French elections

If you would like to understand how the French election system works, let me tell you what I understand. First you vote for a president (Sarkozy won) who, when in power, is supposed to broadly reflect the political will of the people. That's why he chose from a range of different political parties for his ministers. Separately you vote for the députés (the members of parliament). This is the député stage. The first vote is this Sunday and the next round the following Sunday. If one of the candidates gets more than 50% of the vote then that's it, they're in, but in practice no one ever gets 50%, so the top two go into the second round. We live in the Fifth Circonscription du Gard. Our department of Gard is broken down into 5 areas, with each area voting for one député. If we were able to vote (we can only vote in our local elections, ie. for our mayor) we would have 16 candidates to chose from. Yes - 16. Talk about shades of politics. Amongst them you have the Nazi party, two shades of green, and and least three shades of far left. The motsky trotskies, the trotksy motskies and the ultra socialist, ultra trotsky, trotsky left wing trotsky party. No wonder it's difficult to chose! Anyway, they're predicting a landslide for Sarkozy, and all this might signal a big change in French politics for the foreseeable future. My best guess is that Sarko is going to be around for ten years (two terms). He'd have to screw up big time to lose the next election and at first glance he looks too clever for that.

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And there you were thinking that it couldn't get any worse than 'Fatal Attraction'. Take a look at this.