France's presidential election | Sarkozy steps ahead | Economist.com
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THE French took a step closer to choosing their next president by voting Nicolas Sarkozy, on the right, and Ségolène Royal, on the left, into the second-round presidential run-off. According to early estimates of the first-round vote, held on Sunday April 22nd, Mr Sarkozy topped the poll, with just over 31%, securing a fair lead over Ms Royal, on 26%.
The vote, declared Mr Sarkozy, in a speech to supporters in Paris shortly after the estimates were announced, was “a victory for democracy”. Voter turn-out, at 85%, was the highest in a presidential election for decades. In blazing sunshine across the country, voters turned out en masse, forming queues at many polling stations and giving resounding support to the mainstream candidates—at the expense of the fringes. The two finalists now go forward to a head-to-head run-off vote on May 6th.
The biggest first-round surprise was the gap that Mr Sarkozy and Ms Royal managed to open up between them and the other 10 candidates. Only two of these stood a real chance of making it through to the second round: François Bayrou, the centrist, and the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen. In the end, Mr Bayrou, who had enjoyed a surprise surge in the polls during the campaign, achieved 18.5%—a massive jump from the 6.8% he secured in the 2002 election, but not enough to win him the second-round place and a chance to remake French politics at the centre that he had hoped for.
As for Mr Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, whose campaign message was a mix of crude xenophobia and anti-establishment populism, his 10.5% was for him an outright disappointment. Not only was it well below the 16.8% he achieved in 2002, when he evicted the Socialist candidate to win a place in the run-off. It was also his lowest score since 1974. At the age of 78, this was in all likelihood his last presidential election.
Mr Le Pen's feeble result was in many ways a validation of Mr Sarkozy's first-round strategy of chasing far-right voters with a hard line on immigration and crime. “It is not Mr Le Pen that I'm interested in,” Mr Sarkozy repeatedly said during the campaign, “but his voters.” They rewarded him with a first-round score for a centre-right candidate that has not been seen in France since 1974, when Valéry Giscard d'Estaing achieved 33% (and went on to win the presidency). It is all the more striking given the fact that Mr Sarkozy faced both a strong centrist, and far-right rival, this time round. He picked up voters not only from the far-right, but from the far-left too: in contrast to 2002, none of the eight other candidates scored 5%.
As the two remaining candidates begin an intense two-week campaign, ahead of the run-off, there are two big challenges. The first is how each will manage to appeal to the centre, after a first-round campaign in which they have both concentrated on consolidating their political bases. On the left, Ms Royal devised a high-spending programme and dressed it in old-fashioned, anti-market rhetoric. She will now need to convince voters in the centre, as well as fellow Socialist Party members from the social-democratic wing who had urged her to team up with Mr Bayrou, that she can speak to them too.
On the right, Mr Sarkozy's task will be to restyle himself as a reassuring, unifying figure after a campaign in which he has been accused of trying to divide the French with tough law-and-order and immigration policies. In each case, the question will be how to make this shift credibly. If the centrist Mr Bayrou decides to endorse one of the two candidates, this could help.
The second challenge is the head-on confrontation over ideas that did not take place during the first-round campaign. Because of the number of candidates, and strict rules governing equal access to the airwaves, the French have not had the chance to compare two competing visions of how to reform the country; there was no debate held ahead of the first round. Now, one is now planned between Mr Sarkozy and Ms Royal on May 2nd. Mr Sarkozy may be feeling the more confident. Four polls taken late on Sunday tipped Mr Sarkozy for victory on May 6th, giving him between 52% and 54% of the vote.
France's presidential election | Sarkozy steps ahead | Economist.com
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