Washington Post: Sarkozy, Royal to Face Off in French Vote

By Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 22, 2007; 2:24 PM


PARIS, April 22 -- French voters Sunday chose the two main party front-runners, ruling party candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Segolene Royal, to face each other in the final presidential balloting in two weeks, according to exit polls by French survey organizations.

Exit poll results indicate that French voters want a clear choice when they vote for a new president May 6. That election will be a classic right-left showdown pitting Sarkozy, the tough-minded former interior minister and candidate of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement, against Royal, the Socialist who has cast herself as a maternal protector vying to be France's first female president. She is the first woman ever to advance to the second, decisive round in a French presidential race.


Election officials said an estimated voter turnout of 84 percent could break all records for a first-round election, reflecting its importance and voter enthusiasm over more modern, personality-driven, American-style campaigns. This was the first presidential race in France in which the Internet played a major role, and the first campaign in which most of the top candidates opened their personal lives to the media and the public.

Both Sarkozy, 52, and Royal, 53, pledged major changes to shake France from its doldrums, and both promise a less imperial presidency that is more in touch with the people. Whoever wins will be the first French president from the baby boomer generation, heralding a more modern style at the Elysee Palace.Twelve candidates competed in Sunday's election. Exit poll results released by French polling organizations showed Sarkozy leading with 30 percent of the vote, followed by Royal with 25 percent. Francois Bayrou, 55, of the small Union for French Democracy party, who had billed himself as a centrist between Sarkozy and Royal, came in third with 18 percent of the vote, and Jean-Marie Le Pen, 78, an anti-immigration nationalist, ranked fourth with 11.5 percent, in the exit poll.

The remaining 15 percent was split among eight minor political groups, including three Trotskyite political parties, the French Communist Party and the ecologically friendly Greens.

Pollsters said the exit polls have a margin of error of five percent, though in the past French exit polls have been very accurate.Most public opinion polls have indicated Sarkozy would have a four to eight point lead over Royal in the final round, although one recent survey said the race was a toss-up. Going into the final week of the campaign, pollsters had said that as many as 40 percent of the likely voters had not made up their minds. It appeared that Royal benefited from many voters who decided in the closing days to steer away from leftist fringe parties and vote for the Socialist candidate.

Many left-leaning voters on Sunday said they were wary of repeating the mistake they made in the 2002 election, when they split their first round votes among so many small parties that it siphoned critical votes away from the Socialist candidate, typically the left's standard bearer, and opened the door for a narrow second-place victory by Le Pen, who faced Chirac in the final round.That left French leftists feeling as though they had squandered their first round votes and disenfranchised themselves. Royal urged voters not to make the same mistake this time, and newspapers on both sides of the political divide warned voters to cast a "useful" ballot in the first roun