Word: first-round
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...Estaing was the combined appeal of an alliance of Socialists and Communists. All the nation's polling organizations had predicted that the leftists would come out on top in the first of two Sunday rounds of parliamentary elections. Then, with the left having gained momentum from a first-round victory, the second round of balloting, held on March 19, could paralyze Giscard's presidency and gravely damage France's economy...
...lesson of the first round is that the French were not deceived by the demagogic promises with which the left hoped to seduce them," said Premier Raymond Barre, adding prudently that "nothing is lost, but nothing is won yet." Although the leftist momentum had been arrested, there were a number of constituencies where the second-round election would be decided by the narrowest of margins. "If just a few of our supporters decide to go fishing on March 19, we could still lose," declared a centrist campaign aide. To prevent a diminution of the 29 million first-round turnout...
Meanwhile, analysts were sifting through the first-round results for clues of why the outcome, to everybody's surprise, showed the left to be in perilous trouble. Many pointed to the false expectations generated by France's public opinion polls. For more than a year, they had consistently predicted that the leftist coalition plus the ultras would win 50% to 52% of the popular vote as against 45% for the combined center-right parties. But the left coalition actually trailed the center-right...
...first indications that the practitioners of that inexact science had overestimated the left's strength came only minutes after the first-round polls closed. It was obvious that the left's early lead was fast shrinking to invisibility. Computers tallying the vote on television soon made it clear that the leftist upset was caused by an unexpectedly poor showing by the Socialists. Watching TV in a hotel in Burgundy, Socialist Leader François Mitterrand turned to an aide and asked, "Is that really all?" Shortly thereafter, Mitterrand appeared on television to concede that "we expected...
...other side of the barricades, the center-right parties scarcely experienced a first-round landslide. Of the 46.5% total, Chirac's Gaullists won 22.6%, giving the rightists a tiny edge of 1,320 votes over the Socialists as France's leading party. At the same time, Giscard, Chirac's rival in the center-right coalition, scored a modest success as a result of the surprisingly strong 21.5% showing of the Union pour la Démocratie Française a group of three small non-Gaullist parties that the President stitched together last month. The group pulled...