunner, François Hollande, is more than ever positioning his campaign to the hard right, to court voters from Marine Le Pen's extreme-right Front National. But the tactic appeared to have backfired this week as he was attacked by religious leaders and some within his own party for stoking anti-Muslim sentiment by forcing the marginal topic of halal meat into the centre of his election campaign.

In what some newspaper columnists called "sick-making" and "grotesque" electioneering, Sarkozy pushed fears of a supposed secret Islamisation of French people's dinner plates. He reopened a row, begun last month by Le Pen, over whether meat ritually slaughtered according to Muslim religious standards was being sold on the wider market to unsuspecting non-Muslim consumers."

Or maybe not.

"Sarkozy is hoping that a rush of media appearances and a major campaign rally in a north-eastern suburb of Paris this weekend will draw a line under a difficult 10 days in which he has failed to overtake Hollande in the polls and was pelted with eggs by protesters on a campaign trip to the Basque country.

The latest poll for CSA put Hollande on 30%, Sarkozy on 28% and Le Pen on 15% for the first round vote on April 22. The poll found Hollande would beat Sarkozy in the 6 May second round run-off by 56% to 44%."

It must be hard for the son of a Hungarian immigrant to say there are too many immigrants. Perhaps if he was more specific, but then there's already a party occupying that spot on the spectrum.

In any case, these are interesting times. But it's kind of sad seeing Europe go down the shit hole.