France Holds Round One of Presidential Election

Already suffocated by bureaucracy, France saw Sunday’s wait for results rendered into low farce. Disclosing election results until the final late-opening polling stations have closed is an arrestable offence under French election law. Needless to say, the writ of French law does not run across the border in Belgium, whose French-language newspaper Le Soir contentedly pumped out the figures until their website crashed from the avalanche of French voters eager for the forbidden information.
Despite the total breakdown of the embargo, with results relayed instantly across France as they arrived, mainstream media was silenced from reporting or noting what their viewers already knew. Some French voters communicated the results to each other using old World-War II era codes.
The farce is a near-perfect parable for the disorder of French public life. Privacy laws have long prevented French readers from knowing the sort of information about their politicians that is considered basic for the functioning of representative politics in the English-speaking world. Rather than protecting public debate from slouching into a swamp of Anglo-Saxon prurience, the media black-out has allowed corruption to flourish untrammelled and left ordinary citizens poorly placed to distinguish fevered conspiracy from trustworthy revelations of insider misdeeds.




Twenty-seven-year-old Malian Binta Chacha arrives at the polling station with her husband and three small children.  She says she is voting for the first time in her life because she wants change. Her candidate: Socialist front-runner Francois Hollande.  


Chacha says that under conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy nothing has changed.  People cannot find adequate housing and work.  She says Sarkozy blames France's economic problems on immigration, but she says immigrants are doing the hard jobs that French refuse to do. 


Jobs and France's sickly economy are top issues during this presidential election.  That is particularly true in tough, working class suburbs like Aulnay-sous-Bois with high immigrant populations and high unemployment rates.  Aulnay was among dozens of suburbs that exploded in rioting in 2005, in France's worst bout of urban violence in recent history.  


Sarkozy is banking on his experience steering France through hard economic times.  As president, he promised people would earn more by working more.  But unemployment grew during his presidency, and today voters like Aulnay storekeeper Embark Essaidi are disillusioned by his promises. 


Essaidi believes the election campaign has largely ignored concerns in poor suburbs like Aulnay-sous-Bois - like youth unemployment that reaches up to 40 percent in some places.

But Hermemin believes Sarkozy will likely be elected to a second term.  He says Hollande lacks leadership experience, which France's current president has shown during difficult economic times.