While Nicolas Sarkozy still dominates the electoral scene,Ségolène Royal is dipping in the polls, François Bayrou rising. The reason Royal is sinking is clear: her recent comments on France’s nuclear submarines and on Quebec which follow hard on an early confusion in her camp as people close to her put out conflicting messages. The internet, having created her image, has now caused some serious dents in it. The candidate who pushed for total transparency has found out the hard way what that means, with videos of policy meetings showing her making statements which she admits she doesn’t want most people to hear, or telephone conversations in which jokey asides become headline news. Although the ethics are debatable, these off the record statements show the gap between what Mme Royal says and what she does, and that disappoints the undecided. On a side issue, the French public who, for years, have pooh-poohed the British gutter press for its intrusion into the private lives of politicians, now find they too love that kind of thing.
The reason Sarkozy remains at around 32% of the polls is perhaps more surprising, since I hear a lot of people saying they don’t trust him, he’s too aggressive or he has no caring side. But this weekend’s poll shows that, regardless of whether or not they will vote for him, 57% think his campaign is more “solid” (against 25% for Royal), 52% say it’s more “precise” and 45% say it is more “credible”. But on issues he doesn’t do as well: 51% of those asked say that Royal inspires more confidence on the environment, against 35% for Sarkozy.

When asked which issues should be made priority during the campaign, the most urgent are felt to be the fight against unemployment (68%), health-care and education. The last two have been almost totally ignored by the candidates. Issues such as immigration and tax, which have been given a lot of coverage, are only rated priority by around 20%, similar to foreign policy and the construction of Europe. But anyway, none of the issues except security are being dealt with satisfactorily. In other words a majority of French people, while perhaps amused by the tittle-tattle, are dissatisfied with the campaigns so far because their preoccupations are not being addressed well. That dissatisfaction with the main candidates pushes more people to agree with the one who has said for years that those in power are a waste of space, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Which beings me back to François Bayrou: he can only make headway in the polls as long as Le Pen is not seen as a threat. If Le Pen starts rising again, Bayrou’s support will fall off, as voters try to prevent the leader of the Front national getting through to the second round. So Bayrou’s apparent popularity has little to do with his policies, but more to do with Royal’s current decline and Le Pen’s perhaps temporary pause.
Or are the dissatisfied voters flirting with the Communist party? That would really be a surprise. As a journalist on Le Monde has noticed, if you go to the Daily Motion site and write presidentielles in the search window, you find that the 8 most popular videos on that subject, some with over half a million viewings, are interviews with the communist candidate, Marie-George Buffet. Worth noting too that the video I mentioned above, showing Royal at a policy meeting, has been screened 647,136 times in 2 months, while one about Sarkozy has been watched 1,418,019 times in seven months, which again shows how active the internet is, and the effectiveness of viral communication (trendy phrase meaning word-of-mouth).

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