FRENCH ELECTION UPFDATE :: SARKOZY PARTY (UMP) SET FOR LANDSLIDE

Projections after the first round of France's parliamentary elections suggest President Nicolas Sarkozy's party is heading for a landslide. Although most seats will not be decided until next week's second round, polling firms said Mr Sarkozy's UMP party would win at least 383 of the 577 seats.

Analysts say a big majority would allow the new president to press ahead with his sweeping economic reforms.

"Many people seem less interested in the parliamentary elections because they think Sarkozy will win a large majority anyway," Mikhael Perez, a 48-year-old voter from Paris told Reuters news agency.

With a second round of voting to follow next week, the size of the UMP's likely majority was still uncertain.

Polling companies said the party could win anything between 383 and 501 of parliament's 577 seats, compared to its 359 at present.

Mr Sarkozy's Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, said: "Today you have chosen to give the presidential majority a beautiful lead... Tonight we have gone some of the way.

"But everything will really be decided next Sunday. This is why all the French need to go to vote. Change is on the march."

The Socialists, whose presidential candidate Segolene Royal lost to Mr Sarkozy, appeared set for another big disappointment.

It was predicted they could lose some of their 149 seats - and possibly as many as half of them.

Ms Royal urged left-wing voters to show up next weekend. "The republic needs you, because the republic needs a great force of the left to watch over things," she pleaded.

If candidates do not win more than 50% of the vote, with at least a 25% turnout, the constituency must vote again on 17 June.

Most will go to a second round. Any candidate with a first-round score of 12.5% or more of the registered vote is eligible to stand.

France has not returned the same government to power since 1978 - but this time the pattern looks set to change, the BBC's Emma Jane Kirby in Paris says.

France's "blue wave" means the president will get exactly what he wants - strong backing with which to implement his ambitious programme of economic reforms, our correspondent adds.

The parties of the left - including the communists, who look set for their worst result in memory - have called for a big turnout next week, warning voters not to give absolute power to Nicolas Sarkozy.

"He is a sort of hyper-president," said Socialist Pierre Moscovici, a member of the European parliament.

Mr Sarkozy has said he will hold a special session of parliament in July to initiate his first set of political reforms, which include tougher immigration rules and more freedom for universities.

A new finance bill will mean that overtime earnings are no longer taxed, inheritance tax is abolished for most people and overall individual taxation is capped at 50%.

The final vote will be next Sunday, June 17th.

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From BOZ at Politique Blog:

One of the most interesting things to come out of today’s vote are the wide ranging projections that different media sources are displaying for the final results next weekend. The top image from Le Figaro, which claims to be based on numbers from TNS-Sofres, predicts the UMP and allies with a win of 405-445 seats next week. Le Monde, which basis it’s projection from CSA, Sofres, and Ipsos, projects 381-444 seats for the UMP and allies. This breaks down to an average win of 425 for Le Figaro and 412.5 for Le Monde. Even better are the projections for the Socialist Party. The average number of seats the Socialists should win according to Le Monde is 145, but for Le Figaro only 120! To be fair, projections vary widely. CSA alone is predicting the UMP and allies win 460-495 seats, an interval that is entirely above the one chosen by Le Figaro.

But if these chosen figures have a slight political bias based on the media outlet, it only goes to show the relative unimportance of the other political parties. Both papers show MoDem winning 1-4, the Greens winning 3 or less, and the Communists winning 6-12. Much will likely depend on if the UMP can get a big enough turnout; because their absolute majority is assured, it is more likely that a UMP voter would figure his vote isn’t necessary than a Socialist or MoDem voter. Whatever happens, I wouldn’t want to be in the Royal-Hollande house tonight...

From the Financial Times:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d38e37fa-1780-11dc-86d1-000b5df10621,dwp_uuid=e17a8288-890f-11db-a876-0000779e2340.html

Small parties crushed in French elections
By Ben Hall and Pan Kwan Yuk in Paris

June 10 2007

The historically low turnout in Sunday’s first round of France’s parliamentary elections looks set to hasten the demise of the smaller parties in the National Assembly, leaving a divided Socialist party to form the only real opposition to the dominant centre-right grouping of President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Polling agencies last night estimated turnout at 60-63 per cent, the lowest for a first round of legislative elections for 40 years and more than 20 points down on the second round of last month’s momentous presidential contest.

French voters appear weary of politics after May’s dramatic race to the Elysée and following widespread predictions that the parliamentary elections were a foregone conclusion.

A sense that the parliamentary elections were simply the third round of the preceding presidential contest may help to explain why the centre-right UMP and its allies and the Socialists both did much better than expected, with 46 per cent and 36 per cent respectively, according to Ipsos estimates.

The poor performance of the smaller parties, accentuated by the two-round, first-past-the-post constituency system, means the National Assembly is set to become an essentially bipolar chamber, with an opposition centre-left confronting a governing centre-right that holds a crushing majority.

François Bayrou, the centrist who claimed to have broken the mould of French politics after scoring 18.6 per cent in the first round of the presidential election, has suffered a spectacular collapse in his fortunes.

His Mouvement Démocrate party won only 7 per cent of the vote, according to estimates by Ipsos, meaning it will have only a handful of deputies, far short of the 20 required to register as a formal parliamentary grouping.

The communists also look set to disappear from parliament as a formal group, after winning only 3 per cent together with the other far-left parties, according to Ipsos.

Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front also continued its sharp decline, winning 5 per cent compared with 11 per cent in 2002, and is once again likely to be left without parliamentary representation.

Despite the stronger-than-expected results for the two main parties, the low turnout will reduce the number of outright victories in the first round. To be elected in the first round, a candidate needs to win not only 50 per cent of the votes cast but also at least 25 per cent of the eligible electorate, a threshold that is harder to reach if turnout is low.

In the vast majority of constituencies, there will be a second round of voting on June 17, a run-off between all those candidates who secured the votes of at least 12.5 per cent of the electorate.

The results are likely to intensify the debate about whether France should adopt an element of proportional representation for its parliamentary elections. Mr Sarkozy has said he is open to the idea.

from the IHT:

http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=6079537

French overwhelmingly favor president’s camp in parliamentary vote

By Katrin Bennhold

Sunday, June 10, 2007
PARIS: President Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right camp was on course to win a landslide victory in Parliament Sunday after the first round of France’s legislative elections, cementing his power to implement reforms in Europe’s third-largest economy.

The Union for a Popular Movement obtained 41.3 percent of the vote, according to preliminary estimations by the CSA polling institute, a score that is expected to give the party between 360 and 470 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly after the second round of voting June 17, three pollsters said.

The main opposition camp, the Socialist Party, received an estimated 27.2 percent, putting it on course for 60 to 170 seats, pollsters said, reinforcing the sense of disarray that has reigned on the left ever since Ségolène Royal lost to Sarkozy in last month’s presidential race.

Sarkozy’s party, which has set itself the unofficial goal of winning 400 seats, has been widely expected to obtain a comfortable majority, but the preliminary results Sunday exceeded even optimistic forecasts.

It is the first time since 1978 that an outgoing parliamentary majority is re-elected, a result favored by a recent change to synchronize the presidential and parliamentary terms. But with the Gaullist camp set to expand its dominance in Parliament from the current 359 seats, commentators said the result was also a sign that French voters trusted Sarkozy to jolt their country out of a collective sense of decline.

Minutes after the first exit polls, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, head of Sarkozy’s Popular Movement, hailed the result as a strong endorsement of the president and his platform.

“It is a success,” Raffarin said in an election broadcast on the TF1 network. “The drive Nicolas Sarkozy gave to French politics was confirmed by the French people. They have confirmed their choice en masse.”

Sarkozy has been eager to maximize his mandate, reminding voters repeatedly in recent weeks of his intention to implement an ambitious agenda of change. Eleven ministers of his 15 are running in the election, including Prime Minister François Fillon, in a bid to maximize their legitimacy. None of them will actually take up their seats, but if any of them were to lose, they would be asked to leave the government. On Sunday night only one of them, the minister of sustainable development, Alain Juppé, faced a risk of defeat.

If the presidential campaign was a roller coaster of suspense and passion that culminated in a turnout of 84 percent on May 6, the parliamentary election has failed to spark nearly as much interest among voters. On Sunday, only 60.4 percent turned out to cast their ballots, according to an early estimate by CSA. That would be record low under France’s fifth Republic and an illustration that this election has come to be seen as a mere vote of confirmation or, as newspapers here described it, the “third round” of the presidential election.

A victory of the Gaullist movement has been so widely predicted that the opposition has merely urged voters not to hand the new head of state too large a majority.

The Socialists sought to put on a brace face Sunday night.

“There is a second round in which the results can be improved,” said Laurent Fabius, a senior member of the party.

If the Socialist Party suffered in the first round of the legislative ballot, smaller parties received an even harder blow. A new centrist party, led by François Bayrou, who finished third in the presidential election, came nowhere close to the nearly 19 percent its leader received last month, getting only an estimated 7.4 percent of the national vote. The centrists, like their Green counterparts, have little hope of winning the 20 seats necessary to constitute a parliamentary group and get access to the financing that comes with that status. The Communist Party risks losing its parliamentary group, while the far-right Front National, who have no lawmakers in the outgoing assembly, are not expected to win any this time either.

A majority in Parliament makes Sarkozy the most powerful leader in Europe and one of the most powerful presidents in France’s recent history. Elected for five years, the French head of state is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and has the right to dissolve the National Assembly.

To be sure, a parliamentary majority is no guarantee for swift change. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who 10 years ago won a landslide on a platform of pragmatism and personal drive not unlike that of Sarkozy’s, shied away from overhauling Britain’s health and education systems in his first term. In former President Jacques Chirac’s second term, the center-right controlled nearly two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly. But the government was deeply unpopular and unable to break a sense of stagnation permeating the country’s elite, particularly after the French rejected one of Chirac’s pet projects, a European constitution, in May 2005. Last year, lawmakers swiftly abrogated legislation creating a more flexible work contract for young people after two months of street protests.

In his first four weeks in office, Sarkozy has signaled that he is determined to use his powers to implement his election promises and, unlike his predecessors, get personally involved in the process.

“I want to be a president who governs,” he vowed after his election. Two bills - one proposing a number of tax cuts and the other tightening sentencing rules for repeat offenders - are ready to be submitted to the newly elected assembly in an extraordinary session over the summer.

If these measures are the most popular in Sarkozy’s reform package, a more revolutionary catalogue of measures, all at one point tried and abandoned by previous administrations under pressure from labor unions, are to follow. Over the next year, the new president plans to make it easier to hire and fire; allow universities to select students and charge fees; and overhaul generous public sector pensions.

According to commentators, the larger the parliamentary majority, the slimmer the legitimacy for unions to paralyze the country with strikes and demonstrations.

“Strong parliamentary backing is a decisive factor in transforming the country,” an editorial in the right-leaning Figaro said in its weekend edition. “Given what awaits him, Sarkozy will need it.”

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