Austin Bay Blog

Fausta has the initial French election reports. Fausta is updating. Remember, this is round one. The second round is next Sunday, June 17.

The Intl Herald Tribune published a couple of estimates earlier today.

Key graf:

The Union for a Popular Movement obtained 41.3 percent of the vote, according to preliminary estimations by the CSA polling institute, a score that is expected to give the party between 360 and 470 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly after the second round of voting June 17, three pollsters said.

MSNBC and the Financial Times have the same numbers Fausta does:

President Nicolas Sarkozy was on course on Sunday night to win a commanding majority in parliament after the centre-right UMP party won an estimated 46 per cent of the vote in the first-round of France’s general election.

Political analysts forecast the UMP party and its allies were likely to win between 405 and 445 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly in next Sunday’s run-off.

Such an outcome would be a remarkable personal endorsement for Mr Sarkozy, marking the first time in almost 30 years that an outgoing government has been returned to office.

The extreme left and the extreme right got hammered. Good.

Voter turnout is a little over 60 percent. The Financial Times explains the election rules:

A sense that the parliamentary elections were simply the third round of the preceding presidential contest may help to explain why the UMP and its allies and the Socialists both did much better than expected.

The low turnout will reduce the number of outright victories in the first round. To be elected in the initial round, a candidate needs to win not only 50 per cent of the votes cast but also at least 25 per cent of the eligible electorate, a threshold that is harder to reach if turnout is low. In most constituencies, there will be a run-off between all candidates who secured the votes of at least 12.5 per cent of the electorate.

At Deutsche Welle a German “Euro-intellectual” disses Sarko as a “nationalistically-inclined leader.”

A taste of the screed:

Sarkozy has a reputation of being power-hungry and reluctant to listen to advice, and in the past, he has repeatedly played the nationalist trump card. For instance, Sarkozy didn’t exactly endear himself to Germans by bringing up World War II and the Holocaust on a number of occasions during the campaign.

Sarkozy was trying to play on French national pride. At a campaign rally in Marseille, he gleefully pointed out that not all French people supported the Nazi-installed occupation government during World War II. “There were also the heroes of a free France,” Sarkozy crowed, “and the Résistance.”

To underscore that message, he staged his last rally at a symbolic site of the French resistance, the Plateau des Glières, promising, if elected, to make an annual pilgrimage there. But how can an obsession with history help a president who has pledged to lead France into a new era?

Angela Merkel, however, wants stronger Franco-German ties. She expects Sarko to come see her in Berlin. He will.

Gordon Brown knows he has a challenge filling Tony Blair’s shoes. He’s also going to have a hard time keeping up with Nicholas Sarkozy.