Clinton keen to be French president

FORMER US president Bill Clinton has been pondering his chances of running as President of France, which he thinks would be “great”.

Although American rules bar him from a third term as US president, Clinton said on CNN he believed France was an option.
“Because I was born in Arkansas, which is part of the old [French] Louisiana, I could also run for office in France," he said.

“Any person anywhere in the world that was born in a place that ever was a part of the French empire, if you move to, if you live in France for six months and speak French you can run for president of France.”

Louisiana, named after King Louis XIV (which included the modern state of the same name) once covered around a third of the USA. It was sold to the United States for $15million by Napoleon.

Clinton said he once scored “very well” in a survey of his chances in a French presidential election.

"And I said, ‘you know, this is great’. But that's the best I'd ever do because once they heard my broken French with a southern accent I would drop into single digits within a week and I'd be toast.”

Unfortunately for Mr Clinton the law which allowed natives of former French territories to stand for president was abolished in a 2006 immigration act backed by then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

Anyone who wants to run as French president has to have lived in France at least five years and have taken nationality. In America, anyone running for president has to have been born in the country.