(HOST) Commentator Olin Robison has been watching the French elections with interest, and he says that no matter how the campaign chips fall, they’re likely to be the agent of real change.
(ROBISON) The French are in the middle of their election cycle right now. The first round of the presidential elections was on Sunday, April 21. There were twelve candidates and the first round reduced the field to two since no one candidate got a clear majority in round one. The run-off election will be exactly two weeks later, on Sunday May 6. The third round, the parliamentary elections, will be in mid-June and it is widely assumed in France that the parliamentary elections will see a new parliament elected in an alignment that will be supportive of the winner in the presidential elections.
An astonishing eighty-five percent of the eligible voters turned out to vote in round one. The result is to be a run-off between the Socialist, Madame Segolene Royal and the Centre-Right candidate, Nicholas Sarkozy. This pair have been at each other for some time now and are usually referred to in France as Sego and Sarko. But don’t be deceived by that familiarity. This pair are about as different as you can imagine. All twelve candidates in round one seemed to agree that France is in trouble but views as to what needs to be done vary radically. Madame Royal, the Socialist, promises to shore up the faltering “social model” while Mr. Sarkozy, the French equivalent of a Republican, wants to change the thiety-five hour work-week and, as the newspapers would have it, wants the French to work harder and pay fewer taxes.
If elected, Madame Royal would be the first woman president in France; he would be the first immigrant to be president (his family came to France from Hungary). In either case, each would be the first French president to be born after the end of World War II.
At the time of the last such election five years ago, Mr. Le Pen was one of the finalists – a fact that embarrasses a lot of the French. Mr Le Pen represents the far, far right in French politics and he has run for the presidency repeatedly. In that sense he is sort of the Harold Stassen of French politics but his views make him something of the Pat Buchanan of France. Five years ago he was one of the finalists. This time he got only eleven percent of the vote.
The number three candidate, also eliminated in the first round, is Mr. Francois Bayrou, an avowed Centrist. He has, since the first round elections, been seriously courted by both Madame Royal and Mr. Sarkozy. Bayrou’s endorsement would mean a lot to either candidate. Bayrou has been playing coy, endorsing neither but leaning toward Royal.
Even so, the conventional wisdom is that Sarkozy has a slight edge with other news and polling organizations saying that it is too close to call. Sarkozy is the more pro-American of the two but both of the finalists make much of the trans-Atlantic relationship and how important it is. There is an ambivalence towards America in France – an unusual combination of disdain and envy.
Olin Robison is past president of both the Salzburg Seminar and Middlebury College. He now lives in Shelburne.