The French are still making up their mind [Update - they have made up their mind: Nicolas Sarkozy has been elected President - more soon]. Once again in record numbers - the only official figures released so far estimate the voter turnout at noon at 34,11%, the highest number since 1974, apparently. One winner of [...]

Style is clearly more important than substance in Presidential debates. Unfortunately, after 45 minutes of speaking time for each candidate, I was, quite frankly, very disappointed on both accounts. Neither Ségolène Royal nor Nicolas Sarkozy were able to present coherent arguments of their respective programmes. Instead, they kept constantly interrupting each other, Royal more so [...]

If the weather in France is even remotely as warm and sunny as it is here in South-West Germany today, I have doubts tonight’s televised debate between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy will be able to get 86% turnout yet again. Still, if you would like to tune in to the debate, but you don’t [...]

8:40: Sarko and Ségo in the second round then. Which means two important things. Firstly, someone at work owes me a coffee (I really should have bet for something more pricey). Secondly, the election that had been billed by some pundits as one of the most inpredictible ever has delivered very predictible results indeed: the [...]

At the French Consulate-General in London, the election is held in the classrooms of the Lycée Charles de Gaulle next door. There are plenty of lycées named after the general, but this one has a greater connection to him than most - the Free French air force had its headquarters in one of the buildings [...]

A few minutes to go to the official first results in the first round…
Unofficially, Ipsos puts Ségoléne Royal on 26.5 per cent, Nicolas Sarkozy 27.5 per cent, Jean-Marie Le Pen 17 per cent, and François Bayrou on 16 per cent, with OIivier Besancenot doing best out of the broom wagon candidates. CSA, which has [...]

History is an important participant in French politics. As, for example, François Hincker, notes, the lasting impact of the French Revolution on the contemporary French polity can never be underestimated - „[c]ertes, [...] que l’essentiel de la France con¬tem¬poraine sortit d’elle est une idée dont la banalité n’efface pas la vérité.“ (François Hincker, La [...]

Just back from a trip to France, where this quote in a book on the history of Libé struck me:
Le Tiers-Monde commence en banlieue!
The Third World begins in the suburbs, in other words. This was 1972 or thereabouts, and it was a slogan of the very far Left.
Curiously, the same notion is still [...]

It’s getting terribly close…
The last two opinion polls in the French elections put Royal and Sarkozy level pegging in the first round, with one of them showing nils apiece in the second round too. With numbers, the first poll, carried out by CSA on the 21st, shows Royal on 26 per cent, Sarko on 26 [...]

Ségolene Royal’s campaign is doomed. The total vote for the Left is polling (32 to 36 per cent) almost as low as it was in 1969, when the second round vote was between a Gaullist, Georges Pompidou, and a centrist/classical rightist, Alain Poher, with everyone to the left crashing at the first turn on a [...]