By Lucie Marie Goulet

Monday, 9th of April 2007
The official campaign has just started. Posters are going to be stuck up next to polling places. The order in which they are placed has been drawn, and funnily enough Olivier Besancenot (far left), is going to be placed first whereas Nicolas Sarkozy (main right party), clear gamblers favourite, is last. The company in charge of sticking the posters up was also on strike until Friday, which really wasn’t surprising considering that it’s probably their best time to get heard.
Each candidate’s media coverage also gets counted. Which I think is really silly since it doesn’t take into account all the articles published on the web. Trends such as the far left get more coverage as a philosophy than socially unacceptable groups like the far right.

Tuesday, 10th of April
Those last 15 days of campaigning are going to be decisive since it is estimated that 42% of the electorate is still undecided. Add to that the fact that the numbers of voters has gone up, especially in some “banlieues”, and that it is hard to predict how they are going to vote.

Wednesday 11th of April
There is a film out today called Le Candidat “the candidate”. Apparently the fact that it’s out in the middle of the campaign is just a coincidence. Anybody who believes that please raise your hand.

Thursday 12th of April
I’ve had a look at facebook today. Pretty much every candidate obviously has an official profile. Bayrou, Sarkozy, Royal, have official profiles. The groups about Le Pen are mainly calling not to vote for him, apart from one described as “For those who believe Jean-Marie Le Pen is a French patriot and that France's future lies in his visionary program.”

Tuesday 17th of April
Sarkozy and Royal are given 50-50 in a poll by CSA if they both go to the second round. Everything is still possible.
I’ve also been surprised by how little the candidates talked about the Virginia Tech shooting. I know the situation is quite different in France, we don’t have the whole arms problem but security has been a major issue since the start of the campaign.
 

Wednesday 18th of April
Valerie Giscard d’Estaing, former French president and founder of the UDF party is supporting Sarkozy over Bayrou. Surprising? Maybe. But no paper is giving it that much coverage. Presidential influence tends to wane after too long out of office…

Thursday 19th of April
Rumour after rumour after rumour. If pretty much everybody agrees that Sarkozy is going to reach the second round, the other candidate to stand on the 6th of May still raises debate. In most cases, predictions are for a Sarkozy-Royal duel (expect pistols and backstabbing).
However, some journalists consider themselves better informed than everybody else (they wouldn’t be journalists otherwise) and announced that a poll conducted by the French Renseignement Generaux (unit of the French police in charge of collecting information for the government) predicts le Pen to reach the second round. Now what’s interesting about this information isn’t so much its verdict, as the fact that it is illegal for the RG to do that anymore. Their motive? There is a very easy link to make: Sarkozy as Ministre de l’Interieur was head of the French Police. It’s just one easy step for readers to think that he took part in the ordering of this poll, and hasn’t fully relinquished his government role. Needless to say the magazine which broke the story and stood by it after denials from the RGs is rather lefty.

Friday 20th of April
Heated debate about whether or not polls should be forbidden from being published and commented on all French media (including internet) between Saturday 21th April midnight and Sunday 22nd of April, 8pm. It’s probably a fair bet to say that by the next campaign, this law will have been changed to take into account modifications in technology.

Saturday 21st of April
The official campaign closed at midnight. Candidates are not allowed to talk anymore, polls can’t be published etc etc. I guess they are happy to get some rest now… Sarkozy went riding in southern France yesterday and ends up on the Financial Times cover with a stupid-looking face, something in between Bush in his Texas ranch and a cowboy. I read the FT coverage of the elections and despite a very good article, I still don’t know for sure who I am going to vote for. Two weeks have past and I’m still undecided, along with 1/3 of French voters. I guess am having  a bit of a McGarry syndrome; “tired of having to choose between the lesser of who cares”.

Sunday 22th of April
Am seriously wondering how you feel when you are running for President and it’s election day. I mean I am only voting and I am really excited. I’ve been trying to find stuff on the net which I haven’t read yet but considering that the media can’t report on polls or on candidates’ programs anymore they talk about a) the sociology of voting and voting day (conclusion, it’s a bit like the World Cup), b) what candidates can expect (i.e. if that one gets less votes than last time he will be a looooser…), c) what candidates do on voting day (read the newspaper, have coffee, impromptu riding session?).

Monday 23th of April
Sarkozy versus Royal!
No last minute surprises and a predictable result. The surprise is the number of people voting. 85% of the voters cast their vote, with some departements even reaching more than 87.5%.

Tuesday 24th of April
Today’s Union pour un Movement Populaire meeting was something of a Stalinist public trial, with a former high advisor to Royal telling to a full theatre how wrong he had been all that time. But then, Merci Dieu, Sarkozy showed him the light (or a promise of a Ministerial title).

Wednesday 25th of April
As expected Bayrou didn’t call to vote for either Royal or Sarkozy. So now question is: who are those people going to vote for? Are they going to go more for the right which could sound logical considering the history behind the UDF party or are they going to go for an “anybody but Sarkozy” attitude?