Word: penning
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...preceded by an eerie silence punctuated only by the hiss of thousands drawing a breath in anticipation. But the screaming outside the French Socialist Party headquarters on the Rue Solferino weren't the expressions of horror and despair heard five years earlier, when the right-wing Jean-Marie Le Pen beat then Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin into the runoff against President Jacques Chirac. This time, the Socialist faithful were yelling out of joy and relief that it was their candidate, Segolene Royal, who would be facing off against conservative rival Nicolas Sarkozy in the May 6 runoff...
...were confident, but after the shock of Le Pen sneaking by us into the runoff in 2002, no one could feel safe," admits party member Arnaud Sanchez, 20. That forced many Socialist voters to "hold their nose," as Sanchez puts it, and vote for Chirac to ensure the defeat of the anti-immigration Le Pen. "I was ashamed to go abroad and have to explain to people how someone like Le Pen could get that far - meanwhile, the urgency to deny Le Pen meant France got a default president in Chirac," says Sanchez. "Thank goodness this time it's different...
...performance in his victorious 1981 presidential run, Sarkozy's 31.1% is even more formidable. While the Socialist candidate can count on the backing of most far-left candidates in the runoff, their first-round share added with the Socialists' is only 36.2%. And if much of Jean Marie Le Pen's 10.4% transfer their support to the tough-on-immigration Sarkozy, the outcome of the presidential race will be decided by the 18.5% of voters who backed split-the-difference centrist Francois Bayrou. Bayrou only recently began distancing himself from Sarkozy and the ruling conservatives after having been a close...
...buzz Sunday night on Rue Solferino was that to lure Bayrou voters behind Royal, Socialists would seize on another factor in first-round polling: Le Pen's collapse, which saw his share of the vote almost halved from the tally he scored in 2002. Much of that erosion, analysts say, came as a result of Sarkozy's unabashed efforts to seduce Le Pen voters with hard-line positions on crime, immigration, and dealing with France's troubled suburban housing projects. Socialist supporters believe that by associating Sarkozy with the politics of Le Pen, they can persuade centrist voters to back...
...hard- and extreme-right voters, but he'll pay for that in the second round," predicts Pierre Moscovici, a Socialist Party heavyweight and vice-president of the European Parliament. While mainstream conservatives backing Sarkozy's tax-cutting, market-friendly economic polices may overlook his repeated pledges to help Le Pen voters "out of their ghetto" and into his camp, Moscovici warns that the hard-right lean will repel most people who supported Bayrou. "Sarkozy reminds me of Berlusconi," Moscovici comments. "The Italian right forgave him every excess, the Italian center fled...