Le Nouveau Président!

So last night, François Hollande was elected president of France! Hollande is from the Partie Socialiste, and he defeated the right-wing incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy. According to the Sud Ouest paper I picked up today (for free at the fac!), Hollande won 51.67% to 48.33%.

Over 80% of voters turned up, but a lot of people weren't excited about either candidate. The Sud Ouest article I read said that 45% of people who responded to a survey said the main reason they voted for Hollande was to avoid another five years of Sarkozy (as opposed to saying it was because they really wished for Hollande to be president), and 7% of people cast a blank ballot. Last week, I asked some of the French students I know at school what they thought, and they said pretty much the same thing, that they weren't too happy with either one and were considering voting blank. (The second round, there's only two candidates on the ballot. France doesn't have write-ins, so you can either vote Hollande or Sarkozy, or submit an empty envelope.)

I did not go to the precinct to watch the voting this time, but I watched with my host-family as they announced the results on TV. France has really strict laws about covering politics on television, so every network had to wait until exactly 8:00pm, when the polls close, to announce it. It was a very serious moment, but I had to laugh at the ridiculous graphic the news channel used. I mean come on! France 2, have you seen what CNN is doing?? They have holograms!

Afterwards, my host-family and I went to a bar a couple blocks away to celebrate. For a bar, there were a surprising number of families with small children there! Mostly, it was just people in the neighborhood talking and celebrating. As the evening went on, there were more and more people singing/shouting old French songs that I didn't understand the lyrics to, except that they were inserting Hollande and Sarkozy's names into them.

Here's a fun fact I learned: A lot of people on the left or far left (which was everyone at the bar celebrating) think Sarkozy is too elitist and arrogant. Apparently, a particular sore point is that he likes to eat at Le Fouquet's, a famous restaurant in Paris that is crazy expensive, on the taxpayer's dollar euro. In French, to make word into a noun, you usually add "-eur" to the end, like "-er" in English. So, read --> reader, lire --> liseur, talk --> talker, parler --> parleur. So "Fouquet's" becomes "Fouqueur".... And French people are pretty familiar with American swear words, so that gets used how you would imagine...

Anyways, Hollande takes office on May 15th! So soon after the elections! It surprised me that there was not a longer transition time, since in the U.S., there's like two months. It was really interesting being in France for the presidential elections, and seeing how different their attitudes about politics and their election system is from ours. I'm interested to see what happens on May 15th! If you want to read more about the election, here's the article in the New York Times.

À bientôt!