The voting is done in two rounds with voters making choices among lists of regional counselors put forward by all the various political parties. The first round was Sunday and the UMP got its butt kicked everywhere. Overall, the UMP had between 26.5 and 27.3 percent of the votes, depending upon the region; the Socialist party (PS) racked up between 28.4 and 30 percent of the vote. Alarmingly, Jean-Marie Le Pen's far right Front Nationale (FN) party did much better than expected with 11.6 to 12 percent of the votes. And everyone's also pretty alarmed that more than 50 percent of voters stayed home, tired and fed up with the whole thing. Sound familiar to anyone?
This week, everyone's in a scurry to regroup. Parties that got at least 10 percent of the votes carry through to the second round; those with more than 5 percent can ally with a qualifying party. It all goes to a second vote on Sunday.
Here are some of the folks still in the running in Ile de France:
Jean-Paul Huchon, candidate for the PS, and current president of the regional council for the Ile de France.
Wunderkind Cécile Duflot (she's just 34) for the Green Party which finished surprisingly strong in the first round.
Marie-Christine Arnautu for the FN. Born in France to Romanian parents, she's holding the anti-immigrant banner for the far right. Doesn't anyone see the irony here?
Valérie Pécresse, the current minister of higher education, is the UMP's candidate. Almost all the ministers hold some additional office. Hard to imagine for Americans as this would be kind of like being secretary of education and governor of a state at the same time.
3 comments:
hmm....I guess you are glad you can't vote in france..seems kinda complex...nice to see all the woman candidates though.
Le Pen always does better than anyone expects, but always loses in the second vote by a really large margin.
People are regularly "alarmed" by the Front National score, but really there's nothing to be alarmed about when one starts to pay attention.
-Percentages raising never meant numbers of voters raising (in 2002 pretty much as many people voted for Le Pen than in 1995 for example).
-Whether more people voted for them or not this time around, when the racist campaigning the government has been doing lately trying to lure FN voters, it's no surprise that it backfired.
-The FN vote is almost always a protest vote, most people who vote for the FN don't want the FN to win, and we all know it just can't.
As far as the high percentage of non-voters, maybe someday France should understand that local elections should be managed at the local level and not at the national one, then maybe people will start caring.
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