Election Diary

Keeping a lid on the results:French authorities are doing everything they can to ensure election result projections do not circulate before the moratorium is lifted at 8pm tomorrow, when the final polling stations close.

Yesterday, the public Opinion Poll Commission said it had received an assurance from the nine main polling agencies that they would not carry out exit polls and would take measures to prevent their projections seeping out early. Similar concerns are raised at every election, but the rise of Twitter and Facebook has made the authorities especially anxious this time around.

Anyone in France who breaks the moratorium can be fined €75,000, and prosecutors have said anyone who breaks the law will be pursued.

Solemn Sarkozy

One of the keys to understanding Nicolas Sarkozy’s low popularity ratings is his behaviour in his first year in office. By celebrating the 2007 election win with millionaire friends in an expensive Paris restaurant, putting his private life constantly on display and being photographed taking a holiday on a rich industrialist’s yacht, Sarkozy showed people a side to his personality that they didn’t like and didn’t forget. His satisfaction ratings hit 30 per cent within 14 months and never recovered.

Yesterday brought a rare public admission from the president of those errors. “Perhaps the mistake I made at the beginning of my term was not understanding the symbolic dimension of the president’s role and not acting with sufficient solemnity,” he said. “It’s a mistake for which I would like to apologise.”

The Chirac question

One of the most galling defections to François Hollande’s camp has been that of former president Jacques Chirac, whose friend and ghostwriter Jean-Luc Barré has said he plans to vote for the socialist rather than his successor and erstwhile protege, Sarkozy.

But will Chirac get to take his revenge on the man who famously didn’t support him for the presidency in 1995? Yesterday it emerged that the former president, who has been ill for a number of months, has been granted permission to vote by proxy and his wife Bernadette has been nominated to drop the ballot paper into the box on his behalf. The only problem is that Bernadette is the sole member of the Chirac family who is supporting Sarkozy by all accounts, and has voiced her support at his campaign rallies. She wouldn’t, would she?

Versatile Victor Hugo

It was the left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon who started it. “I’m going to read you a page from a book,” he began during a speech in early February, before launching into a passage on revolution and tyranny from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.

On Tuesday, Hollande followed suit. “I was re-reading Victor Hugo,” he said, before quoting a speech by Hugo on poverty and injustice. (Hollande had said elsewhere that Les Misérables is his favourite book.)

Not to be outdone, Sarkozy got his chance to invoke Hugo at a rally in Paris last Sunday when he cited a lengthy reflection on work, liberty and respect for heritage.

Hugo’s political malleability is explained by the fact that before he became a left-wing figurehead he was a conservative – leaving an oeuvre that secured him a prime spot on every French speechwriter’s desk.