The Majority Vote
Over 30 million French voters went to the polls in the first round of Presidential elections to decide their preference in a full slate of 9 candidates. In a major upset that stunned political pundits, Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin secured nearly 7 million votes (or 23.24% of the votes cast) to come out first in the pack while the favourite Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist, was grateful to scrape through to the second round with about 6.2 million votes (20.64%). Chirac was just ahead of his former friend, fellow Gaullist and handpicked PM Edouard Balladur, who had deserted his mentor in a bid for the Presidency but fell just short by 600,000 votes, getting only about 5.6 million votes (or about 18.54%). Not to be denied his place under the French sun Jean Marie Le Pen, the Far Right candidate, secured 15.15% of the vote, translated into 4.6 million votes, slightly above par than his previous performances. Next came Communist Robert Hue with 2.6 million votes (3.72%), then Trotskyist Arlette Laguiller with 1.6 million votes (5.34%) followed by Nationalist Phillipe de Villiers (1.4 million votes 4.78%) and Ecologist Dominique Voynet with 3.33% of the vote representing 1 million votes. At the very tail was the Extreme Right candidate Jacques Cheminade with 83,472 votes (about 0.27%).
Since none of the candidates got an outright majority (50%), a second run-off election will be held on May 7, 1995 between the Socialist Party Candidate Lionel Jospin and “Rally for the Republic (RPR) Party” Candidate, Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac. Contrary to pollsters’ speculation a few months ago that pitted Conservatives Chirac and Balladur against each other, the early front runner French PM Balladur self-destructed in the final weeks to make it a straight Left-Right contest. On the surface, the Right (Chirac, Balladur, Le Pen, Villiers and Cheminade) picked up about 18 million votes (60%) to 12 million votes of the Left (Jospin, Hiz, Laguiller, Voynet), about 40%. However, this is rather a simplistic calculation as not all the voters of the Right will vote for Chirac or for that matter Jospin will not automatically sweep up all the votes on the Left. A fair estimate is that a vast majority of each side may still favour their ideological inclination (and a fair amount may stay at home) but most voters react to individual candidates in preference to their political leanings. The inaccurate French Polls had shown Chirac getting nearly 27% of the vote or about 8 million votes, he fell short by a massive 1.8 million votes, nearly 25% less than predicated by pollsters. On the other hand Jospin did better than expected by about 1.6 million votes and Balladur was short of the projections by about a million votes. These represent very wide margins of error and expert analyst are of the opinion that Chirac almost got clobbered because of (1) voter apathy inasfar that they expected him to win anyway and stayed at home (2) the Right-Right split of the Gaullist vote and (3) desperate Socialist attempt to keep their candidate Jospin alive by concentrating the left vote. At the same time Le Pen, who had no chance anyway, profited from his rabid rhetoric against immigrants, the symbolic backlash maintaining his performance of the past. The Extreme Left (in Hue, Laguiller and Voynet) got a better than expected 5 million votes (about 17%).
