{"id":1374,"date":"2006-11-16T10:34:00","date_gmt":"2006-11-16T10:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/11\/16\/the-french-presidential-race-a-quick-summary\/"},"modified":"2006-11-27T08:46:51","modified_gmt":"2006-11-27T08:46:51","slug":"the-french-presidential-race-a-quick-summary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/11\/the-french-presidential-race-a-quick-summary\/","title":{"rendered":"The French Presidential race – a quick summary"},"content":{"rendered":"

France’s next president could be decided today<\/a> as the Socialists vote in a three-way primary for their candidate to take on Chirac’s expected conservative successor, Nicholas Sarkozy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The front-runner for the socialists (on 49% – via<\/a>) is currently thought to be Segolene Royal<\/a> – who would become France’s first female president if she gets all the way to the top – although being a bit of a moderate there is the possibility that the extreme left of the party may launch a last-minute counter-offensive to avoid the risk of having a female Blair in charge.<\/p>\n

If Royal doesn’t get the nomination today thanks to left-wing stubbornness (remember the last Presidential election, when the socialists were beaten to the final round by Jean Marie Le Pen’s fascists, giving the washed-up Chirac a free run to another term?), then Sarkozy is a shoe-in. Assuming, of course, that barking idiot Chirac doesn’t decide to go for a third term in office.<\/p>\n

Still, if she does win the nomination, according to the latest polls<\/a> she’d be in by far the best position to take on Sarkozy, steadily gaining ground on him over the last couple of months. The two most likely candidates are currently neck and neck – meaning that the run-up to the election itself at the end of April is likely to be an intriguing one. Whoever wins, it should mark a major shift in the make up of European politics.<\/p>\n

Time to start getting to grips with the issues, methinks… Anyone know of any good English language sites on French domestic politics?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

France’s next president could be decided today as the Socialists vote in a three-way primary for their candidate to take on Chirac’s expected conservative successor, Nicholas Sarkozy. The front-runner for the socialists (on 49% – via) is currently thought to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-france"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}