Poll shows French don't support McCain

By Francois Murphy

PARIS (Reuters) - Just one percent of French people want Republican candidate John McCain to win the U.S. presidential election, and western Europeans overwhelmingly favour his rival Barack Obama, an opinion poll showed on Friday.

McCain's campaign derided Obama as a celebrity akin to Paris Hilton after the Democratic nominee toured Europe and gave a speech to a huge crowd in Berlin this summer. The Harris Interactive survey suggested the Republican would have struggled to draw such a large audience there if he had tried to.

When asked which man they wanted to see elected, 78 percent of respondents in France backed Obama, compared with just one percent for McCain and five percent who said they wanted neither to win, the poll for television news channel France 24 found.

The rest were undecided.

In Germany, where Obama held his rally, five percent of people supported McCain while 72 percent backed Obama.

"The five largest European countries are unanimous in their desire to see Barack Obama elected whilst John McCain's rating is extremely low," the pollsters said in a note summarising their survey of 6,276 adults in Spain, Italy, Britain, France and Germany, as well as the United States.

Republican President George W. Bush clashed with then French President Jacques Chirac over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Berlin also opposed the war.

But even in countries that took part in the conflict, there was little appetite for another Republican administration.