Unless the polls in France turn out to be wrong, by the end of the day, Francois Hollande will be addressed as Mr. President. Nicolas Sarkozy, meanwhile, will be the first incumbent since Valery Giscard d'Estaing in 1981 not to win a second term. Opinion polls suggest Sarkozy has cut Hollande's lead slightly but is still trailing his Socialist challenger by some six percent. Sarkozy needs a major reversal in fortunes to win. His hopes for political survival rest on winning around 80 percent of the over six million votes garnered in the first round by far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, and at least half of the votes collected by centrist Francois Bayrou, who took 9.1 percent in the first round and who has now backed Hollande. As well as mobilizing first round abstainers, these are tall orders for Sarkozy. From the start it was an uphill struggle for Sarkozy. Almost every crisis-hit European people that have held an election since economic disaster struck in 2009 have looked for salvation elsewhere. Silvio Berlusconi, Gordon Brown and George Papandreou, former leaders of Italy, Britain and Greece respectively, are just a few of the casualties. Economic gloom, Sarkozy's failure to keep a 2007 promise to cut unemployment to five percent, and a dislike of his brash and showy manner turned many supporters against him. The warning signs were there. In the first round of the elections Sarkozy became the first incumbent in French history to lose. In their nearly three-hour debate earlier in the week, Sarkozy presumably felt his aggressive debating style would overshadow Hollande's more reserved manner but he failed to land a knockout punch and his challenger appeared more poised and confident. Not seen as a charismatic figure even by left-wing voters, Hollande was long overlooked by many in the Socialist Party. The prospect of a victory for Hollande - who has pledged to raise education spending, raise taxes on big companies and the rich, and temper Europe's drive for austerity - not only initially alarmed some investors but never looked probable. Had the former French finance minister and managing director of the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn not been arrested last year following a New York hotel scandal, it would likely have been Strauss-Kahn, and not Hollande, who would be facing the French electorate as the Socialist Party candidate in the presidential elections. Call it luck, but Hollande has made optimum use of his good fortune by reinventing himself as the leading candidate in the elections and he now stands poised to be the first Socialist head of state since Francois Mitterrand left office in 1995. If the opinion polls are to be believed, Sarkozy will today suffer defeat, and Hollande will be elected as the president of France for the next five years in the left's best ever result in any French presidential election, beating the 54.02 percent achieved by Mitterrand in the second round of the 1988 elections. But a Hollande victory may not be inevitable. The gap is narrowing, there are still a lot of undecided voters and there can still be a few surprises in one of the most dramatic elections in recent French history. __
