French Election Update

Only about 50 days until the 1st round of the French elections! Things are heating up; there's been some interesting developments in the past months. The two leaders, which up until now have been relatively clear cut--Segolene Royal of the Socialist (left) party and Nicolas Sarkozy of the UMP (right) party--are facing some challenges. The most impressive of these is François Bayrou, representing the UDF--a party which is somewhere in between the main left and right candidates above and seems to be capitalizing on the fact that many French are not finding exactly what they are looking for in either the mainstream right or mainstream left. A recent poll which has been the talk of the town shows Sarkozy at 27%, Royal at 25.5%, and Bayrou close behind at 23%. Then of course there's the ultra-right Jean-Marie Le Pen with 12% (a little scary).

The way that it works in France is that you need to have a majority (>50%) of the vote to be elected president. Obviously, with so many candidates, this is nearly impossible to achieve on the first go. So the goal of the 1st election is essentially to see who are the top two candidates--then, two weeks later, there is a run-off election between these top 2. It's so close right now that any of the combinations seems plausible. In 2002, France was shocked when the top were Chirac (from the right) and LePen (from the extreme right)--with the candidate from the left not even making it to the final round. If Segolene doesn't even make it into the final round as well, it would seem to be a major blow to the Socialist Party.

French for the Day: a quirky phrase for "to stand somebody up" (e.g., to not show up or to be egregiously late for a pre-ordained meeting) is "poser le lapin à quelqu'un"--literally: "to give somebody the rabbit."