France/US

Former socialist candidate: Obama copied me

Article published on the 2009-01-20 Latest update 2009-01-20 12:13 TU

Ségolène Royal.
(Photo: Wikimedia)

Prominent French Socialist figure Ségolène Royal boasted Monday that Barack Obama’s team owes some of its key campaign themes and internet tactics to her own presidential run against Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007.

Royal, who was in Washington to attend Obama’s inauguration ceremony on Tuesday, told French reporters that she didn’t see any reason to deny that many of his ideas came straight out of her presidential run.

She reported that an Obama team visited Paris in the lead-up to her election defeat and took her campaign themes of “winner-winner” and “citizen-expert” back to the US for use in their own presidential run.

Royal’s interactive website that encouraged people to help her develop her platform was a prototype for Obama’s highly-praised website, she said.

Obama’s “new conception of leadership” was in part inspired by Royal’s attempts to lead France. “The more we listen to people, the more we anticipate, the more our authority is confirmed,” she said.

Royal said she was attending in a personal capacity what she called “an essential moment that only comes once a century.”

“I want to experience the moment differently than just in front of a television screen,” she said.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy will not be in Washington on Tuesday as tradition stipulates that foreign heads of state do not attend the inauguration ceremony - only ambassadors do.