[lbo-talk] French Leftist Candidate's Polls Plummet

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 2/19/07, BklynMagus <magcomm at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> For those lbosters wise in the ways of Europe: if this is
> true, why is it so?
>
> Brian
>
> French Leftist Candidate's Polls Plummet
>
> By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
> Published: February 19, 2007
> Filed at 2:09 p.m. ET
<snip>
> With Royal looking weak, other candidates have
> pounced on her territory. Centrist Francois Bayrou,
> a gentleman farmer figure who writes historical
> nonfiction and raises racehorses, has made
> overtures to the left, and he even suggested he
> could name a leftist prime minister. His poll numbers
> have risen while Royal's have dropped
<snip>
> Sarkozy, meanwhile, has embarked on a full-fledged
> campaign of wooing voters away from the left.
> There are signs it is working.
>
> Several prominent leftist intellectuals have defected
> to his camp, and a group called ''La Diagonale'' has
> gathered 1,000 leftists who plan to vote for him --
> including some people who still hold Socialist Party
> membership cards.

34% for Nicolas Sarkozy and 13% for Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first
round ("Royal Gets No Bounce, Sarkozy First in France,"
<http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/14751>)
-- France has a big anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant bloc, which includes
former leftists, "sarkozystes de gauche" led by the likes of Alain
Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann!

And the field to the left of Royal (27%) in the first round is crowded
and divided, demoralizingly so (the pre-election campaign attempt to
keep up the momentum of the No vote on the European Constitution and
of the victorious anti-CPE struggle and find a single candidate that
unites the anti-liberal Left was unsuccessful): Revolutionary
Communist League (LCR) member Olivier Besancenot gets 2.5%;
Marie-George Buffet of the French Communist Party (PCF), 2%;
farmer-activist José Bové, 3%; Arlette Laguiller of Workers' Struggle
(LO), 2%; and Dominique Voynet of the Greens (Verts), 1% ("Royal Gets
No Bounce, Sarkozy First in France,"
<http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/14751>).

Royal has run a kind of post-Left campaign, both in style and
substance, so if she's mainly losing votes to Francois Bayrou, she has
only herself to blame.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>