French Elections of 2007

▪ 2008

      The 2007 presidential election in France was never a foregone conclusion. Ségolène Royal, the Socialist contender, had the early advantage of being the first candidate to win a mainstream party nomination, in November 2006. Unlike Royal, however, Nicolas Sarkozy had no rivals for his party ticket, and once he was endorsed by his conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party in January, he quickly drew level with and then ahead of Royal in the polls.

      Even faster was the poll-rating improvement of the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) candidate, François Bayrou, who went from less than 10% support in early February to more than 20% by early March. This third-party candidate never succeeded in making it into the two-person runoff, however, as the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen had done in 2002. Indeed, the 2002 result was probably one of the reasons why Bayrou never made it to the second round: many voters were wary of the dangers of tactical voting that could put an unwanted candidate through to the runoff. Another reason was the doubt about what sort of parliamentary majority Bayrou could count on to govern if he was elected president. Experience bore out the doubts. Bayrou came in third in the April 22 first-round vote with a very creditable 18.6%, pushing Le Pen (10.4%) into fourth place.

      In the campaign before the May 6 second round of the presidential election, both Sarkozy (who had scored 31.2% in the first round) and Royal (25.9%) vied for the nearly seven million voters who had cast their ballot for Bayrou. He refused to endorse either candidate, although Royal reportedly left several messages on his mobile phone and Sarkozy pledged that centrists would “have their place” in his government. The battle between Sarkozy and Royal was hard fought to the end, and an estimated 20 million people watched the last television debate between the two candidates, held four days before the vote. Sarkozy's final margin of victory was decisive—53.1% to Royal's 46.9%.

      Bayrou's political fortunes collapsed in the June parliamentary elections. Most of his UDF deputies quit to join Sarkozy's UMP rather than the new Democratic Movement that Bayrou formed. Bayrou saved his own seat only because Sarkozy had ordered the opposing UMP candidate to stand down. The UMP did not manage to capitalize on this or on Sarkozy's presidential success, however, as the party won fewer seats than in the previous general election (313 of the 577 National Assembly seats, compared with 355 in 2002). The Socialists won more than they had five years earlier (186 seats, up from 140). The main reason for the UMP's poor showing appeared to be a preelection leak that the government planned a five-point hike in the value-added tax. Nonetheless, the UMP conservatives retained power, the first time since 1978 that an incumbent party had won reelection.

David Buchan

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