French Presidential Election; 2nd round thread

[Colin]

I'm a bit of a novice in regards to French presidential politics. What areas need to come in in what percentages for each candidate to win?

Well one candidate has to get more votes than the other in the second round. In the first round the top two candidates, if no candidate has reached 50% of the vote, go onto a second round where the one who recieves the most votes wins. Not really that exotic of a system.

[Colin]

57.2% for Sarkozy. 42.8% for Royal.

I'm going to say the floor for Royal is about 44% I would be very surpised if there was anything larger than a 55-45 victory for Sarko.

[Colin]

Another defeat for "third way".

Huh? Please tell me who was third way in the second round? You could make a case that Bayrou was a "third way" candidate but Royal really was not "third way" economically.

[Colin]

Another defeat for "third way".

Huh? Please tell me who was third way in the second round? You could make a case that Bayrou was a "third way" candidate but Royal really was not "third way" economically.

True. On the whole she was noticably to the right of Blair (except in rhetoric, obviously).

Well socially she definitely was, some of her plans sounded quite authoritarian to me at least.

[Colin]

This result is what I expected, unlike the first round (where I predicted Le Pen to beat Bayrou for third place ). Check out this hilariously biased AP article. One of many gems within:

The 52-year-old former interior minister inherits a nation losing faith in itself, paralyzed by worries over globalization, bitter at American dominance and saddled with social tensions.

Wow, thank you AP and CBS News for making yourselves look completely foolish. Half the article was just talking about how pro-American Sarkozy is and the other half talked about the "Arab and African immigrants" and all that rubbish. Now I know why I get most of my news from foreigners.