SPAIN: French Presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy takes campaign to Madrid, rallies expatriate voters.

Hundreds of French citizens resident in Spain gather in Madrid to attend a political rally by France's rightist presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy who made a one-day visit to the Iberian country. France and Spain have to unite in order to face illegal immigration to Europe, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday (February 27) in Madrid. Sarkozy, one of the front-runners in France's presidential race, made the statement to hundreds of French residents in Spain who gathered in the capital to participate in a political rally organised by the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Sarkozy's political party. Sarkozy, who has made a name for himself as a law-and-order hard-liner in his approach to the immigration issue, has openly criticised in the past Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero for having opened the door to Europe via an extraordinary of immigration status regularisation. Zapatero and Sarkozy had met earlier on Tuesday. Sarkozy pledged to revitalise France and turn it into a nation where everything is possible, a nation ready to surprise the world with its policies on employment and education. At the rally, France's interior minister and leading conservative candidate told wooing expatriate voters that France should be reconciled with success. A recent poll carried out for French newspaper Journal du Dimanche put Sarkozy and Socialist candidate Segolene Royal -- the two main candidates -- level-pegging on 28 percent for the first round of presidential elections on April 22.

ITN Source | February 28, 2007

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