Next Up: Northern Niger

Le Monde reports on a fascinating crisis, one that incorporates essentially all the themes of the times. In northern Niger lurk huge reserves of uranium, and the French nuclear power industry covers about a third of its requirements from mines there owned by Areva SA. It was this mining industry that Joe Wilson was ordered to investigate, with fateful consequences. Now, with the price of uranium historically high on roaring demand, a curious confluence of developments twirls across the desert..

For a start, back in June, the chief of security at Areva was ordered to leave Niger immediately. Unsurprisingly, Gilles Denamur is a retired French Army colonel who used to be the French military attache to Niger – one of that very specific type of all-purpose soldiers/spooks/businessmen/crooks France’s continuing involvement in Africa produces. He was accused of colluding with a local group of rebels, the National Movement for Justice (MNJ) – a local chapter of the spreading, water-stressed trouble across the continent from Somalia, this lot are mostly Touaregs. According to the Niger government, he was secretly arming the rebels, perhaps as an alternative to the government troops posted at the mines.

More recently, on the 25th of July, the managing director of Areva in Niger was himself rousted. Dominique Pin is another of those men; a veteran of Mitterand’s Africa policy cell that was at the heart of the vast network of scandals around the Angolan war. He’s accused of intriguing with the MNJ, too – after all, if baroudeur had a job description attached, intriguing would be the first or second item on it. And the Niger government has something to be angry about. After all, their crack commando unit that was (of course) stationed to protect the mines has deserted to the rebels in its entirety.

There is of course something else the government has to be angry about; Areva and its predecessors have had a monopoly of uranium mining in Niger for the last forty years, or to put it another way, ever since independence. Now, Niger would like some more of the money, what with the raging demand from China. And they reckon there may be much more uranium out there; the desert is now positively crowded with prospectors after it. Wouldn’t it be terribly convenient, then, if some of the French execs were caught doing something absolutely intolerable? And, indeed, Niger has announced that the monopoly is over. Although Areva got some five new exploration permits, Niger has secured the right to market some of the production from the existing mines itself.

The French claim that the Chinese are offering arms in return for exploration rights, but this may merely be propaganda. And there is an important fact that is missing from Le Monde‘s story; on the 7th of July, a Chinese mining executive from Sino-U was kidnapped by the MNJ. Their spokesman, who is based in Paris (one can perhaps see why Niger is suspicious of French motives), claims it’s because the Chinese paid for the government to buy a pair of Mi-24 attack helicopters, and also because the Chinese are digging too close to a major traditional gathering-place. He was released soon enough, after some trouble due to the fact he didn’t speak French or English, let alone a local language. At the time, Le Monde was noticeably sympathetic to the Touareg cause; I think they have cooled on it quite a lot, going by the tone of the latest dispatch.

France and the United States

France needs to abandon its rejection of globalisation, right? Get with the programme? Join the war against terrorism? Or face simply becoming irrelevant? We’ve blogged plenty at AFOE about the bizarre notion that France and the United States are suddenly irreconcilable foes, but here is some definitive refutation. Defensetech.org reports that the USS Enterprise had some French Dassault Rafales over to visit in the Mediterranean recently.

Chris Walker is Ignorant

If you want to lecture the French on “economic reform”, it pays to have some knowledge of French economic history. If you insist on doing so despite knowing nothing, “Big Mouth Strikes Again” is not a good headline. Of course, it could be some downtrodden sub-editor’s revenge.

Anyway, Chris Walker writes in today’s Independent that Nicolas Sarkozy is “committed to privatisation, and many of the Mitterand legacy stakes are to be addressed, such as Renault, Safran, EDF, and Air France”. Renault was nationalised by Charles de Gaulle in 1945, as punishment for allegedly collaborating with the German occupier. This is not a legacy of François Mitterand, at least not one he’d admit to. EDF is also a creation of De Gaulle, or more importantly the technocrats who ran it and the Communist minister Marcel Paul. It is hard to find an argument that cheap power is a net loss for French industry. Air France has been semi-nationalised as long as it has existed.

Walker also repeats the content-free mantra that “a Thatcherite-style purge and return to free markets has not happened in France in the 25 years since” Mitterand – well, something. Mitterand came to power in 1981, 26 years ago, swung around to the franc fort in 1983, 24 years ago, went into cohabitation in 1986 with the Right, who forced him to privatise many of his nationalisations, won the Presidency again in 1988, won back the National Assembly…but on the way, French heavy industry went through a pretty grinding restructuring process, with tens of thousands of jobs lost. The whole coal industry was shut down. The French also invested heavily in the remaining big industries, which is why they can build trains and space rockets and mobile phone networks and we can’t.

Walker demonstrably knows nothing about France. However, he is an expert.

Fertility in Europe

According to the Economist last week “Reports of Europe’s death are somewhat exaggerated“. I can only whole-heartedly agree. I think though, it only fair to add, that reports of Europe’s impending old age are almost certainly not, indeed generally it might be felt that the significance of this phenomenon were rather underestimated, than overstated.

Let me explain.

As the Economist article itself points out, here in Europe a good deal more attention has been being focused on the potential impact of climatic change (which is in and of itself undoubtedly an important topic), whilst, and in contrast, comparatively little coverage is being given to our need to develop a population policy:

though every rich country has a climate-change policy, few have a population one (there are historical reasons for that). And just as everyone whinges about the weather, but does nothing about it, so everyone in Europe complains, but does nothing, about population.

Again I tend to agree. Part of the difficulty comes, I think, from our undoubted tendency to try – as the Economist also notes – to simplify what are undoubtedly complex topics. This simplification processes can in itself produce rather sudden and noticeable shifts in opinion, as we have recently seen in some quarters in the case of climate change. What was previously thought by some to be benign, now is thought to be not quite so benign, and in the process a new global consensus emerges, even if comparatively little seems to have changed in the way of available evidence.

And so it will probably be with demography. In part, if this does turn out to be the case the Economist itself may turn out to be one of the guilty parties, since interesting and useful as this article is, it does most definitely fall into the complacent – things aren’t so bad as was feared – camp.

The article makes 6 main points:

i) “This article will argue that pessimism is no longer justified. It would be too much to say Europe’s population is bouncing back. But its long-term decline is starting to bottom out, and is even rising in a few places.

ii) A long list of US observers – ranging from American observers from Walter Laqueur, an academic, to Mark Steyn, a conservative polemicist – who have been arguing that “Europe is fast becoming a barren, ageing, enfeebled place” are wrong.

iii) That changes in population are not – in and of themselves – either a good or a bad thing in economic terms, since “there is no short-term correlation between population change and wealth” and “Japan and South Korea have even lower fertility than Europe”.

iv) Europe is simply not in decline. “Rather…. it no longer makes sense to talk about Europe as a single demographic unit at all” since “There are two Europes.”

v) Some “very-low-fertility countries can fall into a trap”. (This is a reference to a hypothesis which has been advanced by the Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz and his collaborators at the Vienna Institute of demography, although strangely, even while the Economist author uses adjusted data from the VID for the article, Lutz himself doesn’t appear to warrant a mention. I have posted on this hypothesis extensively both on Afoe and elsewhere, and a list of posts can be found here)

vi) “16 European countries, with a total population of 234m, now have fertility rates of 1.8 or more…..They are rare examples of bucking the trend that, as countries get richer, their birth rates fall. Why? There are no obvious answers.”

Of these (iv) (with qualifications see below) and (v) seem to be arguably very much to the point, (vi) is undoubtedly true, (iii) is highly questionable (in substance, though not in the rather constrained form in which the argument is presented, again see below), (ii) is undoubtedly the case, due to the simplistic way in which the argument is often put, and (i) is really not only deeply questionable, but fall foul of exactly the same kind of oversimplification process which the article’s author would want us to reject from Europe’s US critics. A case of double standards?

Well, let’s take a look at what is actually happening.

In the first place, as the Economist argues (and this is undoubtedly one of the strong points of the article) it is simply not satisfactory to talk about Europe as one single demographic whole. There are several Europe’s, and perhaps not two, but four. The general situation can be rapidly grasped by a quick glance at this map which I have put online here.

In the first place we have those countries – essentially France, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia – where fertility is at, or near, population replacement rate. The population path here, if you add in a certain quantity of immigration which the comparatively strong economic dynamic of these countries naturally attracts, would certainly seem to be pretty sustainable, and at least a lot more sustainable than in many other countries. As noted above these countries vary considerably in their welfare and tax systems, so it is hard to identify any specific feature which has contributed to their relative stability. This being said, that isn’t the end of the problem, unfortunately, since demographic processes are not only about fertility, they are also about life expectancy, and increases in the latter, which seem to form part of what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently referred to as an ongoing demographic transition, a transition which is associated with rising population median ages and which is destined, with or without fertility-related problems, to place growing pressure on the health and pensions systems of all OECD countries.

In the second place, and at, as it were, the opposite extreme, we have the former member States of the Eastern Bloc. I single this group out as a special category since they are arguably still operating under the weight of what could well be termed an “asymmetric demographic shock” since their fertility generally plummeted following the coming down of the Berlin Wall. In addition, prior to the coming down of the wall, the mean age at first birth of mothers was significantly below that which could be found in Western Europe (see this map here for an at a glance appreciation) and below ages which are now considered to be the norm for developed societies with services-oriented economies. As a result these countries face what could be called a continuing “birth dearth” as mean first-birth ages move steadily upwards over – and probably over a good number of years to come – as women systematically put off having children to ever-higher ages.

This postponement process can lead many astray into thinking that the impact the process has on Total Fertility Rates (TFRs) is benign, since eventually TFRs may well recover somewhat (if there is not a trap, again see below), and although this debate gets incredibly technical involving comparisons of Completed Cohort Fertility Rates and TFRs, and the study of an issue which has become known as Quantum vs Tempo, one of the obvious impacts is easy enough to understand: with each passing generation the size of the cohort base from which children can be born is reduced, and substantially so – as a result of the missing births. The structural damage which this does to the shape of the population pyramid is known as the negative momentum effect, and this is one of the mechanisms which has been identified as a factor in any possible low-fertility trap.

In the third place we have the ‘Latin’ cultures of Southern Europe – Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece – where, by and large, significant birth postponement has already taken place (Portugal is something of an outlier here), but where fertility still stubbornly sticks near to the lowest-low TFR 1.3 zone. I think entering the specifics of these countries is going to have to remain beyond the scope of the present post, but my feeling is that Portugal and Italy are much more stuck in the fly-trap than Greece and Spain are (this remains outside my present scope since the explanation of why I think this is the case rests on a development of the economic dynamics of the trap which Claus Vistesen and I are currently working on, which I briefly outline here, and which I sort of spell out in the case of Italy here. In a nutshell, it depends on whether – as a population – you are still young enough to get a housing boom or not).

Fourthly and lastly we have the case of the German speaking countries, namely Germany and Austria (and a part of Switzerland). The German case is by now reasonably well known. Aggregate fertility was, of course, negatively affected by the fertility “crash” in the former DDR, but as the graph appearing in the middle of this post – and which compares the two constituents independently – reveals, fertility in the West is low in its own right, and has been so for a very long time now.

As the Economist notes:

Germany not only has low fertility now, but has had for more than a generation. This suggests that “exceptionally” low rates can persist for decades. Admittedly, points out Michael Teitelbaum of the Sloan School in New York, Germany may simply be odd demographically.

Now while the German fertility pattern is decidedly odd, perhaps one of the oddest of odd features in the recent childbirth patterns there is omitted from mention in the article, namely the relatively higher numbers of women in German-speaking cultures who remain childless (see this chart where you can see the very rapid and significant rise in childlessness – up towards the 25% mark – among German women since the 1950 cohort) and indeed the proportions of women in these cultures who have considered it normal not to have a child. As can be seen in this chart, in answer to the question asked of women in the 2002 Eurobarometer survey about what their “ideal” number of children would be some 16.6% (in the 18-34 age group) declared “none” to be their ideal number of children in Germany and 12.6% in Austria.

These results do tend to give credence to the idea that some part of the low fertility in Germany is structurally different from low fertility in other members of the “lowest-low” group, in that a more significant part of the childlessness may be due to a free and voluntary decision rather than a result of biological infertility produced by excessive postponement.

But high levels of childlessness are not the only significant characteristic of low fertility in Germany, as can be seen from a glance at this chart, which compares the parity composition of childbirth (ie numbers of children) in six EU countries – Italy, Federal Republic of Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland and France – for the 1935 cohort. If we make a direct comparison between Germany and France we can see that not only does Germany have more women who remain childless, of those who have children, a far lower percentage were having third and fourth children.

If we then take a look at the time-series chart for the percentages of children born out of wedlock to mothers in a number of EU countries which I have at the bottom of this post, we can see that in the case of Germany it is noticeable that the percentage of children born out of wedlock remained low in comparison with the UK, Sweden and France right though the second half of the last century, and that the level had stabilized by the 1990s (at around one-sixth of the birth total): this is an interesting result since marriage and the family are specifically protected by the German Constitution and since we have seen how since unification the number of such births has been halved in the east, where “illegitimacy” was previously massive.

So we may well have a rather perverse situation here, whereby “family” (as opposed to child oriented) policy specifically targeted married couples, and – at least in terms of tax concessions – favoured the father rather than the mum, with the result that – given the significant social transformations which were taking place in family types during the period in question – less children where born. Such at any rate is the opinion of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research demographer Jan M. Hoem, as argued in this paper (PDF).

So now lets go to point (iii) in my list from the Economist, namely the idea that population change is economic growth neutral. I would say that this was perhaps the most controversial idea in the whole article. The key point to note here I think, is that it is not population SIZE that matters, but population age structure. Changes in age structure effectively produce – as was mentioned in the context of Ben Bernanke and the Demographic Transition earlier – shifts in median ages, and these shifts in median ages do seem to have significant economic consequences. Basically, if we look – yes, actually look – at those societies whose median age has reached the highest level – around 43 – so far – Germany, Japan, and Italy – we can note straight off that each of these has been experiencing economic problems in recent years which to some extent break away from the traditional pattern. I do not wish to go into this in any great detail here (that will be, I think, another post), but basically it could be argued that these three countries all tend to be suffering from congenitally weak domestic consumer demand, and as a result tend to depend on export lead growth for increases in GDP (increases which in the case of Italy remain exceedingly small, due to the inability to meet the export-lead growth challenge).

I have recently gone into all this in some considerable depth in the German case (and here) so I will simply refer the interested reader to this line of argument. But this kind of economic problem will undoubtedly feed-back into the fertility trap problem (if one exists), and in particular by maintaining downward pressure on the disposable income available to young people, both via the tax squeeze that ageing and the associated higher elderly dependency ratios produces (viz, the 3% VAT rise in Germany) and the downward pressure on wages which is being systematic and relentless in both Germany (see this remarkable Q1 2007 wage data from Eurostat, just 0.1% growth in wage costs y-o-y after the boom year of 2006) and Japan (where again wages continue to fall, and here).

So, in summing up, what can we now make of the Economist’s claims that “pessimism is no longer justified” and that “Europe’s population is bouncing back”? Well, I would say that pessimism is rarely justified, since it tends to produce fatalism. On the other hand realism leads me to want to qualify the Economist’s claims in the following way:

* Europe is only bouncing back in parts, so it is hard to draw any real conclusions, in particular a very large part of Europe still has – as can be seen here – around 70% of its population with TFRs below 1.7, and 1.7 is already significantly below replacement level.

* Demographic changes are not processes which only go to work in the very long term, the short term consequences of changing median ages are already real and present.

* The economic consequences of changing population age structures are not growth neutral, but are real and significant.

* As a consequence of all of this we simply cannot afford to continue to give demographic changes the back seat. Europe needs above all policy – rather than complacency – in the face of these changes, and such policies ought to be just as evident in the minds of our citizens as the recent declarations of good intent about the need to act on climate change.

Président ou Présidente?

The French are still making up their mind [Update – they have made up their mind: Nicolas Sarkozy has been elected President – more soon]. Once again in record numbers – the only official figures released so far estimate the voter turnout at noon at 34,11%, the highest number since 1974, apparently. One winner of the Presidential race is therefore clearly institutional democracy – although burning cars is probably considered a way of political expression by some, not least, Ségolène Royal, who, earlier this week, warned that a Sarkozy victory could lead to violent protests in some Banlieues. While that is certainly not entirely out of the realm of the possible, and Sarkozy’s reaction was appropriately forceful, accusing her of fanning the (possible) flames, I doubt it was a particularly clever move on Royal’s behalf, to end her campaign by scaring voters. Apart from that, she’s probably also lost all votes of those about 3000 policemen who are now spending the evening in the suburbs to preempt any possible social unrest.
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French Presidential Debate Notes

Style is clearly more important than substance in Presidential debates. Unfortunately, after 45 minutes of speaking time for each candidate, I was, quite frankly, very disappointed on both accounts. Neither Ségolène Royal nor Nicolas Sarkozy were able to present coherent arguments of their respective programmes. Instead, they kept constantly interrupting each other, Royal more so than Sarkozy, kept losing discourse threads (sometimes even without being interrupted) in pointless debates about specific figures or jumped from one point to another. Sarkozy may have been a little more concise on the economic parts (taxes, pensions, labour market regulation, welfare) of the debate, but he certainly did not “win” that debate by any stretch of imagination.
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French Presidential debate broadcast online

If the weather in France is even remotely as warm and sunny as it is here in South-West Germany today, I have doubts tonight’s televised debate between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy will be able to get 86% turnout yet again. Still, if you would like to tune in to the debate, but you don’t receive French tv (or even speak French) there are a couple of options available.

ARTE.tv broadcasts the event live in both French and German, while France 24 will offer interactive coverage as well as tv-streams (wmv9, 400 kpbs) in English, French, and Arabic (links via wwitv.com).

French presidential election: brief comments

8:40: Sarko and Ségo in the second round then. Which means two important things. Firstly, someone at work owes me a coffee (I really should have bet for something more pricey). Secondly, the election that had been billed by some pundits as one of the most inpredictible ever has delivered very predictible results indeed: the two candidates that were ahead in the polls since the beginning get through to the runoff; the Bayrou insurgency receded in the late campaign, just like the polls were showing; and all the minor candidates were crushed, with the Communist and Green parties looking DOA now. The only half-surprise is the (relative) crash of the extreme right: but it is a surprise only because many thought Le Pen would get a big result, against what most of the polls were predicting. I sense the always-reviled pollsters will have a field day tonight.

Update by Alex: Libé carried time-series graphs for all the pollsters on Friday, and one of the striking things was that Le Pen had gained no more than 1 per cent or so over the campaign, whichever poll you looked at.

8:50 (Emmanuel) : there’s no denying that Sarkozy is looking good now. Not only is he ahead by a significant margin, but Royal does not have significant reserves of votes to tap into for the second round (the total of all left-wing candidates is around 36%). Much will depend on François Bayrou’s attitude in the next days but even if (a really big “if”) he calls his voters to support Royal, it remains doubtful that they’ll follow him.

9:10 (Emmanuel) : The much-awaited Bayrou is speaking. Begins with that worn-out platitude: “French politics will never be the same”. Big score despite negative media, polls and pundits. Strongly criticizes the two main parties. Hints that “decisions” will be taken in the next days.

9:20 (Emmanuel) : Official CW about Bayrou is that he won’t support Sarkozy and that he can’t support Royal (because UDF MPs clearly need the support of the UMP to be reelected in June). Hence his pox-in-both-your-houses attitude. One striking thing nonetheless: all the left-wing candidates have been falling over themselves to give their support to Royal (even the famously intransigent Laguiller); so far, no candidate has called to vote for Sarkozy.

9:47 (Alex) : Royal making incredibly long, incredibly lacklustre speech. Bayrou was bad enough but this is dire. You wouldn’t think this was one of the highest scores for a Socialist in the first round ever.

9:50 (Emmanuel) : Damn. Alex just wrote exactly what I was thinking. When you hear Segolène speaking, you always wonder how she managed to go that far. Really unispiring stuff.

10:00 (Alex) : Le Pen is gradually sinking with each update of the polls. He’s now below the lowest estimate of his score at the beginning of the campaign. And the Communists have done very badly in places like Ariége..

10:05 (Alex) : Thierry Maillet says it’s 1981 over again. Giscard got 28.3 per cent, Mitterand 25.9, Chirac 18, and Georges Marchais of the PCF 15. 2007==(Giscard:Sarkozy, Mitterand:Royal, Chirac:Bayrou, Marchais:Le Pen)? Perhaps. Maillet points out that many of the voters who left the PCF moved to the FN.

10:14 (Alex)
: It’s worth pointing out that so far, the départements that are reporting are very few, and most are overseas territories. As Libé’s front-page Flash map points out, the masses are yet to engage. Meanwhile, gurks! Eric Besson, the PS national secretary who walked out of Ségoléne Royal’s economic team, has announced that he’s supporting Sarkozy.

10:15 (Tobias) – coverage of international online coverage – the BBC duly notes the high turnout and realizses that “France opts for a left-right battle.” The BBC’s political correspondent Jonathan Marcus also states that

“Whoever finally wins the presidency, … it will mark a change of political generation and perhaps a shift in French international priorities, making this election matter even to those outside France.”

Quite right. The NY Times enlists the help of the AP and also notes the generational change, as well as the gender dynamics in play –

“If the results confirm that, France will get its first president born after World War II after the May 6 final round. If she wins, Royal will become France’s first woman president.”

Wondering about Bayrou’s weak results, the newspaper reminds that one principal motivation for many voters was not to allow the participation of Le Pen in the second round. Germany’s conservative “Die Welt” mentions that Sarkozy’s move to the right paid off in the first round but questions whether it might not have the opposite effect in two weeks, mentioning the importance of the Bayrou vote, the majority of which seems willing to rally behind Royal to avoid Sarkozy – possibly without any official recommendation from the former candidate. Sarkozy will now have to move back to the center, but Die Welt doubts his efforts will be convincing following months of rather divisive campaigning.

For the liberal weekly Die Zeit’s “Blog Tricolore” (in German) Alain-Xavier Wurst” files a report from Royal’s headquarters and notes that the mood is getting better by the minute after they realised that this election will not be a repetition of the last one. He also explains that one winner of the current election wasn’t even on the polls – the telecommunications industry apparently expects as many text messages as after last year’s world cup final, that, for the first time in decades, Jaques Chirac must has voted for someone else – probably Ségolène Royal, and that there are about three million new voters, mostly young people, many of whom live in the Banlieues offended by Monsieur Sarkozy.

It will be very interesting to dissect today’s result in a little more detail. A regional breakdown will be available at the French interior ministry’s site – but at the moment, all results are still empty. Don’t forget it’s a Sunday…

10:15 (Emmanuel): first second-round poll. Sarko 54% – Ségo 46%. As anticipated, it really will be an uphill battle for the left-wing candidate.

10:25 (Alex): Or maybe not. More results are coming in, and the gap is closing – 29.6 vs 27.4, with Le Pen tanking under the 10 per cent mark. PS, Liberation has a regional results map on their front page.

10:50 (Emmanuel): A lot of interesting tidbits in the Ipsos exit poll (pdf). Like, for all the talk about the underwhelming result of Le Pen, the fact that he’s still first in the blue-collar demographic slice (“ouvriers“).

10:59 (Tobias): Nadine Morano explains on arte.tv that Sarkozy wants to convince pro-European voters by explaining that he was the only one who wants to go forward with a “mini-treaty” and avoid a second referendum on the constitution.

11:05 (Emmanuel): France Info radio reporting Sarkozy first in Paris, Seine-Saint-Denis (aka the place where all those cars were burnt in 2005) départements.

11:12 (Tobias): Daniel Cohn-Bendit believes that Bayrou was in the end beaten by the problem that the UDF feels the need/needs to cooperate with Sarkozy’s UMP in the parliamentary elections. That, according to Cohn-Bendit, essentially made Bayrou’s “third way” proposal a lot less credible. Interestingly, he also praises Sarkozy for his ability to pull Le Pen voters into the “normal” parliamentary spectrum.

11:15 (Emmanuel): Another second-round poll, this time from CSA. And another expected result: Sarkozy 53,5% – Royal 46,5%. Among the people who voted for Bayrou it’s: 16% unsure, 45% Royal, 39% Sarkozy.

11:35 (Emmanuel): And the WTF award of the day goes to unknown candidate Gérard Schivardi (dead-last with 0,4% of the vote) who declares: “I’m a happy man. This electoral base will allow me to create a new political party“.

11:55 (Emmanuel): Droite caviar? Sarko gets 73% in his own (posh) town of Neuilly, and 58% in the (posh) 8th arrondissement of Paris. Meanwhile, Royal barely comes out ahead in Bordeaux, a bit of a surprise since this is the town of ex-Prime minister and Sarkozy ally Alain Juppé.

12:05 (Alex): Droite ouvriére. Sarko just sneaks it in the Pas de Calais. Even there, where the biggest city is still Communist-run, the PCF gets only 3.4 per cent.

01:05 (Emmanuel): well, the bottle of wine is empty now and the official results are still not coming, so just a last comment to say that I fully agree with Pascal Riché’s analysis: based on the first round results, Ségolène Royal really has an impossible equation to solve, considering that the total of left-wing votes and one half of Bayrou’s total still left her at something like 45%. Adding to that the fact that Sarkozy is a much better debater than she is, and it’s hard to be very optimistic right now if you’re a left-wing voter (which, I hasten to add, I am). But, as they say, one week is a long time in politics. And she has two. But she better get started now.

Oh, and a warm welcome to our soon-to-be-there 1,000,000th Afoe visitor.

This is what 86% looks like

At the French Consulate-General in London, the election is held in the classrooms of the Lycée Charles de Gaulle next door. There are plenty of lycées named after the general, but this one has a greater connection to him than most – the Free French air force had its headquarters in one of the buildings that now forms part of the school, and it was here in 1940 that suspected collaborators among the French community were dragged in by Andre “Passy” Dewavrin, de Gaulle’s intelligence chief.

Today, the French of London were queueing around the block, in the sense that each side of a double city block was taken up by queues, even though there were a total of three entrances. Such was the crowd that an ice-cream van was attracted to it, far from a bad idea given the number of children present. The people? Probably a population younger and more middle-class than the French averages, although hardly lacking in diversity.
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French Elections: Ticker

A few minutes to go to the official first results in the first round…

Unofficially, Ipsos puts Ségoléne Royal on 26.5 per cent, Nicolas Sarkozy 27.5 per cent, Jean-Marie Le Pen 17 per cent, and François Bayrou on 16 per cent, with OIivier Besancenot doing best out of the broom wagon candidates. CSA, which has been consistently more favourable to the Socialists, puts Ségo and Sarko level pegging on 26 per cent, and the same results for the others.

However, these figures are being constantly updated at the moment (see Le Temps de Généve). They currently put it this way:

  1. Nicolas Sarkozy (UMP): 29,4 %
  2. Ségolène Royal (PS): 26,2 %
  3. François Bayrou (UDF): 18,6 %
  4. Jean-Marie Le Pen (FN) : 10,8 %

There are also going to be exit polls soon enough. Everyone is clear on one thing, that turnout has been enormous: according to Radio France-Inter, the official figure is 85 per cent, although the unofficial data is going even higher.

Update

First official results (updated at 40% count)

  1. Sarkozy – 30.5 per cent
  2. Royal – 25.2
  3. Bayrou – 18.3
  4. Le Pen – 11.3
  5. Besancenot – 4.6
  6. De Villiers – 2.4
  7. Buffet – 2
  8. Laguillier – 1.5
  9. Voynet – 1.5
  10. Nihous – 1.2
  11. Bové – 1
  12. Schivardi – 0.3

Crash for the far right…and not great for the Communists.

Update by Tobias – Sarkozy gave a conciliatory – or “presidential” – speech at his campaign headquarters, complimenting Mme Royal, thanking the French voters for a result that would allow the choice between, as he put it, two alternative sets of policies. He called for a dignified second leg of the campaign and hoped that it would amount to a true competition of ideas.

Update by Alex – Marie-Georges Buffet says all good communists must come to the aid of the party..the Socialist party. Pity there’s only 2 per cent of them.

Update by Alex – Arlette Laguillier says – for the first time since 1981 and the last time in her career – that her supporters should vote Socialist. De Villiers now ranting about “Européeisme(sic)” being a dead ideology responsible for abortion and euthanasia. Vote Sarko, he finally gets around to saying. Voynet goes Socialist, too, with the mighty weight of her 1.5 per cent. But what will Bayrou do?

Update by Alex – Olivier Besancenot calls on supporters to support the Socialists “at the ballot box and in the streets”. That should be enough to fill the gap… Also, DSK has been out calling for people who didn’t get their preferred candidate but want “renewal” to vote PS. Dominique de Villepin, meanwhile, congratulates Sarko through gritted teeth.

Update by Alex – Bayrou about to speak..whingeing about the pollsters..still blathering..and eventually says nothing..

Update by Alex – Le Pen says his supporters should abstain “for the moment” (eh?) but he will give further advice on the 1st of May. “Le Front National n’est pas a vendre!” But who would buy it?

RFI reports that 20 départements have completed counting, but the Ile-de-France (the populous metropolitan area around Paris) is still counting, with the large suburban départements like Seine-Saint Denis and Val-de-Marne still to come.

Update by Alex – Corréze, Chirac’s home turf, goes socialist by a distance, while the Communists crash badly in their old stronghold of Ariége.