Youth set up barricades during incidents following the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as President-elect, May 6, 2007, in Toulouse, southwestern France.
Photo: AP
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France Comes to Terms with Its Election
While Nicolas Sarkozy was declaring that, with his election, “France has returned to Europe,” he was being burned in effigy in another part of Paris. A few hundred cars were also burned around the country, and Segolene Royal stated that her Socialist Party could not continue to exist in its current form.
Sarkozy won with just over 53 percent of the well-attended vote. The mainstay of his electorate was people over 60. The 25-34-year-old age group also gave 57 percent of their support to Sarkozy. In the 18-24-year-old age group, 58 percent supported Royal.
Statistics show that centrist Francois Bayrou's voters (18 percent of the total) in the first round split almost equally between Sarkozy and Royal in the second round. Sarkozy received the votes of 52 percent of women. Far rightist, including followers of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who called for a boycott of the elections, gave 63 percent of their support to Sarkozy. Twenty percent of Le Pen's followers boycotted the election, and 15 percent voted for Royal.
Royal accepted her defeat with dignity, saying that life and the political battle go on and expressing hope that the victory (whose name she did not mention) would serve France well. The evening after the election, Socialists gathered to discuss the future of their party. It seems likely that they will seek an alliance with Bayrou's Union for French Democracy.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of May 08, 2007
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