In a press conference yesterday, Bayrou (who got 18% of the votes in the first round) officially announced he would not give voting guidances to his electorate for the second round of the presidential election on  May 6th. His voters will have to decide by themselves how to split their votes between Sarkozy or Royal [...]

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Less than 24 hours after the first round, both Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal are trying to reach out beyond their”natural” constituencies. They both need to convince Bayrou’s supporters (again, 18% of the electorate) to give them their voices on May 6th. They did it tonight in different ways and with a different magnitude. Sarkozy [...]

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We know now who will be in the race for the second round of the French presidential elections: Sarkozy got around 30% of the votes, Royal around 25%. Those results need to be refined and the exact figures will be known around midnight European time today. To be noted at this stage : – the [...]

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According to latest polls, Nicolas Sarkozy would get 27% of the vote, followed by Ségolène Royal at 25%, François Bayrou at 19%, and Jean-Marie Le Pen at 15.5%. It seems likely that the two main,”big” candidates, Sarkozy and Royal, will make it to the second round. If this is the case, polls show that the [...]

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One week before the presidential election, the french newspaper Le Monde asked François Bayrou, Ségolène Royal, and  Nicolas Sarkozy to give their opinion on the following foreign policy topics. On a nuclear Iran : The three candidates agree that the West should be firm and reinforce sanctions. Sarkozy differs from Bayrou and Royal regarding the [...]

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On Saturday, Turkey witnessed one of its republican history’s largest rally. Hundreds of thousands of people — from children to elders, from farmers to artists, from socialists to nationalists — traveled from across the country to Ankara not only to protest a possible presidential run by Turkey’s pro-Islamic prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan but also [...]

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President Viktor Yushchenko’s decision to dissolve parliament and set new elections for May 27 now faces a challenge in the constitutional court. Even if the president’s decree is upheld, reformist forces will still face an uphill task in convincing voters to give them a mandate to form a government in light of the farcical manner [...]

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