Apr 13 2007
France reflects general disillusion with mainstream political parties and the EU
The French Presidential election wallows on. The main centre right candidate swaggers as the next President because the polls show he has almost 30% support! The leading centre left candidate, Segolene Royal has the support of fewer than one in four of the voters, and the coming from nowhere centrist Francois Bayrou is stuck on 1 in 5.
The election is played under a type of PR so of course in the first round it encourages candidates and parties to go to extremes. Some left of centre voters are attracted to the Workers Struggle or
RSS Feed
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
I’m not sure there is an incentive for the French to vote for extremes it may just be that what you consider extremes have more of the confidence of the left & right sections respectively - ie that they are just voting as they wish. When Le Pen got into the final as the standard bearer of the right, they lost because the moderate right mostly prefered to see the left candidate in.
This is thus actually less likely to produce an extreme result than British politics where the FTPT system ties in rightest voters to whoever the Tory leader is & the left into Labour’s standard bearer.