Down to the Wire and the Winners are

After months of invective-filled, media-obsessed campaigning by 12 separate contenders, France, on April 22, finally narrowed down its presidential race to two finalists—Ségolène Royal on the left and Nicolas Sarkozy on the right of the political spectrum.

In the first round of France’s two-tier election system, Sarkozy wound up with some 31.18 percent of the votes cast and Royal with 25.87 

The two now will face each other in a runoff election May 6 which will determine who will lead the nation for the next five years. For the moment, pollsters are predicting a substantial victory for Sarkozy in that second contest but that could change radically during the two weeks of additional campaigning before the final vote.

The May 6 result, however, also will determine how France is going to act and be viewed in the international arena during the winner’s tenure because the finalists differ significantly in their foreign policy views, particularly in regard to the United States. 

Sarkozy, for instance, strongly condemns America’s intervention in Iraq but he has met with U.S. President George W. Bush and maintains that France and the U.S. are historical allies who must work together despite periodic disagreements.

Royal, on the other hand, is firmly anchored in left-wing ideology and frequently echoes its classic anti-American rhetoric. In a clear slap at Sarkozy, for instance, she promised her cheering followers on the eve of first round voting that, if she becomes president, “We will not go down on our knees before George Bush.” 

Sarkozy, president of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) party, and Royal, nominee of the nation’s Socialist party (PS), have been considered favorites virtually from the beginning of the presidential race.

They were seriously challenged right down to the wire, however, by two other hopefuls, perennial contender Jean-Marie Le Pen on the far right and François Bayrou, a former Education Minister presenting himself as a centrist in the political spectrum.  

Bayrou finished third in the first round voting with 18.57 percent of the vote, an impressive tripling of his scores in previous presidential runs. But he fell short of what was needed to go on to the runoff.  So did Le Pen, who finished fourth in the first round with 10.44 percent of the vote. 

Le Pen prides himself as the spokesman for full-blooded, native-born French citizens who are alarmed by unchecked immigration policies and the growing influence of the Muslim community in France.  In the last presidential elections in 2002 he surprised everyone by making it through to the final voting round even though he was then soundly trounced in the runoff by France’s current but outgoing President, Jacques Chirac.

Bayrou, head of the Union pour la Démocracie Française (UDF) party, normally has been aligned with the right but always striving to retain a certain degree of more center-lining independence from the UMP. 

This year, however, he unexpectedly gathered his significant following by presenting himself as a refreshing middle-of-the-road alternative to the nation’s habitually feuding left and right wing parties.  The latter have  dominated French politics for the last 50 years but both have lost considerable voter confidence because they have tended to promise much when they campaign but deliver little when they are in power.

His strong showing in the first round was based more, however, on electors seeking someone, anyone, other than Sarkozy and Royal than on his own program potential. It has, however, provided Bayrou, in principle, with considerable bargaining power in return for his support of the two finalists and he has announced his intention to use that power to its fullest. How that will work out remains to be seen. 

The fact that the first round went down to the wire with Sarkozy’s and Royal’s victories, expected but far from certain, exactly reflected the perplexed mood of the nation’s 44.5  million  registered voters.

The 12 first round candidates represented a bewildering kaleidoscope of views, issues and proposals from the far left to the far right.  They included promises, among others, to take France out of the European Union, regularize all the nation’s illegal immigrants, stop immigration completely, create 750,000 new government jobs, build five million new public housing units in five years, forbid staff cuts by profit-making companies, re-nationalize the nation’s electricity and gas industries, divert the bulk of current military spending to social concerns, require equal pay for men and women, make all medical costs free to the consumer and brake back France’s significant nuclear energy program. 

Small wonder that roughly 30 percent of the potential voters claimed they still were undecided on the eve of election day. Too many candidates, too much hip-hopping from one headline-grabbing issue to another, too much babble to permit a clear choice to emerge

All the candidates had started their runs claiming they wanted the election to be about their programs to deal with anguishing national issues such as high unemployment, housing shortages, increasing living costs, a staggering national debt, a steady slide downward in the table of world economic leaders and the disruptive effects of globalization  on France’s social-welfare-oriented economic and political system . But the leading contenders, Sarkozy and Royal, with their eyes on the results of well more than 300 opinion polls during the campaign, quickly shifted gears.

They softened their stances on controversial issues, quickly adopted as their own proposals that were winning votes for their adversaries, lavishly promised help for virtually anyone with a problem and dodged questions about how it would be paid for.  

Foreign policy questions, usually a main preoccupation of any French president, were scarcely ever mentioned. Neither were France’s tenuous relations with the rest of the European Community, badly strained by France’s negative referendum vote in 2003 that halted attempts to formulate a new EC constitution. Although all the candidates paid lip service to newly fashionable environmental concerns, the issue never was more than marginal during the first round campaign.

When it was a question of seeking voters, however, the main candidates energetically embraced every possible symbol of proud French history. 

Royal started singing the “Marseillaise,” the national anthem, at her meetings, something never before done at Socialist gatherings, and she urged each French family to have a French flag in its closet. Sarkozy made a dutiful trip to be photographed at the home and tomb of wartime hero, President Charles de Gaulle, the spiritual father of his political party, and Bayrou pointedly took time to show his humanitarian concern by visiting a military cemetery

Meanwhile virtually all the contenders, but particularly Royal, criss-crossed the country turning up breathlessly for sympathetic photo ops at any site that was making headlines—a school having problems with its student lunch program, supermarkets whose cashiers feared that new electronic checkout procedures would cost them their jobs, or factories programming staff cuts to survive. 

To the detriment of all, in its final weeks, with everyone trading uninhibited insults and personal slurs aimed at their opponents, the first round campaign dissolved more into a slanging match than a political debate.

Sarkozy’s harsh words for youthful delinquents in the largely immigrant-origin suburbs of Paris when he was Interior Minister helped to enflame large scale riots there in the autumn of 2005.  Tactically, Royal and the leftist camp in particular have based much of their campaign on the necessity to eliminate the kind of “brutal” regime they insist would follow if he became President.  

In particular, they have tried to link him to Le Pen’s periodically xenophobia-tinted, far right posture against uncontrolled immigration even though Le Pen has been an equally vitriolic critic of Sarkozy.

That is largely because of the latter’s efforts to woo away electors who supported Le Pen’s concerns in the past but also could line up behind Sarkozy’s less strident views about how to deal with them.  Obviously the tactic worked for Sarkozy, however, because Le Pen’s first round scores April 22 dropped markedly nationwide particularly in areas where Sarkozy did well. 

On a nationally positive note, however, all the election hubbub elicited intense voter interest, quickly interpreted as a strong signal that the country was demanding that it’s politicians, often viewed as unheeding once they got into office, listen more to their down-to-earth concerns.

Some 2.3 million new voters, 7.5 percent more than in the last presidential elections, registered this year and voter turnout in the first round ran to a record 37 million compared to 29.5 million in the first round of the 2002 elections.  The participation rate, which had been sinking steadily for the last 20 years, reached more than 84 percent this time, a near 40-year record. It was  71.6 percent in 2002. 

The end of the first round voting was nowhere near the end of the presidential race however. Within moments of the announcement  of the first election tour results, finalists Sarkozy and Royal began campaigning for victory in the runoff May 6 and mapping out strategies to rake in all those voters who opted for the other 10 candidates in order not only to win the presidency but also to ensure convincing majorities for their parties in the national legislative elections scheduled for June 16 and 17 and municipal elections not long after that.

The object for the winner:  to guarantee parliamentary majority support for implementing his or her multiple campaign promises. 

The object for the loser: to try to establish a parliamentary presence that can block or delay or force transformation of the winner’s legislative efforts.

Thus the almost inevitable scenario is an election whose contestants promise massive changes in the way France is governed but whose ability to bring them about will be fought every inch of the way by the election losers.  There are certain American parallels here. 

Despite all its much-criticized turmoil and remaining uncertainty, the election does turn a significant page in French history. The replacement of Jacques Chirac, 74 years old, in office for 12 years and officially scheduled to hand over his powers on May 13, will mark the exit of the last of the last French president to have experienced the trauma of World War II.

Sarkozy, 52, and Royal, 53 and, for that matter, Bayrou, 55, represent a new post-war age-group of French political leaders, even though all have been engaged in politics for virtually their entire careers .

Royal, a smart, good looking mother of four children fathered by her companion, Socialist Party President François Holland, has positioned herself as a liberated but deliberately non-strident feminist and as a virtual mother or nanny figure to her hoped-for electorate. She repeats constantly that she listens to and understands their concerns and that if she becomes president she will devote all her energies to addressing them and including them in an ever greater form of “participative democracy.”  Her overall support is for an even more caring and protective welfare state in stark contrast to Sarkozy’s proclaimed desire to take France forward via harder work, and more risk but with the promise of greater rewards.

From the start of the presidential race Royal’s opponents, including her main male rivals for the Socialist party’s nomination, one a former Prime Minister, another a former Finance Minister, attacked her for lacking experience for the nation’s top job, particularly in the foreign policy arena. Her previous government posts when the Socialist party was in power dealt more with French environmental, family and education issues and her early attempts to add a foreign policy chapter to her credentials by visits to China, Lebanon and Israel were marked by a series of blunders due precisely to her inexperience. 

She is, however, often termed a steel hand in a velvet glove. She is a pugnacious and accomplished debater, a graduate of the nation’s prestigious “Ecole nationale d’administration,” (ENA), breeding ground for many national political and diplomatic leaders and, above all, a photogenic, alluring female offering the chance to provide France with it’s first woman president.   She also is extremely media and image-savvy. She has—as has Sarkozy—made masterful use of the internet to support her campaign and she is adept at presenting herself as a bloodied but unbowed victim, because she is a woman, of her male opponents’ attacks.

Although Sarkozy edged her out in every opinion poll since the presidential race began, it hasn’t been by enough to exclude a reversal on final election day May 6. 

Sarkozy, on the other hand, has a well-embellished resume of top government jobs including stints as Finance Minister and as a “get tough on crime and delinquency” Interior Minister under outgoing President Jacques Chirac. In addition, as President of the UMP, he leads the nation’s majority right-wing political party and can count on its relatively solid support in the second round of voting.

His drawback is an off-putting, hard-edge, somewhat Napoleonic image that scares a lot of electors, even in his own camp. That scary image constantly has been played up by Royal and other leftist contenders with a rallying call of  “Anyone but Sarkozy,” and their efforts were stepped up moments after the first round results were announced. 

While the first round of the elections was marked by a plethora of declarations and meetings it was also notable for a lack of any head-to- head debate among the contenders.

Royal consistently avoided such a face-off, even with her own Socialist Party opponents, during the party’s candidate selection process. However, both she and Sarkozy tentatively have scheduled a televised debate on May 2, just four days before the final vote.

At that time the country’s voters finally may see them toe to toe and have their best ever chance to compare and choose their new President. 

Given the contestation-oriented nature of the French, however, they well might wind up voting more against a candidate they don’t like than for one they do.

Two weeks and maybe many more will be needed to sort it all out.  

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Editor’s note

In correspondent Korengold’s Normandy village, population 640, there are 543 registered voters and 474—some 87 percent of them—voted this year compared to less than 70 percent in 2002. That year Le Pen topped the vote list. This year it was Sarkozy.