[MegaSilver]

I sure hope your election will be a clear-case victory for the Republican party, so that this illegal alien votes issue is stamped out once and for good.

Well, even if the Republicans do win with a mandate, I doubt it'll do anything about this illegal alien problem.

The thing about your country is, the government has pressure on it to actually do something useful about the problem, because more than a few Frenchmen have shown that they are willing to vote for the extreme right if nothing gets done. I would imagine the last thing Chirac needs right now is to bleed more votes to the FN.

[Atlantic Friend]

Well, to be fair with Chirac's deviousness, he largely engineered - or at least encouraged - the success of Le Pen. To Chirac, the results of April the 21st, 2002 must have been something as a divine surprise, as he would have had a tougher fight against Jospin.

Yes, Le Pen has been extremely successful in rallying around him many fringe elements ranging from the traditional right to real neo-Nazi elements and even some Royalists. But this group cannot expand forever - some FN top men, among them Le Pen's own son-in-law, Samuel Maréchal, stated rather bluntly in various interviews that the future of the FN was not in the ballots but in the streets.

They know they don't stand a single chance of having 50,1% of the French electorate to cast votes in their favor. Their model is something between Hitler and Mussolini : rising to power either through a paramilitary coup (like Mussolini), or through a constitutional coup (like Hitler).

As for immigration, what baffles me the most is that the answer is not with new rules or new laws - just enforcing the current laws, whether in France or the US, would largely sanitize the situation. But no, our politicians don't want to be called anti-immigration, and they curry favors with movements which all but demand that there shouldn't be any control at all and that our democracies can absorb 6 billion more people overnight.