Sarko vs. Royal, Don't Read if You Don't Give A Phoque About French Presidential Politics

sarko otm:

http://emmanuelle-romania2004.buzznet.com/user/photos/?id=12677001

Ha ha!

Well <a href="http://tracerhand.wordpress.com/2007/09/14/french-dna-testing-for-immigrants/";>this</a> is a novel idea. (Note shameless spamming.)

I think the reason I'm not doing commentary on that site is that stuff like this honestly just leaves me speechless.

GAH

this

And like I said, speechless.

It is all sarkozy's Fault

I really would love to know what they imagine will be done from a privacy standpoint with this data.

bump

Hollande - 28%, Sarko - 26%, friggin 20% for Marine Le Pen.

11% for mélenchon has to be disappointing really

meanwhile the front national votes are just terrifying

What's really terrifying is how the other candidates will have to woo their electorate. Even Royal was after them this evening.

If you add up Sarko+FN+some proportion of Bayrou it's easy to get to 50% - that's what the right have to aim for. However, it seems that around 20% of Le Pen voters say they'll vote PS and a sizeable chunk of protest voters will abstain. I heard on the news that Sarkozy has asked for three TV debates over the next two weeks - he obviously knows he has to do *something* to shake things up.

The official LaRouche candidate failed to seize the moment, alas.

Cheminade is a wacko

Le Pen won't say who to vote for in the runoff but she has said she wants Hollande to in. She intends for the FN to become the opposition to the 'ultraliberal, laxist, libertarian' Socialists

that 1.5% gap seems like it probably 'matters' a lot in terms of narrative

Un sondage Logica Business Consulting-France Télévisions-Radio France-Le Monde-Le Point, réalisé à 20 heures, dimanche 22 avril, sur un échantillon de 1 090 personnes représentatives de la population française, qui place François Hollande en tête avec 54 % des voix, permet d'avoir une idée de la réponse.

Les électeurs de Marine Le Pen voteraient à 60 % pour Nicolas Sarkozy, 18 % pour François Hollande et 22 % s'abstiendraient, selon cette étude. Ces proportions sont similaires au report de voix de 2007, selon un sondage réalisé le 6 mai 2007 par Ipsos.
Mais ce taux de report des électeurs lepénistes vers Sarkozy a connu un bond au cours des derniers jours, si on le compare au sondage Ipsos des 18-19 avril : 45 % des électeurs FN du premier tour disaient vouloir voter Sarkozy au second, 43 % prévoyant de s'abstenir.
Les électeurs de François Bayrou se répartiraient en trois tiers, un tiers pour François Hollande (33 %), un tiers pour Nicolas Sarkozy (32 %) et un tiers qui s'abstiendrait (35 %). En 2007, ces reports étaient plus importants pour Nicolas Sarkozy avec 40 %, selon Ipsos.
86 % des électeurs de Jean-Luc Mélenchon voteraient pour François Hollande et 11 % s'abstiendraient, 1 % voterait pour Nicolas Sarkozy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon a clairement demandé à ses électeurs de "se mobiliser pour battre Nicolas Sarkozy".

Curiouser and curiouser

uggh at fn results. and ugh at ump going full out to get all the fn voters to vote sarkozy in the 2nd round. man seriously sarko really has a lot to answer for, because fn being all the way up top with 20% of voters is his work.

idk, it's not statistically a huge jump from the fn 2002 or 2007 results...sorta just seems like that segment of the population hasn't gone anywhere

fwiw if america had the french system our actually-fascist candidate would pull more than 20%

but like, ~20% as the permanent nationalist far-right, sarko wins over a few in 2007 but it's a demographic that prob isn't going anywhere

Is there a major ideological gap between Sarkozy and Hollande? (Haven't followed this closely; am curious.) I never really saw Sarkozy as super-right-wing.

um ya, sarko is kinda very right wing (ok, maybe he wouldn't look too right wing in the us but for france he's very much on the right wing and closer to the far end than the centre). he's trying to kick out as many illegal immigrants as he can, wants to impose quotas on foreigners allowed in france etc.

as for fn, they had a terrible score in 2007, around 10-11% iirc. i mean i knew they were going to have a good score, but i think it came as somewhat of a surprise to most ppl that mlp managed to get this many votes. there's very low abstention (about 19-20%) which means that today 6 421 773 ppl voted for marine le pen, whereas in 2002, "only" 4 804 713 ppl voted for her father. so while they had a similar % in 02, the number of people who voted for them has dramatically increased. and this too at a time when sarkozy does everything he can to drain votes from fn to his party, whereas in 2002 chirac wasn't particularly trying to attract fn voters to his side

I think 10% in 2007 has to be put in perspective tho - 10% w/ a popular conservative running is comparable to 18% when the mainstream right-wing is unpopular. the nationalist issues aren't going anywhere so I can imagine marine being in exactly the same place 6 years from now.

i agree with you but only to an extent. once again with 6.4M ppl who voted for her, she got 1.6M more people to vote for her than the previous high in 2002! as for mlp, she is probably gonna be in the exact same place for the next presidential election. actually, according to some pundits, it's gonna be a lot worse. she has everything to gain from a hollande victory which is why she probably won't be giving out strong recommendations to vote for sarkozy. if sarkozy loses, those experts claim that ump will kind of implode and have to start anew. if and when this happens, mlp will continue to appear as a more and more credible option and she could rally quite a large number of right wing peeps around her. this would go well with her strategy these past few years of distancing herself from her father's racism/negationism etc. she might also change the name of her party to get rid of the negativity attached to the name front national. anyways, what i'm saying is that mlp and the fn are def here to stay, but man do i hate that.

wrt name-changing, the FN are talking about contesting the next parliamentary elections under the banner of "Rassemblement Bleu Marine" (geddit?):

Le Front national pourrait devenir le "Rassemblement Bleu Marine" en associant des souverainistes et des indépendants pour les élections législatives de juin, a déclaré mercredi Louis Aliot, vice-président du FN.

"Nous partons sous la bannière Rassemblement Bleu Marine", a dit le compagnon de Marine Le Pen sur Radio Classique et Public Sénat.

"C'est la marque pour les législatives. A l'intérieur il y aura les candidats du Front National, il y aura les candidats d'un micro parti qui vient de se créer et dont Monsieur Coûteaux est le président et il y aussi des indépendants dont Gilbert Collard est le chef de file", a-t-il ajouté.

http://www.lepoint.fr/fil-info-reuters/le-fn-envisage-un-rassemblement-bleu-marine-aux-legislatives-18-04-2012-1452679_240.php

there was an interesting bit in the recent jonathan meades documentary on france, where he showed how you can trace a direct line from the OAP - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_de_l%27arm%C3%A9e_secr%C3%A8te - and its concomitant right-wing "fatherland" type organisations to marine le pen

meades contended that the far right in france is forever impotent and its impotency is paradoxically the source of its continued attraction: the french right wing (like many right wings) constantly feels under assault, underappreciated, on the verge of extinction. he also contended that in france the far right never really changes, that it has nursed the same grievances and concerns for more than a century