Freshly returned from his post-presidency vacation in the Caribbean, Barack Obama is already back on the campaign trail, this time… in France!
Posters of the former US president started popping up around Paris last week, flanked with a French translation of his infamous 2008 campaign slogan ‘Yes, We Can’ (‘Oui On Peut’), in what started as a joke between four friends.
Although as a foreigner Obama cannot technically run for France’ highest political office, the tongue-in-cheek campaign seems to have struck a nerve among Frenchies.
An online petition supporting Obama’s candidacy, complete with a fake campaign website, has already garnered over 42,000 signatures.
Titled “Obama17,” the campaign calls on French voters to make a “radical choice” by asking the former POTUS in the approaching 2017 race, to take France “out of its lethargy” once and for all.
“Obama completed his second term as President of the United States on January 21, now why not hire him as President for France?” reads the petition, adding that Obama “has the best CV for the job” and that France could teach the world a lesson or two in democracy by electing a foreigner “at a time when France is about to vote massively for the extreme right.”
The campaign is the brainchild of four Parisians, all in their mid-twenties, who came up with the idea in a bar after feeling disenchanted with the choice of presidential candidates.
The quartet, who wishes to remain anonymous, also said they wanted to “make people smile” and lighten the mood amid an election cycle marred by political scandals.
(Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen is currently embroiled in a scandal alleging she gave her bodyguard a “fake” job using EU funds. And her right-wing rival Francois Fillon is facing similar charges claiming he employed his Welsh wife Penelope as parliamentary assistant in what has been dubbed ‘Penelogate’ by journalists.)
“We like saying it’s a joke, but in truth the idea takes its roots in us being fed up with French citizens rejecting politics,” one of the organizers told French network BFM TV.
“We’re scared this (rejection) will push people to vote for candidates outside the system like Trump in the US. We don’t want that,” she added.
The organizers hope to reach 1 million signatures by March 15th—just in time for the closing date for presidential candidacies.
Obama has not yet weighted in on the campaign.
Polls currently forecast Marine Le Pen to come first in the election’s first round in April and lose to a rival right-wing or left-wing candidate in the run off on May 7th.