"What happened, why Sarkozy?" I asked my neighbour from the adjacent balcony last night at 10pm. We were standing outside looking across Toulouse to Le Merail, the hot spot ghetto of Toulouse, waiting for the cars to spontaneously ignite . 'It's easy, the choice was between Sarkozys' bad idea and Ségolènes' no idea' he said.

Interesting I thought to myself as another fire engines siren dopplered its way across town. [...]

So the ladies at my wife's gym were wrong. To a woman, they were agreed that Nicolas Sarkozy had shown himself to be arrogant, pig-headed and flaky. Ségolène Royal had won the debate.

But no. Look at today's final polls before campaigning officially ends and they show that if there has been any movement in public opinion since Wednesday night's grand televised duel, it has been in Sarkozy's favour.

"Step right up, step right up." Billed as the heavyweight show down for this pre-election debate, this had everything - accepted heavy weight, bruisers favourite, an outsider with a south paw jab that would knock out an elephant, but out of form,...how would it pan out?

Like 20 million other viewers I strapped myself in and waited for the bell - Sarko's George Foremen verses the incumbent Royal's Muhammad Ali [...]

Last night’s electoral debate had record audiences. This morning I hear ‘Ségo won – she was stronger than we expected – she looked Sarko straight in the eye and knew her stuff’ but I also hear ‘She was arrogant – it was intolerable to have her interrupt almost every sentence M. Sarkozy pronounced – she lost her cool – she is trying to be all things to all people, using [...]

Last 23rd April, following the first round, the battle had only just started, as Frederic Niel wrote in his blog. The 2nd May in the evening, 9 o’clock precisely, we’ll have the final showdown between the two contestants.

The TV debate between Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy is important. France is waiting for it with bated breath. In fact, it has been waiting for quite a long time, since 1995, [...]

Clearly, this presidential election is not like the others. Normally the first round cuts out all the candidates bar two, who face each other in the finals two weeks later.

This time the third candidate, instead of retreating quietly to his cage to lick his wounds in silence, has managed the feat of inviting himself along to the second-round campaign.

Indeed, the two finalists – the right’s Nicolas [...]

If you live on the south eastern coast of blighty you may have experienced a sudden, short off shore breeze last Sunday night at about 9pm. This recent meteorological phenomenon was the result of 60 million French citizens simultaneously gasping with relief when they realised they hadn't waved the keys to the Elysée to an extreme right wing nationalist like Le Pen as they did in 2002; in the process [...]

Months of campaigning, speculations and opinion polls and… the obvious happened! The two big candidates, Segolène Royal and Nicholas Sarkozy, qualified for the second round. In some ways, this is a victory for the pollsters and the media, who predicted this outcome many months ago. However, they failed to predict the two really surprising things about the election results.

After the failure to predict his rise in 2002, no [...]

Eighty-four percent turnout tells us that the French actually care about this election. They have been led to believe, and they probably do, that for once there are real and important choices to be made. In theory, yes. In practice, the questions centre on whether either of the 2nd round candidates have the clout and wherewithal to push an agenda for change, or whether they'd get bogged down in the [...]

So there we have it. The French have voted with their hearts and shown their true colours with 15 percent of the first round votes going to the eccentrics, and now there is a straight left versus right contest. At least, this time, there is a ‘Partie Socialiste’ involved. The lesson of 2002 has been learned (when Josspin was knocked out in the first round and Le Pen gave the [...]