French Ambassador on Rules of the Game

The Ambassador of France to Ukraine, Philippe de Suremain, hopes that the election runoff will be a fair contest. The ambassador compared the second round of the Ukrainian presidential elections to a soccer match. He noted that European community representatives are looking forward “with extraordinary interest” to the outcome of this encounter but they still remain observers, not participants, of the competition. “We will cheer any side that wins this match,” the ambassador said. Yet the diplomat mentioned several times that one must obey rules in the course of the election campaign. The French ambassador is also convinced that the different attitudes of people in the western and eastern parts of Ukraine “are not of a destructive nature” and, ideally, can even be a “positive factor.” He said in this connection that there is also rivalry among various regions in France. The diplomat stressed that this kind of trend is typical of many European states, Interfax reports.