Updates on the French Presidential Election

PARIS — Twitter users turned Sunday's French presidential election into a battle between a green Hungarian wine and a red Dutch cheese in a bid to get round tough laws banning result predictions.
The #RadioLondres hashtag was the top France trend on Twitter during the first-round presidential vote, in homage to World War II codes broadcast to Resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied France from the BBC in London.
But French citizens have written a new codebook in a subversive bid to get round laws that mean anyone announcing vote predictions before polls closed at 8:00 pm (1800 GMT) could be fined up to 75,000 euros (100,000 dollars).
"Tune in to #RadioLondres so as not to know the figures we don't want to know before 8:00 pm," said one ironic tweet.
As a result, incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy became either Tokaji wine which, like his father, comes from Hungary, or Rolex because of his perceived "bling-bling" lifestyle.
His Socialist opponent Francois Hollande was either Gouda cheese (from Holland) or a soft, sweet "Flanby" caramel desert -- an old and unforgiving nickname for the portly frontrunner.
Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen was associated with the names of totalitarian regimes or rodents and Communist Party-backed Jean-Luc Melenchon was either a rotten tomato or something linked to the former Soviet Union.
The tweets were witty, bemused or cruel, with many including links to francophone media websites in Belgium or Switzerland that are beyond the reach of French law and thus able to publish leaked estimates.


Sarkozy and Hollande Advance to Second Round
President Nicolas Sarkozy will face the Socialist candidate François Hollande in the second round of French presidential voting on May 6, according to early results and national projections.


Mr. Hollande received the most votes on Sunday with 28.4 percent, according to projections published by Le Monde. Mr. Sarkozy received 25.5 percent. The two had been widely expected to move on in what will likely be a tough re-election battle for Mr. Sarkozy.

In an early surprise in the results, which trickled out on foreign news sites and Twitter but were unveiled at the officially sanctioned time of 8 p.m in France, the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen placed third with more than 20 percent of the vote. Ms. Le Pen, of the National Front party, bested the left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who came in fourth with more than 11 percent.