Marine le pen

Monday

Freddy Gray

Why Sarko is worth a punt…

Call me crazy, but I’ve just bet on Nicolas Sarkozy to win the French election. I am not convinced he will — Hollande is rightly the favourite — but at 5/1, Sarko is well worth a punt, I reckon.
 As Gideon Rachman notes, last night’s first round was by no means a disaster for Sarko. In fact, given the extent of anti-Sarko sentiment throughout France, he did remarkably well. In the end, Hollande only beat him by about 1.5 per cent. Yes, no French president has ever failed to win the first round before, and the statistics are all against the incumbent. But that need not stop Sarkozy. He has

Friday

Daniel Korski

Sarko’s renaissance

When David Cameron sits down for lunch with Nicolas Sarkozy today, he is bound to ask his host how the presidential election is going. In response, President Sarkozy is likely to break into one his wide-faced smiles, and begin moving about energetically, as he tends to do when he is excited. Forget the polls that put Francois Hollande ahead in a two-way race. It is too early to tell what people really think and, crucially, it won’t be a two-person race. It is a five-person, two-round election. And so far, Sarkozy is doing very well. Besides Sarkozy and Hollande, four other candidates could make a difference to the outcome: Marine

Monday

Clarissa Tan

For Sarkozy, AAA stands for austerity

Nicolas Sarkozy has served up his second austerity budget in as many months, in a bid to retain France’s AAA credit rating. The president wants to cling on to those three precious letters at all costs. There are elections in six months’ time and he isn’t doing well in the polls. Austerité Part Deux consists of tax increases and spending cuts totalling €7 billion, the government announced today. There will be increases in VAT and levies on large corporations, as well as curbs on increases in welfare spending. This savings programme follows the €11 billion one announced in August. Sarko’s bid to get re-elected in 2012 is in disarray. According

Friday

James Forsyth

Is Strauss-Kahn back in the race for the Élysée?

The news that the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is in danger of collapsing is almost as surprising as the initial news of his arrest on suspicion of raping a chamber maid. There had been a general assumption in New York, Washington and Paris that the case against the former IMF president was clear-cut and that his political ambitions were over. It is unclear how quickly the case will now be resolved. But there is sure to be pressure in France to delay the nominating deadline for the Socialist Primary beyond the 13th of July to allow Strauss-Kahn to run if he is cleared. The question is whether the various revelations

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

DSK arrest doesn’t spell success for Sarkozy

Before being arrested in New York for rape, Dominque Strauss-Kahn wasn’t just the Managing Director of the IMF. He was also the frontrunner in next year’s French presidential election. In virtually every poll since last summer, Straus-Kahn had posted big leads: both against his fellow Socialists in the primary and against Nicolas Sarkozy in the general. So you might have thought that the trouble that has befallen DSK would improve Sarkozy’s chances of being re-elected in 2012. Certainly the rape charges make Strauss-Kahn very unlikely to run, and much less likely to win even if he did, but the latest polling suggests it’s not Sarkzoy who benefits at his expense.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Sarkozy’s game

I’m hearing more reports about the rather peculiar behaviour of Nicholas Sarkozy, and how he is playing the Libya campaign thus far. Obama wants to hand over leadership of this mission quick. He was never really into it, but the US Navy was overwhelmingly the best placed to do the first phase of the mission (ie, fire Tomahawks into 20 Libyan targets). The Tomahawk team constituted 11 US ships and submarines, plus one British submarine. Anything other than American leadership would have been a joke. Phase Two is to take out Gaddafi’s surface-to-air missiles as soon as he dares to move them. Obama wants to hand over the baton to