The third man

Everything in France right now is about the presidential election. If just the smallest thing happen, the candidates have to make a statement about it and declare that with their politics the incendent would never have happend.

The first round of the elections will take place this Sunday (22nd of April) and there are 12 candidates to vote for. If one of the candidates gets more than 50% of the votes this candicate will be the new president. -However, this will not happen. None of the candidates are even near to get those 50%. So the elections will go into the second round which will take place on the 6th of May.

Due to the large number of candidates in the first round, many of the candidates with only a small percentage (between 0.5-4%) will take a lot of votes from the candidates with higher percentage numbers which has a higher chance of getting elected. I some difficulties to understand why people bother to put their votes on a candidate which anyway doesn't have a chance (and even harder to understand why someone would candidate to become a president if s/he will get less than 1%). I have, however, understod that a lot of people use the first round to show their disapointment of the "etablissement". During the last election this disapointment led to that the nationalistic candidate Le Pen went to the second round - where he lost towards Chirac. The main reason to this was more or less that the socialist/communist voters where spreading out there votes on several candidates. Allthough, this year there is still a lot of communist candidates that battles of being - la gauche de la gauche (more left than the others). However, none of them gets especially high percentage, and the only left candidate with a chance seems to be Ségolène Royal (Ségo). The other two candidates which still stand a chance is Nicolas Sarkozy (Sarko), which is probably the most unpopular candidate, but his party UMP (conservatives) can a lot of support from the French, and the last candidate François Bayrou which accord to the French media is a "extrème centrist" from the UDF. All three of them have between 20% and 30%. Theoretically Le Pen still have chance, but I rather think nor hope that he will go to the second round, and if he does he will not stand a chance against the other candidates.

The elections have much to do about which candidate people don't support, rather than who they do support. An intresting scenario is if Bayrou who is the third candidate (the Third man) in most polls would go to the second round. Although Sarkozy and Ségolène have the highest percentage there are probably more people that wouldn't like to seem them as presidents than would, so probably noone of them would stand a chance against Bayrou in the last round - who is not as popular but also not as impopular as both of them. The most likely would however be that Sarkozy and Ségolène will go to the second round - and according to the polls Sarkozy will be the new president. However, is it something French people know is it not to trust "les sondages".

An intressting note about Le Pen has gotten as much media attention in French media as the other candidates. For a long time in Sweden the Swedish nationalistic party almost never got any attention - it seems however as if it going to change. Although in Sweden luckily Sverige Demokraterna still only has around 2% which support them towards Le Pens front national which has about 13%.