France, its administration and its political class are often blamed for not being up to date and not "connected" (digitally that is). However, the current majority party UMP has reportedly launched an aggressive online recruiting campaign which includes buying keywords on Google that are relevant to hot societal topics in the news. Even better, the UMP is apparently paying to advertise on requests containing names of opposition leaders. Of course, the Socialist Party wants to counterattack and is divided on an email suggesting to deliberately click on ads using its leaders' names to incur larger expenses to its rival. I guess these are the premise of a nice online bashing for 2007 elections.

More in this article (in French).

Update: I tried some searches and UMP is effectively paying for names of Socialist affluent members. Some examples (working today Feb. 20 using google.fr):

Looking for Segolene (as in Segolene Royal, a potential presidential candidate)

Looking for Lionel Jospin

I got this sponsored link:

Exprimez vos idées
N. Sarkozy vous propose de débattre
du projet pour la France en 2007
www.u-m-p.org