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ON ALL THINGS FRENCH. Or, rather, some comments on the American media coverage of the French presidential elections. The conservative candidate (though a European type of a conservative), Nicolas Sarkozy, won with 53.1 percent of the vote, leaving the Socialist candidate Segolene Royal with 46.9 percent. What does this mean?
The short answer seems to be that the French voted largely on their economic concerns. Jeremi Suri on Huffington Post has decided that Mr. Sarkozy's victory means the end of socialism in Europe. Some of Mr. Suri's commenters set him right on that score. But it isn't unusual to read more into election results than they deserve. Remember how we were going to have a permanent Republican majority in Congress?
Talking about reading too much into election results, this from the New York Times deserves a correction, too:
Ms. Royal had repeatedly appealed to the women of France to vote for her in a show of female solidarity. But Mr. Sarkozy, a conservative who made his reputation as a hard-line minister of the interior, got the majority of the women's vote, according to Ipsos, an international polling company ...Why is this the most surprising development? The argument appears to be that Ms. Royal failed in her appeals to the women of France. But are women supposed to vote on gender alone? Do men do that? And in any case the success of that strategy could only be measured if we had the numbers of women voting for someone just like Ms. Royal except for being male. Suppose, for instance, that the imaginary Mr. Royal would have garnered only 40 percent of the votes. It could then be argued that women's votes helped Ms. Royal.In the most surprising development, 52 percent of female voters cast their ballots for Mr. Sarkozy, compared with 48 percent for Ms. Royal.[emphasis added]
--J. Goodrich
