AFP – If US Republican candidate Donald Trump is elected president it would be a dangerous result and “complicate” relations between Europe and the United States, French President Francois Hollande has warned.
“Those who say that Donald Trump could not possibly become the next president of the United States are the same ones who thought that Brexit would never be voted in,” Hollande said, referring to last week’s British referendum which backed withdrawal from the European Union.
Trump was running on the kind of slogans peddled by the extreme right in France and elsewhere in Europe; fear of the wave of migration, stigmatisation of Islam, questioning representative democracy, denouncing elites, the French leader said in an interview to be published Thursday in the French financial daily Les Echos.
When asked whether a Trump presidency would be a dangerous thing he answered “yes”.
Trump’s presence in the White House “would complicate relations between Europe and the United States,” Hollande added.
A new opinion poll in the US showed that the race for the White House is too close to call.
Respondents to the latest Quinnipiac University national poll put Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton ahead of Trump by just 42 percent to 40 percent, a narrowing from Clinton’s four-point margin in the organisation’s June 1 survey.
Trump, the New York celebrity tycoon, has caused alarm in Europe with his abrasive style and pledges to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and build a wall on the border with Mexico.
His proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States drew the ire of Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, who called the idea “stupid, divisive and wrong”.
Trump has criticised the continent’s leaders as “weak” and accused them of taking inadequate measures to combat terrorism following the Islamist attacks on Brussels in March.
Last month French Prime Minister Manuel Valls accused the presumptive US Republican presidential nominee Trump of being a “bad man”.
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