Without any risk or surprise, one can say that current French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Socialist opponent François Hollande will tonight, after the results of the first round of the French presidential elections are announced, be the two candidates who will compete in the second round in two weeks. This has been confirmed by every opinion poll, and is known to the leaders of the campaigns of all ten candidates. And if one of the results of these projections is a drop in the turnout rates of French voters, who number around 45 million, campaign leaders will pause at the rates obtained by the extreme right-wing candidate of the National Front (FN – Front National), Marine Le Pen, as well as by the candidate of the Left Front (Front de Gauche) and former Socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and by the candidate of the centrist Democratic Movement (Mouvement Démocrate) François Bayrou. The campaign in the first round witnessed a new phenomenon in French elections. Indeed, traditional promises and electoral programs did not arouse much enthusiasm among voters, in view of their being repeated on the background of a deteriorating economic situation and the absence of new ways to emerge from the state of economic recession, lack of job opportunities and increasing cuts to education and healthcare budgets. And none of the candidates has put forward a credible plan to resolve this deteriorating state of affairs. Thus the competition has come to revolve around personalities and not programs, a feature usually characteristic of the second round. The leaders of the Sarkozy campaign recognize that the tremendous drop in the latter's popularity is connected to his personality much more than to the catastrophic results of his five-year term. And it seems that some advisers have recommended that he seek to improve his personal image among voters by admitting to his mistakes in behavior and to his arrogance. Yet such admissions have proved detrimental and led to further deterioration of his image among voters. On the other hand, Hollande has from the beginning given himself the image of an ordinary man, without doling out illusions about his person as an extraordinary man engaged in an extraordinary task. He has sought, gradually, and ever since he obtained his party's nomination, to come closer to voters through field visits to all regions, the countryside and workplaces, so as to portray the image of a president-to-be who seeks to come closer to people's concerns and to understand them – this in order to rub out his image as a politician who has never assumed significant responsibility in government, and as one lacking experience in the management of the country's affairs. And in fact Hollande has been successful in this, imposing himself at the end of the race as a statesman. Yet more important that all of this is the fact that he has avoided the major mistake made by his Socialist predecessor Lionel Jospin, who assumed when he competed for the presidency in 2002 against then-President Jacques Chirac that his election in the second round had been ensured, and thus refrained from engaging in a broad campaign while refusing to grant any concessions to Leftist forces and to the Greens (Les Verts), who traditionally support his party in presidential elections. His campaign was thus dull and unsuccessful, to such an extent that it led to extreme right-wing candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen reaching the second round against Chirac. Today, however, it seems unlikely for Marine Le Pen to repeat her father's experience. Nevertheless, analysts will pause at the rate she obtains in the first round, as her voters will constitute the main reservoir which Sarkozy will try to tap into, which will reflect on the nature of the campaign in the second round and on its slogans, expected to increasingly veer to right in order to please National Front voters and to attract them. Similarly, Left Front voters will represent the reservoir that will boost Hollande's chances in the second round, yet without the Socialist candidate having to modify his electoral slogans. Indeed, the broad popularity attracted by Mélenchon, in polls and at rallies, is due first and foremost to the man's personality – a professor of French literature and eloquent speaker who has managed to bring together the voters of the Communist Party (PCF – Parti Communiste Français) and from the left of the Socialist Party (PS – Parti Socialiste), in addition to the disgruntled and the marginalized from every segment of the populations, under the slogan of defeating Sarkozy and defending against Marine Le Pen. And this automatically means that his supporters will turn to Hollande in the second round. As for Bayrou's voters, whose candidate has dropped in polls from third to fifth place, they will either be divided between Hollande and Sarkozy, even if in greater proportion in favor of the latter, or will refrain from voting – this if Bayrou does not find a formula for an understanding with Hollande, in view of this being impossible with Sarkozy, that would ensure his participation in a coalition Socialist-Centrist-Green government.
