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PARIS: Barack Obama headed for Paris Friday on a European tour that
saw 200,000 cheering fans turn out in Berlin to hear the US
presidential hopeful call for the world to tear down walls of
division and hate.
The Democrat got a rock star welcome for his
speech Thursday in Berlin’s Tiergarten park, but here he was to
make no public appearances except a press conference after meeting
President Nicolas Sarkozy before going to London.
There are few votes for any US presidential
candidate in being seen to be close to France. John Kerry, the
Democratic nominee in 2004, was pilloried by some conservatives just
because he could speak French.
But the arrival of the Illinois senator has
sparked much excitement in France, where polls mirror those across
Europe to show he is the candidate most people want to succeed
President George W. Bush in the November vote.
“Obamania” read the front-page headline
Friday in the Liberation newspaper, which said that “the
Democratic candidate fascinates the world and shows he has the
makings of a president.”
The election last year of the rightwing pro-US
Sarkozy greatly improved US-French relations, which were poisoned by
France’s staunch opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq under
then president Jacques Chirac.
Sarkozy told Friday’s edition of Le Figaro
newspaper that 46-year-old Obama, whom he met met in 2006 in
Washington along with his 71-year-old Republican rival John McCain,
was a “friend.”
“Unlike my diplomatic advisors I never
believed in Hillary Clinton’s chances. I always believed that
Obama would be nominated,” he added.
Obama’s national security spokeswoman Wendy
Morigi said, “President Sarkozy has made the bilateral
Franco-American relationship and the transatlantic alliance a
centerpiece of his presidency, and Senator Obama looks forward to
discussing how to build on these important initiatives.”
Repairing realtions between the US and
Europe—strained over the Iraq war—was a theme of Obama’s
Berlin speech, where he said that “the walls between old allies on
either side of the Atlantic cannot stand.”
“The walls between races and tribes; natives
and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now
are the walls we must tear down,” he said, echoing former US
president Ronald Reagan’s 1987 call to tear down the Berlin Wall.
The Berlin event took the White House race
abroad in a way never seen before, and confirmed Obama as a global
political phenomenon.
-- AFP
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