France Picks 2 Candidates for Election Runoff
By KATRIN BENNHOLD and ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
April 22, 2007
PARIS, April 22 — Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, the two leading candidates, won the first round of the presidential elections in France today, giving French voters a clear choice for the runoff in two weeks time.
The next president will be either Mr. Sarkozy, a conservative who wants the French to work more and pay fewer taxes, or Ms. Royal, a Socialist with a leftist economic program, a motherly tone and a declared ambition to modernize her party.
The election attracted a record turnout of France’s voters, who had 12 candidates to choose from, and the result was an affirmation of France’s traditional left-right divide.
Mr. Sarkozy, the tough-talking former interior minister whose presence in the runoff was widely predicted, won about 29.5 percent of today’s vote, according to preliminary results based on a partial count.
Uncertain until the very end of whether she would make the runoff, Ms. Royal ended up with a strong showing, getting 26.3 percent and taking her one step closer to becoming France’s first woman e head of state.
François Bayrou, a centrist candidate who for a brief moment looked like he might actually slip past one of the main party contenders in the end fell short.
But his block of 18.8 percent of voters could hold the key to the outcome of the second round on May 6 and are certain to be courted.
A field of nine other candidates, including the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, garnered the remaining 11 percent. Mr. Le Pen shocked France in the last presidential election in 2002 by unexpectedly sailing into the runoff.
The shock and shame of the 2002 result seemed to have resonated among voters. The balloting was marked by high anxiety, sunny weather and a record high turnout throughout France. More than 85 percent of France’s 44.5 million registered voters cast their ballots, a record in the 49-year history of the Fifth Republic created under Charles de Gaulle.
Sylvain Lesobre, 33, an employee of the state-owned train company SNCF employee in the Paris suburb of Nanterre spoke for many when he explained that he voted Ms. Royal today to avoid a repeat of the 2002 surprise: “I’ve supported her since she became a candidate,” Mr. Lesobre said. “I don’t want to see Le Pen again.”
If Mr. Le Pen’s defeat closes a traumatic chapter for French voters, Mr. Bayrou’s shadow will continue to hang over the election.
Even if Mr. Sarkozy won the most votes in the first round, the second-round race remains wide open. It is difficult to predict where Mr. Bayrou’s electorate will go. According to a study published on Friday by the CSA polling institute, about 70 percent of Mr. Bayrou’s voters come from the center and six out of 10 of them lean to the right. The remaining 30 percent are a mix of center-left reformists disappointed with Mr. Royal’s fiercely leftist platform and cautious conservatives uneasy with Ms. Sarkozy’s blunt talk of a “rupture,” and pollsters say the behavior of these voters is hard to predict in the runoff.
With both Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Royal expected to clamber back to the center in coming days, the tone of the campaign could change radically.
Optimists say it could bring the focus of the election back to the No. 1 voter concern — the economy — and force the two rivals to combat each other with ideas. Pessimists fear that Ms. Royal will try to turn the election into a referendum on Mr. Sarkozy, who has led opinion polls for the last three months but failed to dispel the sense of unease he inspires. That would threaten turning the next two weeks into a mudslinging match rather than a debate of the issues.
One closely watched factor will be a possible anti-Sarkozy alliance between Mr. Bayrou’s supporters and Ms. Royal. Several high-ranking Socialists have urged for such move in recent weeks, warning that the combined vote on the left — standing at 37 percent in Sunday’s ballot — would leave Ms. Royal some 13 percentage points short of a majority.
Whoever moves into Élysée Palace next month will inherit a host of festering problems from Jacques Chirac’s 12-year reign, chief among them sluggish economic growth, chronic unemployment and simmering tensions among alienated Muslim youths in post-riot France.
The campaign has set off unprecedented interest — and confusion — among voters, with record numbers tuning into political television programs, tens of thousands attending campaign rallies and some 3.3 million registering to vote for the first time, the most since 1981.
It was an election of firsts. For the first time, the two contenders were born after World War II. For the first time since 1974, neither of the candidates served as either president or prime minister. For the first time in a presidential election, 1.5 million voters were able to choose their candidate via electronic voting machines.
An estimated one in three voters chose their candidate on voting day, pollsters said. But contrary to the 2002 election, when a large protest vote meant fringe candidates got 57 percent of the vote, this time almost 75 percent cast their ballot for one of the three mainstream candidates..
This presidential election has also raised more interest than usual outside of France.
The departure of Mr. Chirac is expected to improve relations between Paris and Washington after the sharp disagreements over Iraq. And in Europe, it will determine what France’s position will be in efforts to overhaul European institutions and making Europe’s economy more competitive.
Mr. Sarkozy, 52, and Ms. Royal, 53, have both marketed themselves as modern pragmatists. They each had unconventional political careers — Ms. Royal as a woman with little support in her party and Mr. Sarkozy as the son of a Hungarian immigrant who did not attend any of France’s elite schools.
Both have pledged to increase spending on research to bolster innovation and productivity. Both want to give women and ethnic minorities more of a presence in government. And both have irked European neighbors by demanding that the European Central bank keep the euro from strengthening.
But they have starkly differing visions of how to make France more competitive and bring the country back into the fold of the European Union, especially after France rejected the European constitution in a 2005 referendum.
Mr. Sarkozy wants to relax the 35-hour workweek, create a more flexible work contract and reduce the personal tax burden to 50 percent from 60 percent.
He plans to establish a minimum service in times of strike with in weeks of being elected, a move intended to limit the power of labor unions to stop him from proceeding with his reforms.
More pro-American and pro-Israeli than many other French politicians, Mr. Sarkozy is opposed to Turkish membership in the European Union and in favor of reviving the institutional changes in the union’s constitution by submitting them to parliament, rather than another referendum.
Ms. Royal, by contrast, wants to bolster economic growth by lifting the minimum wage by 20 percent, to 1,500 euros a month, creating 500,000 subsidized jobs for young graduates and raising pensions. She plans to scrap a flexible work contract for small businesses and has pledged to punish companies that outsource abroad.
She is open to Turkish entry to the European Union, but wants a new constitution and another referendum. She has also been cooler on trans-Atlantic relations, insisting in her latest major campaign rally that she would not “kneel down before George Bush.”
Ariane Bernard and Maia de la Baume contributed reporting. |
