Let’s Rub Their Heads For Luck
By Mitch Berg
France looks to be sending a conservative avalanche to their parliament in elections being held today:
Pollster CSA said Sarkozy’s bloc would win 440-470 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly lower house after a second round of voting on June 17. IPSOS Dell pollsters saw the centre-right taking 383-447 seats against 120-170 for the mainstream left.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon, who won his seat outright on Sunday, said voters had given a “beautiful lead” to Sarkozy’s allies, but warned that the job was only half done.
“Everything will really be decided next Sunday. That is why all the French will have to go and vote. Change is underway,” he said in his Sarthe constituency west of Paris.
CSA gave the opposition Socialists, in disarray since May’s third straight loss in presidential elections, just 60-90 seats compared to the 149 seats the party won in 2002 elections.
They have their own version of Lori Sturdevant, too!
Senior Socialists appealed to voters to turn out en masse next week in a bid to stem the conservative “blue tide” that risked submerging the opposition in parliament.
“Come and vote, come for yourself, come for democracy, come for the Republic, come for France, come for social justice and come to help us reconstruct a new left,” urged Socialist Segolene Royal, who remains popular despite losing out to Sarkozy in the May presidential elections.
Maybe we need to start importing conservative politicians from France.
Yeah, yeah yeah, I know, “conservative” has a bit of a different meaning there than here. So what?
June 10th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
From the AP story… It pretty much spells it out…
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070610/D8PM3RM81.html
I’m depressed – I voted for the Socialists purely because the right is going to win,” said Geraldine Gourbe, a 30-year-old philosophy professor, on her way out of a polling station in northern Paris.
“I voted for them to be effective, but I’d rather have voted for the Greens or the Communist Revolutionary League,” she said, concerned that those parties’ candidates stood less of a chance of gaining seats.
June 10th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Exciting, wish it was happening here…does this mean we can go back to calling freedom fries french fries? …and that they’ll stop being such wusses and selling nuclear secrets to Iran?
June 11th, 2007 at 9:12 am
that they’ll stop being such wusses and selling nuclear secrets to Iran?
Remember, with the French, “conservative” means “Nationalist”. DeGaulle was a great conservative Frenchman, but that meant that he considered France, rather than The West, first.
Not that that’d be entirely a bad thing, either, compared with the status quo.