China wants France's new leader to honor the legacy of retiring President Jacques Chirac and maintain positive ties between the two nations, Chinese political experts said yesterday.

French voters will choose between right-wing front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy and socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal in a runoff on May 6 after first-round polls.

"It is their choice of a country's people to decide which party or politician will lead them," Wang Yizhou, deputy director at the Institute of World Economic and Politics, under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told China Daily. "What is hoped is that the new regime will carry on and consolidate its predecessor's effective policy of developing friendly relations with China given that the policy has significantly benefited both."

France has close contact with the country thanks to Chirac's policy of nearly 12 years.

When Chirac visited China in 1997, the two countries sealed their comprehensive partnership. Both nations have been said to share common interests, such as multilateralism, and their economies are highly complementary.

When Royal visited China in January to improve bilateral ties, she praised China's ability to find a new mode of development.

She urged French firms to get more actively involved in China and said France should see the world's fourth-largest economy as an opportunity instead of a threat.

Royal, the 53-year-old president of the Poitou-Charentes region, who was deemed a minor politician only a year ago, has successfully presented herself on the French political landscape as a fresh face.

Her straight-forward language and old-fashioned glamour has played well with many voters tired of a generation of male leaders cast from the same elitist mold.

"She needs to burnish her foreign-policy credentials and bolster her reputation on the international stage," Ding Yifan, deputy director with the Institute of World Development under the Development Research Center of the State Council, said.

For the first time since 1974, neither of the candidates had served as either president or prime minister, Ding said.

Sarkozy, 52, who has marketed himself as modern pragmatist, is widely considered closer to the United States than the other candidates.

Source: China Daily