FReepMail me to get on the FRENCH ELECTION PING LIST.
Sarko is on a three day retreat with his wife and son off the island of Malta, in the Mediterranean.
A lot will start to happen as soon as he returns.
See the previosu PINGS for likely Prime Ministers and members of the new Cabinet.
I wish the defeated Ségolène Royal well. I can appreciate what I perceived as her "mother hen" proclivity, conservative on certain social points (e.g. pornography), but am glad for the Republic's sake she will not be the next resident of Elysée Palace...
The question is whether la belle France can save herself at this point. The demographics indicate that she can not.
If Sarkozy defeated Royal merely because his strategy was more clever, those who watch in horror as la belle France commits suicide have no reason to hope that she will not.
The nation, by qualifying Jean-Marie Le Pen for the second round and then electing Jacques Chirac, had already demonstrated its repudiation of the left in 2002. Five years later, it spectacularly confirms its rejection of a side that governed for 15 years over the last period and which hoped that its turn would come automatically... Sarkozy's opposite strategy - "firm in substance but moderate in form" - proved to be effective. He succeeded in winning the votes of a good portion of Francois Bayrou's voters as well as the majority of Jean-Marie Le Pen's. The UDF and FN [National Front] candidates were not followed by a significant segment of their troops. After General De Gaulle in 1965 (55.2 per cent), the UMP candidate gets the best score of any candidate running against the left under the Fifth Republic with 53 per cent-53.5 per cent of the votes cast.