Writing on his Facebook page today, Florida congressman Allen West expressed surprise at France's election of Socialist Party presidential candidate François Hollande yesterday and compared his platform to "that which we are hearing in America."
"The weekends election events in Greece and France could be quite telling for Europe's financial situation as well as our own," West wrote.
He continued, "What I do find interesting is that France has elected an openly socialist individual as President, first since Mitterand in 1988. In reading his platform rhetoric it sounded quite familiar to that which we are hearing in America."
Unlike the American equivalent, the Socialist Party is one of the two biggest parties in France. It had a governing majority in France's national assembly for nearly all of the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as two-term president François Mitterand and prime minister Lionel Jospin from 1997-2002. The PS, as it's called in France, is the strongest party in most major urban areas.