By Orkhan Sattarov, exclusively to VK
The first round of French presidential race is over. It’s results are somewhat ambiguous: acting President Nicolas Sarkozy got 27%, which is exactly 1.5% less than the result of his main rival. It is not a dramatic difference, but still it is important, especially as it is the first time in France’s history when the acting president couldn’t win the first round. And of course Sarkozy can’t be satisfied with such a result – even though all pre-election public opinion polls indicated that it couldn’t have been different.
The second round scheduled for May, 6, gives the head of the Fifth republic a chance for a revanche. But in any case the competition between conservatives headed by Sarkozy and socialists headed by Holland will be fierce. The candidates will fight for the votes of the supporters of the competitors who failed to get to the second round: ultra-right candidate of the ‘National Front’ Marine Le Pen and centrist candidate Francois Bayrou.
Le Pen has shown an unexpectedly high result winning 18% of the votes thus beating the record of her father made in 2002. For now she has made no calls to her supporters to vote for any of the remaining candidates, so both Sarkozy and Holland hope for the votes of the ultra-right electorate. However, according to the experts, Sarkozy has greater chances of winning the ultra-right support than his rival.
According to the German Spiegel, for now 60% of Marine Le Pen’s supporters are ready to give their votes to the acting president. However, Le Pen herself is more likely to abstain from directly supporting any of the two candidates. In the light of the upcoming parliamentary elections Sarkozy’s defeat would be beneficial for her: if the “Union for Popular Movement” candidate fails in the presidential run, the party is likely to fall into disarray. In the situation when the main conservative party of the country is in a state of crisis the ‘National Front’ would have good chances to win the sympathies of the ‘neo-Gaullist’ electorate becoming one of the leading forces of the French National Assembly. On the other hand, Marine Le Pen can’t openly call on her supporters to vote for socialist Bayrou out of ideological considerations.
Sarkozy, on his part, realizes the whole potential of the ultra-right camp support and has adjusted his rhetoric to meet the tastes of Manion Le Pen’s followers. Attacks on Muslim traditions, open European borders and propositions to make migration rules more strict – these are the main pillars of Sarkozy’s second round pre-election campaign, and it is obvious that they were borrowed from Le Pen’s store.
On the other hand, a large part of her supporters are the people who voted against Sarkozy, and not directly for her. The main reasons for popular discontent with Sarkozy are economic and social difficulties. And this ‘protest electorate’ is more likely to ‘pass on’ to Holland. The latter doesn’t resort to ultra-right rhetoric, but, as some experts say, the borders between ‘left’ and ‘right’ in the areas of social policy and economy are somewhat transparent and even erased. Marion Le Pen has successfully won the votes of the rural population – the traditional electorate pool of ‘Neo-Gaullists’ – over, as well as the votes of the working class, which usually supports left candidates. How will her 18% be distributed among the two remaining candidates is yet to be seen.
While Sarkozy hopes to gain the ultra-right supporters of Marine Le Pen over by his anti-immigrant rhetoric, his rival socialist Francois Holland will naturally try to win the sympathies of the ‘Left Front’ supporters. Their candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon won 11% in the first round.
The ‘dark horse’ of the second round are probably the ex-supporters of the centrist candidate Francois Bayrou who won 9%. Bayrou is the head of the ‘Union for Democracy’ party, which is a part of all-European Democratic Party. Bayrou’s decision to support any of the remaining candidates might prove decisive for the outcome of the presidential run. It is noteworthy that Bayrou stands for intensification of the process of Euro-integration calling the EU ‘the most beautiful of man’s creations’. How this position could be harmonized with Sarkozy’s calls on re-introducing the border control within the Shengen zone is yet unclear. The deeper the acting President dives into the right-populist rhetoric, the further he drifts away from Bayrou’s support. But it is true that the EU can’t be seen as ‘the most beautiful of man’s creations’ while French taxpayers have to save Greek, Italian and Portuguese budgets.
In any case, the acting President has no choice but to work with this ultra-right part of the electorate by using anti-immigrant and ‘anti-European’ rhetoric. Will this calculation of Sarkozy’s election headquarters prove to be correct will be seen on May, 6. But the encouragement of nationalistic trends among the population as well as of religious intolerance is a dangerous game, threatening all fundamental European values. We already see the yield of this kind of policy: the supporting letters from European citizens to Norwegian terrorist Breivik who shot 77 people dead, as well as calls (careful for now) to understand his motives on numerous internet forums. And of course the ‘non-French’ France has a great electorate potential as well - the votes of the ex-French colonies expatriates also can play a noticeable role in the final outcome of the elections. While resorting to ultra-right rhetoric Sarkozy risks to lose not only their votes, but also all the votes of those French citizens who can’t accept any kind of right radicalism.
However, according to the experts, the major part of French people is ready to support Holland rather than Sarkozy in the second round. And Sakozy has less than a week to turn the situation to his advantage
