Obama To Celebrate Fellow Socialist's Election

A left wing kindred spirit.

President Barack Obama congratulated French president-elect Francois Hollande for his victory Sunday, but warned of "challenges" ahead, a clear reference to Afghanistan and eurozone debt crisis.

The US president was among the first world leaders to welcome Hollande's election as France's first Socialist president in nearly two decades, a result sure to have major implications for Europe as it struggles to emerge from a financial crisis.

Obama invited Hollande for bilateral talks at the White House later this month ahead of a G8 leaders meeting he will host at his Camp David retreat in Maryland between May 18-19, and a NATO transatlantic alliance summit in Chicago on May 20-21.

In a telephone call, Obama "indicated that he looks forward to working closely with Mr Hollande and his government on a range of shared economic and security challenges," White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement.

Among the thorny issues the two leaders will have to address is the eurozone debt crisis, which Washington sees as a threat to its still-halting recovery after a grueling recession. Unemployment, which stood at five percent in early 2008, is now at 8.1 percent -- high for the United States.

Hollande says he wants to renegotiate the European Union's fiscal pact in order to complement its austerity rules with more targeted investment in jobs and growth.

Like Obama, he wants massive taxation, spending and government expansion.

 Above all Hollande is a supporter of the kind of deeply entrenched socialist policies that continue to wreck Europe’s economies. His election will advance not only France’s decline but the EU’s as well. Hollande has declared “the world of finance” to be his "real enemy", and will implement a top rate tax of 75 percent, increase public spending by €20 billion and significantly expand the size of the public sector. For a country which hasn’t balanced its budget since 1974, that is a recipe for economic disaster.

Francois Hollande offers France a big government nightmare, and the French people are embracing it. His government promises to be a symbol of everything that is wrong with Europe today and a standard bearer for the EU’s decline, delivering policies that are the antithesis of economic freedom. As Margaret Thatcher famously declared back in 1976:

Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money.

And, he's a fellow anti-Semite too.

According to the Jewish Agency for Israel, over 5,000 Jews from throughout France attended a fair in the heart of Paris about immigrating to Israel. The fair was attended by the Chairman of the Jewish Agency, former member of Knesset, Soviet expatriate and dissident Natan Sharansky. “I cannot recall having seen such a massive number of people interested in aliyah [immigration] since the days when lines of people stretched out of the Israeli embassy in Moscow,” said Sharansky. The fair took place the same day as the election that rousted Nicholas Sarkozy, a reliable anti-Iran voice in Europe, from power, replacing him with the far less reliable Francois Hollande, a socialist with heavy ties to anti-Israel populations.