http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9249109/French-Presidential-election-live.html
Nervousness about what the future holds has reached deep into Mr Sarkozy’s inner circle, too. One of his small group of close friends who gather around the president for late-night drinks most weeks put it in the starkest terms for me: “Economically, I want him to win because Hollande will be a disaster for France. But for the sake of social stability, it is better if Sarkozy loses.”
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-04/schaeuble-says-germany-will-negotiate-with-hollande-on-growth
http://www.france24.com/en/20120506-france-votes-tight-presidential-race
17.25 Le Soir, the Belgian paper, has called it for Hollande with 53 per cent of the vote, citing a well-informed source at the Parti Socialiste.
Three polls conducted in the day gave these results:
Harris Interactive: 53% Hollande - 47% Sarkozy
Sofres: 53% Hollande - 47% Sarkozy
Opinion Way: 52.5% Hollande - 47.5% Sarkozy
Le Soir cites a source at the Mutualité claiming Sarkozy's UMP party has cancelled a planned rally on the Place de la Concorde.
17.22 What lies in store for France if Hollande wins? More austerity, and violence on the streets, Benedict Brogan warns.
Nervousness about what the future holds has reached deep into Mr Sarkozy’s inner circle, too. One of his small group of close friends who gather around the president for late-night drinks most weeks put it in the starkest terms for me: “Economically, I want him to win because Hollande will be a disaster for France. But for the sake of social stability, it is better if Sarkozy loses.”
He recognised that the president has been a divisive figure, and that after a decade in power for the Right the public is angry and has had enough. To hear one of France’s wealthy elites whisper that letting the Left win would avoid trouble and reduce tensions is to hear the aristocrats talk of placating the mob.
Among the political classes of both Right and Left, two predictions are being made: first, that Mr Hollande will win tomorrow. And second, that within six months he will have disappointed those who elected him with a series of economic U-turns that will drive them into the streets and into violent confrontations with the state.
Then the crowds will once again return to the Bastille, but this time in anger, not in celebration.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-04/schaeuble-says-germany-will-negotiate-with-hollande-on-growth
Schaeuble Says Germany Will Negotiate With Hollande
The German government will allow a victorious Francois Hollande to “save face” while expecting him to uphold French commitments to Europe’s budget treaty, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said.
Schaeuble’s comments are the clearest indication yet that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is preparing for a Hollande victory at France’s presidential election on May 6 after publicly backing Nicolas Sarkozy to win a second term. Earlier today, the German government said that diplomatic contact had been made with the Hollande camp.
“We’ve told Mister Hollande that the fiscal pact has been signed and that Europe works along the principle of pacta sunt servanda,” meaning agreements must be kept, Schaeuble said in a speech in the western German city of Cologne today.
“I’ve said that everybody who gets freshly elected into office must be able to save face,” Schaeuble said. “So we will discuss this with Hollande in a very friendly way. But we won’t change our principles.”
Hollande is leading European calls to step back from Germany’s austerity prescription intended to tackle the root of the debt crisis that sprang up in Greece in late 2009. He has said he wants to renegotiate the fiscal pact to focus on growth. Merkel has said the pact won’t be reopened, even as she backs plans for structural reforms to spur economic expansion.
German Agreement
Hollande “knows” that European Union agreements can’t be renegotiated every time a government changes, Schaeuble said. Even so, Merkel’s government expects Hollande to say that fiscal consolidation alone won’t be enough to create sustainable public finances, and the German side would agree with such sentiments, Schaeuble said.
“Heads of state and government said months ago that their June summit will focus on the strengthening of growth in Europe,” he said.
Sarkozy gained on Hollande in the campaign’s final daily tracking poll by Ifop today. The survey put Hollande’s lead at 52 percent to 48 percent, down from 53-47 yesterday, according to a statement by the pollster.
Hollande’s election would risk upsetting Merkel’s handling of the debt crisis in tandem with France. Merkel and Sarkozy took years to build a working relationship after he took office in 2007 and only aligned policies in 2010 as the crisis forced their hand.
Merkel Rejection
Merkel, who faces two state ballots in the next nine days and national elections in 2013, rejects any compromise over Hollande’s demands for issuing joint euro bonds, a more activist European Central Bank or loosening austerity measures.
“We can’t keep giving out more money than we take in,” Merkel told supporters of her Christian Democratic Union party at the closing rally today in Tornesch, in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein. “You see it across Europe, where countries that have broken that rule can’t freely decide for themselves what they want to do and what they don’t want to do.”
Schaeuble sharpened that defense in his speech at a separate CDU rally in Cologne, in North Rhine-Westphalia, which goes to the polls on May 13. Schleswig-Holstein votes on May 6.
Schaeuble rejected proposals to allow the ECB to guarantee euro members’ government debt, saying that would lead to a loss of financial stability. He also reiterated his opposition to selling government bonds in the euro region jointly as that would set the wrong incentives for financial stability.
“As long as we don’t have a common fiscal policy, that would mean that the one side piles up debt while the other side pays,” Schaeuble said.
Spanish Banks
Neither should the European Stability Mechanism, the euro region’s financial backstop, be allowed to help recapitalize Spanish banks directly, he said.
“The answer is no,” Schaeuble said.
For all their differences, Merkel and Hollande will have little choice other than to cooperate, said Volker Perthes, director of the Berlin-based German Institute for International and Security Affairs, which advises the government.
“Both are pragmatists,” Perthes said in an interview. “They will find consensus.”
and.....
http://www.france24.com/en/20120506-france-votes-tight-presidential-race
AFP - French voters turned out in numbers Sunday to give their verdict in a hard-fought presidential battle between right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and his Socialist challenger Francois Hollande.
Opinion polls and electioneering were banned in the final 32 hours before polling stations opened, but Hollande began the day as firm favourite despite signs that Sarkozy had narrowed the gap slightly in the closing straight.
Dark grey skies and scattered rain showers greeted early voters in Paris, but turnout was high by recent standards in a highly political country today split roughly 50-50 between left-leaning and right-leaning camps.
More than 46 million voters were eligible to take part, and around 80 percent of them were expected to do so. Polling was to close at 8:00 pm (1800 GMT) and an estimated result was to be given immediately afterwards.
Four hours after polling began just over 30 percent of the electorate had turned out, more than during the first round vote on April 22, but down on the 34 percent who had taken part at the same stage in the 2007 run-off.
Hollande campaigned as a consensus-building moderate focused on restoring economic growth and is seen as on course to become France's first Socialist president since Francois Mitterrand left office in 1995.
Sarkozy has trailed consistently in opinion polls for the last six months, but fought a bruising campaign focused on mobilising voters fearful that immigration and globalisation threaten the French way of life.
Hollande voted early in his adopted hometown Tulle, in the rural backwoods of the Correze region, accompanied by his girlfriend Valerie Trierweiler and welcomed by a crowd of supporters and journalists from around the globe.
"It's going to be a long day," he said. "I don't know if it's going to be a good day -- that's for the French to decide -- but for a portion of them it will obviously be a good day, and not for the others."
Sarkozy and his former supermodel wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy voted at a high school in Paris' chic 16th district followed by a dense pack of photographers and acclaimed by a well-heeled crowd gathered behind street barriers.
Final opinion polls conducted on Friday before campaigning was officially suspended for the weekend suggested the still energetic Sarkozy may have closed the gap on the frontrunner to as little as four percent.
But a complete turnaround would still constitute a surprise, and Hollande was expected to assume the leadership of France, the eurozone's second-largest economy and a nuclear-armed permanent member of the UN Security Council.
Total voter turnout in the first round last month was high, at just under 80 percent, and the duelling run-off candidates, both aged 57, have warned their supporters not to stay at home as every vote counts.
Even before polls opened on the mainland, more than a million had voted in overseas territories and consulates in foreign cities with a large French expatriate population, with turnout slightly higher than in the first round.
If he loses, Sarkozy will become the first French president since Valery Giscard d'Estaing in 1981 not to be re-elected. He is already the first ever incumbent not to come out ahead in the first round of voting.
France has a strict ban on publishing result estimates until all polls close, but foreign media websites are expected to publish estimates before then, and these will spread quickly via Twitter and Facebook.
Anyone breaking the law on sharing early estimates faces a fine of 75,000 euros (100,000 dollars), but French citizens got around the restriction in the first round by using code words and the Twitter hashtag #RadioLondres.
Hollande won the first round with 28.63 percent of the votes to Sarkozy's 27.18 percent, and both candidates have been fighting for the votes of those whose candidates failed to make the run-off.
Far-right anti-immigrant candidate Marine Le Pen, who won almost 18 percent in the first round, said she had cast a blank ballot, and observers expected many of her supporters to do the same.
"I clearly said I would cast a blank vote, I am not in the habit of changing my mind," she said after voting in the northern town of Henin-Beaumont, where she is a regional councillor.
"The two remaining candidates are political Siamese twins, so I'm not expecting very much from the result," Le Pen told journalists.
The polling institute Ifop, however, forecasts that 55 percent of her voters would back Sarkozy and 19 percent Hollande.
Hollande needs a strong mandate to implement his programme to counter EU-driven austerity, while Sarkozy has played on fears that the election of a Socialist would send shudders through the EU and the financial markets.
Whoever wins will next have to build a parliamentary majority after June's legislative elections, but the formal handover of presidential power is expected on or around May 15 -- in any case before May 17.
and a requiem for Sarkozy ......
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