It would be interesting to see a demographic breakdown of that 47%. I would bet that most of those voters are in the very young and/or very socialist camp. Plus a high percentage of the bureaucrats, educrats, and other "elites" of French society. In short most of the people entrenched in the privileged French sector who think they will lose a lot if forced to work for a living.
"Just because you're a feminist, you don't vote for a women who does not have the ability. We're talking about the presidential election here ... It's too serious to link this to a phenomenon of femininity or feminism,".
Another quote that's a bit disturbing, but in one way probably good fun for this audience, is...
Statistics show women in France are far from equal. Just 12 percent of lawmakers are female and only one woman heads a firm in the CAC-40 index of blue chip companies, and she is American.
On the subject of French taxes, they're huge on the income tax front, but less so (I believe) from the capital gains tax angle. Particularly onerous are inheritance taxes and a special tax on the capital of the very wealthy (that i know very little about). Ask me again in a few months, I'm moving to Paris in 3 weeks! You might say I had a vested interest in the outcome of this election, and that sound you can hear is me, breathing a big sigh of relief.
I've often wondered about the perceived French distaste for wealth, I don't really understand it but it seems underpinned by a vaguely-formed notion that if you're wealthy, you must have somehow cheated or exploited others or taken advantage of the general masses to become that way - possibly a throwback from a previous age when status was purely inherited? What I'm getting at is that these socialist policies aren't entirely an outcome predicated by a set of clearly-defined political beliefs, but something more akin to psychology and collective national history that's harder to pin down and therefore also more difficult to argue against. I've tried.