PARIS — Like Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy swept to power on a wave of hope for change. Sarkozy’s wave crashed on the global financial crisis and his own failings. Today, the French leader faces a tough fight against nine challengers in presidential elections awash in fear and anger.
This has been a race of negative emotion and nostalgia for a more protected past. France is feeling down about its debts, its immigrants, its stagnant paychecks and, above all, its future.
To voters, the conservative Sarkozy gets much of the blame. Although he is likely to make it past today’s first-round voting and into the decisive second round May 6, polls show his support waning.
They predict another man will trounce Sarkozy in the runoff and take over the Elysee Palace: Socialist Francois Hollande.
Hollande, in his Mr. Nice Guy kind of way, has tapped into a fear of the free market that has always held more sway in France than almost anywhere in the West, and has enjoyed a resurgence in the era of Occupy Wall Street and anti-banker backlash.
Hollande wants to tax high-income earners at 75 percent and reconsider a hard-won European fiscal treaty meant to stem the continent’s debt crisis. He says it’s too focused on cost-cutting and hurts ordinary folks.
Yet, Hollande is just one of five leftists in today’s race — and he’s the most moderate and pragmatic of the bunch. If rival Jean-Luc Melenchon, with his red neck-scarves and rallies thick with communist red flags, scores strongly, he and his voters will press Hollande to swing his own policies even further leftward.
Speaking to international reporters on Friday, Melenchon — who wants to tax the ultra-rich at 100 percent — called international finance “parasitic.” He criticized U.S. hegemony and military might, looking instead to communist China for partnership.
Under a quirk of French electoral rules, balloting got underway Saturday in France’s embassies and overseas holdings, starting in tiny Saint Pierre and Miquelon — islands south of Newfoundland in the North Atlantic Ocean. Campaigning and the release of poll data have been suspended until the first-round results come in this evening.
