France Picks 2 Candidates for Election Runoff
Alain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Ségolène Royal, the main candidate on the left, at a café after voting on Sunday.
By KATRIN BENNHOLD and ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: April 22, 2007
PARIS, April 22 — Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, the candidates of the two leading political parties, won the first round of the presidential elections in France on Sunday, giving French voters a clear choice for the runoff in two weeks.
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Christophe Ena/Associated Press
Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative candidate, cast his ballot on Sunday.
The next president will either be 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 and a declared ambition to modernize her party.
The election attracted an extremely high turnout of France’s voters, who had 12 candidates to choose from, and the outcome 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 30.44 percent of the vote on Sunday, according to preliminary results from the French Interior Ministry.
Uncertain until the end of whether she would make the runoff, Ms. Royal ended up with a strong showing, getting 24.79 percent and moving one step closer to becoming first French woman head of state.
Mr. Sarkozy told a cheering crowd of supporters in central Paris that the voters had produced a “victory for our democracy.”
“By placing me into first place and Madame Royal in second position, they have clearly marked their wish for a debate between two ideas of the nation, two visions for society, two value systems and two conceptions of politics,” Mr. Sarkozy said.
François Bayrou, a centrist candidate who briefly looked like he might actually overtake Ms. Royal, in the end fell short. But his block of 18.31 percent of voters could hold the key to the outcome of the May 6 runoff and is certain to be courted.
Mr. Bayrou conceded defeat on Sunday night, but not without vowing that his centrist movement was here to stay. “This evening, French politics changed and it will never be the same,” he said.
Ms. Royal concurred. “A new campaign has opened,” she said. “In two weeks France will choose its destiny and its face.”
“On May 6 we will have a clear choice between two very different paths and I will hold the hand of all those around me who believe that it is not only possible but urgent to leave behind a system that no longer works.”
Mr. Sarkozy said of his opponent: “I respect her, I respect her convictions, and I want this second round to be a real debate of ideas. The French have been waiting for this for too long.”
Ms. Royal needs Mr. Bayrou’s votes more than Mr. Sarkozy. The combined vote for far-left candidates, along with the Greens, amounted to about 11 percent, bringing Ms. Royal’s potential voter base to about 36 percent. Far-right candidates received about 14 percent of the vote, so Mr. Sakozy has a potential base of about 45 percent.
Among the nine other candidates, the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen took 11.33 percent of the vote. Mr. Le Pen, who said he would not run for president again, stunned France in the 2002 election by unexpectedly defeating the Socialist Party candidate in the first round and sailing into the runoff against President Jacques Chirac.
The shock and shame of the 2002 election seemed to have resonated among voters. On a sunny spring day, the balloting was marked by high anxiety and a high turnout throughout France. About 84 percent of France’s 44.5 million registered voters cast their ballots.
Sylvain Lesobre, 33, an employee of the state-owned rail network SNCF in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, spoke for many when he explained that he voted Royal on Sunday 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 of the election, the outcome of the second round appears far from certain. It is difficult to predict where Mr. Bayrou’s electorate will go. According to the CSA polling institute, about six out of 10 centrist voters tend to lean to the right in runoffs, and most of Mr. Bayrou’s support came from these centrists.
But Mr. Bayrou also picked up support from Socialists disappointed in Ms. Royal’s platform and cautious conservatives uneasy with Mr. Sarkozy. The IPSOS polling organization said Sunday that among Mr. Bayrou’s supporters, the proportion of Socialist sympathizers was twice as high as that of conservatives, and pollsters said the behavior of these voters was much harder to predict in the runoff.
Optimists say it could bring the focus of the election back to the No. 1 voter concern — the economy. Pessimists fear that Ms. Royal will try to turn the election into a referendum on Mr. Sarkozy, who has led opinion polls for the past three months but failed to dispel the voters’ unease with him. 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 such move in recent weeks, warning that the combined vote on the left would leave Ms. Royal well short of a majority.
Whoever moves into Élysée Palace next month will inherit a host of problems from Mr. Chirac’s 12-year tenure, chief among them sluggish economic growth, chronic unemployment and simmering tensions among alienated Muslim youths.
The campaign has created 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 main contenders were born after World War II. For the first time since 1974, neither of the candidates had 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.
Nearly one in five voters made his or her decision only after entering the voting booth, pollsters said. But contrary to the first round of the 2002 election, when a large protest vote meant fringe candidates got 57 percent of the vote, this time three in four voters 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 their sharp disagreements over Iraq. And it will determine what the French position will be in efforts to overhaul European institutions and make Europe’s economy more competitive.
Mr. Sarkozy, 52, and Ms. Royal, 53, have both marketed themselves as modern pragmatists. Both have had 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 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 allow the euro to weaken.
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 it 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 top personal tax burden to 50 percent from 60 percent.
He plans to establish a minimum service in times of strike within weeks of being elected, a move intended to limit the power of labor unions to stop him from proceeding with his plans.More pro-American and pro-Israeli than many French politicians, Mr. Sarkozy is opposed to Turkish membership in the European Union and in favor of reviving the institutional changes in the European constitution by submitting them to Parliament rather a referendum.
Ms. Royal, by contrast, wants to stimulate economic growth by lifting the minimum monthly wage by 20 percent, to 1,500 euros, or about $2,000, 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 into the European Union, but wants a new European constitution and another referendum. She has also been cooler on trans-Atlantic relations
Ariane Bernard and Maia de la Baume contributed reporting.
