French elections - 3

Exit polls confirm what was said before: M. Hollande, open socialist, is on 27.5 per cent of the vote, while M. Sarkozy, closet socialist, is on 26.6 per cent. Mlle Le Pen, nationalist socialist, is projected to have taken 19.9 per cent of the vote, a considerably better achievement than  her father's in 2002 when he came second to L'Escroc Chirac. The ultra-left Marxist socialist, M. Mélenchon is predicted to get somewhere between 10.5 and 13 per cent, according to a cautious Telegraph piece. Yet again we can see that national socialism is more attractive to voters than the Marxist kind. The centrist only non-socialist, M. Bayrou is estimated to have got between 8.7 and 10 per cent. Turn-out is said to be around 80 per cent, lower than in 2007 but considerably higher than in 2002.

Results will be announced later today, at 10 o'clock London time. Whichever way you look at it, François Hollande is leading but not by much. So the fight will be on for the votes garnered by the other candidates, that is not the two leading ones. M. Mélenchon's supporters will, presumably move over to M. Hollande and M. Bayrou's to M. Sarkozy. The other, smaller parties will scatter according to their left-right division. 


What will happen to the substantial number that voted for Mlle Le Pen? Were they all motivated by anti-immigrant rhetoric or were some and, if so, how many, taken by the idea of pulling out of the eurozone that she posited rather coyly from time to time? If the latter, where will those votes go now?