Following the first round of the French presidential elections last weekend, there seems little doubt that the next French president will be Nicolas Sarkozy, writes David Tresilian in Paris In a vote that saw the highest turnout for nearly 40 years, with around 85 per cent of the French electorate going to the polls, the centre-right UMP candidate, former interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy secured a comfortable lead over Socialist Party rival Ségolène Royal in the first round of the French presidential elections last weekend, Sarkozy's score of 31.11 per cent of the vote put him some five points ahead of Royal on 25.83 per cent. Both candidates now go through to the second round of the elections on 6 May, with all ten other candidates being eliminated from the running. These include the two front- runners' nearest rivals, centre-right UDF candidate François Bayrou, who had run on a centrist ticket, on 18.55 per cent of the vote, and the extreme-right Front National (FN) candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen on 10.51 per cent, his lowest score for almost 20 years. Sarkozy, who has been consistently ahead in the polls throughout the campaign, immediately used his post-election speech as a way of looking forward to the all-important second round. At stake in the run-off with Royal, he told supporters at a party rally in Paris as the final results came in, were "two ideas of the nation, two projects for society, two value systems and two conceptions of politics". In "going out to vote in massive numbers", he told the rally, and above all in choosing two clear alternatives for the second round, the French people had "shown their desire to debate these two conceptions to their conclusion". In the second round of the elections, Sarkozy said, he wanted to put "values such as national identity, authority, work and merit at the heart of politics" and to appeal to "workers, employees, artisans and farmers and to the France that gives a lot and receives nothing in return, to the France that is exasperated and is suffering." Meanwhile, at a rival rally organised by the Socialists in the Royal stronghold of Deux-Sèvres in southwest France, Royal told supporters that in her campaign she would continue to "wager on the intelligence of the French people and refuse to play on fears." "A new campaign is now opening," she said, "and I appeal to all those who want a republic built upon respect to triumph, since we know that there can be no liberty without justice and no economic efficiency without social progress." After last Sunday's vote, commentators in France pointed to the very high turn-out in the elections and to French voters' overwhelming return to the two main parties following a disastrous showing by the Socialists in the 2002 presidential elections, when the party's candidate was knocked out of the running by the extreme-right Le Pen. All told, some 57 per cent of the electorate voted for the two main candidates, with the vote for many of the smaller parties being well down on what it was in 2002, most strikingly in the case of the FN, which lost an estimated million votes. Now that the results of the first round have been digested, and with fewer than two weeks to go before the second round, both candidates are engaged in a struggle for undecided or floating votes, chiefly the 18.55 per cent of the vote that went to Bayrou on the first round and the 10.5 per cent that went to Le Pen. While Royal can count on the support of the smaller left-wing parties in the second round, bringing her the first-round votes of the Communists (1.94 per cent), Lutte ouvrière (1.34 per cent) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (4.11 per cent), Sarkozy can probably count on much of the FN vote. In the first round of voting, Sarkozy topped the poll in traditional FN strongholds, such as in the south and east of France, which had voted strongly FN in the 2002 elections. Le Pen himself, speaking with some bitterness after the results were announced, said that, "it seems that the electorate prefers the appearance of change to real change. It will be the two candidates selected in advance by the media and the polling organisations that now go through to the second round." However, the votes that really matter to both candidates are those that went to Bayrou on the first round, representing some seven million French voters. Even as the results from the first round of voting were coming in last Sunday night, both Sarkozy and Royal were making pitches for Bayrou votes on the second round, Sarkozy trying to "soften" his tough-guy image and Royal distancing herself from traditional socialist ideology. "In the two weeks that remain before the second round," Sarkozy told supporters, "I want to tell all those who fear for the future, who feel vulnerable, or who find life more and more difficult that I want to protect them... against violence, delinquency, unfair competition and the outsourcing of jobs." For her part, Royal spoke of the need to "reform France without brutality," describing herself as a "free woman... and not the hostage of any clan, pressure group, or financial interest," code for distancing herself from traditional Socialist ideology. Yet, both candidates may find Bayrou's endorsement difficult to attract. The defeated candidate, aware that his support could make all the difference on 6 May, said after the first-round result that he refused, "and would always refuse, the idea that there are only two ways towards the future in France." There was a third way, he said, built on the seven million voters who had chosen the centre path. Nevertheless, Sarkozy may find it easier to attract such "centrist" voters to his campaign, since Bayrou is a former centre-right government minister, and he leads a party, the UDF, which is also firmly on the right. It seems unlikely, given the political preferences of such voters and the traditional sexism of French life, that they would now vote for the Socialist candidate to be France's first female president. According to polls appearing in French newspapers after last Sunday's vote, Sarkozy will win the second round of elections with between 52 and 54 per cent of the vote, even if segments of Bayrou's and Le Pen's vote go to the Socialist Party candidate. Amid the euphoria last weekend at what the French newspaper Le Monde described as a "double victory" for "democracy itself and against extremism", there were nevertheless signs of divisions in France that are likely to grow larger if Sarkozy is elected president. In Paris and its troubled suburbs such divisions were clear, with middle-class areas voting overwhelmingly for Sarkozy and poorer areas and those with high concentrations of French people of immigrant origin voting for Royal. In the Paris suburbs that came to world attention in late 2005, due to weeks of riots that swept France, believed to have been stoked up by Sarkozy's references to the "rabble" and "scum" he said were responsible for them, last weekend's vote also went overwhelmingly to Royal.
