Exit polls for the first round of the French elections will be released in a little more than an hour. Here are the simple mean of the fifteen polls conducted during the past week:

Sarkozy (Conservative): 28.4%
Royal (Socialist): 24.6%
Bayrou (Centrist): 18.3%
Le Pen (Fascist): 13.8%
Other / Unsure: 14.9%

The top two advance to the second round, which will take place in a couple of weeks. It is the same system that we have for federal elections in Texas, and for all elections in Louisiana. It is a system that I wish we had in Philadelphia, where our next mayor will be decided by whoever wins 30% in the Democratic primary.

Back in 1995, during my junior year abroad in England, I followed the French elections quite closely. I was rotting for Jospin who, after surprisingly winning the first round, ended up narrowly losing to Chirac a couple of weeks later. I have no particular horse in this race, and have no been following it quite as closely this time around. Royal's campaigns against violence on television, combined with her foreign policy weirdness, combine with the fact that I am not on the "far left" anymore to make the socialist party no longer a reflexive choice. At the same time, Bayrou seems to be a triangulating, anti-left wing politician of the sort I regularly attack within the Democratic Party. I mean, check out this quote from Bayrou in the New York Times:

"I am a democrat, I am a Clintonian, I am a man of the 'third way.'"

So, let's just say that I am not exactly sold on either Bayrou or Royal. I would prefer if the second round were Bayrou vs. Royal, but polling does not make that outcome seem like a reasonable possibility. I'll probably just end up rooting for whichever one of those two makes it to the second round against Sarkozy. Of course, if Le Pen sneaks into the second round again, ala 2002, then obviously I will pull for Sarkozy.

Anyway, this is an open thread on the French elections. I'll post exit polls and results when they are available.

Update: Via commenter island empire, current, but incomplete, exit polls from Ipsos show Sarkozy and Royal headed to a run-off:

Sarkozy: 29.4%
Royal: 26.2%
Bayrou: 18.6%
Le Pen: 10.8%

No real surprise. It certainly looks like Royal vs. Sarkozy in the second round. Current polls on that matchup show the race anywhere from a dead-heat to Sarkozy ahead by 7. Funny how Bayrou, who polled very well in the second round (comfortably ahead of everyone), doesn't have enough hard-core supporters to even make the second round. Ah, the shortcoming of neo-liberal politicians everywhere: comfortable, compromise choices that no one really likes. Also, the 86% turnout is stunning--higher than any other large democracy.

Update 2: Final exit polls:

Sarkozy: 30.0%
Royal: 25.2%
Bayrou: 18.3%
Le Pen: 11.5%
Eight others: 14.0%

So, unless something truly shocking happens, it will be Sarkozy vs. Royal in the second round. Sarkozy will start as the slight favorite.

Final update: More great info from commenter island empire. Based on all four major exit polls, the French media seems to have all but declared it Sarkozy vs. Royal in the second round (see Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Liberation). The big story seems to be the huge turnout.

As a side note, I am surprised at how easily I find it to read articles about polls and election results in French. I have never taken a single French class in my life, but I think there might be something bordering on a universal political horserace language. I mean, I actually understand these articles (or, at least, I think I understand them).

Thought that corruption on the Right was limited to Americans like Tom DeLay, Bob Taft, Conrad Burns, Curt Weldon, Ernie Fletcher, Charles Taylor, Bob Ney, Jack Abramoff, Bill Frist, Tom Noe, Rick Santorum, David Safavian, John Doolittle, Ralph Reed, Richard Pombo, Jerry Lewis and Denny Hastert? Think again. According to Rebecca Anna Stoil of The Jerusalem Post, Israel's star of the Right, Bibi Netanyahu, is involved in an ethics investigation that could finally spell an end to his reactionary political career.

Opposition leader MK Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) was questioned for hours by the National Fraud Squad Tuesday afternoon under suspicion of accepting gifts illegally, as his political rivals kept their eyes on the investigation of a man who sought to portray his party as the alternative to corrupt politics.

Tuesday's questioning was part of an ongoing National Fraud Squad investigation into Yisrael Katz, the former chairman of the Pedagogic Secretariat at the Education Ministry, who has been accused of using government funds to support his private research institute which he ran while he worked for the ministry.

For a number of months, detectives have been probing allegations that Katz committed both fraud and violation of trust in diverting Education Ministry funds to carrying out political opinion polls at the Institute for Education and Community Research at Bar Ilan University.

In this case, Netanyahu is suspected of receiving opinion polls conducted for him by Katz without compensating Katz for the service. Only after a Channel 10 report revealed in late 2005 that Netanyahu had been receiving the polling data, he paid the bill - tens of thousands of shekels - to Katz. It remains unclear if Netanyahu knew that the studies were allegedly financed through the government funds.

With Israel seemingly entering a new phase of engagement with the Palestinians, the center-right/center-left coalition headed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Kadima Party is in a particularly tenuous situation. Opinion in the country after the conflict with Hizbollah is trending more hawkish rather than less, and a recently-released Angus-Reid poll indicates that a right wing Likud Party headed by Netanyahu (who has been toning up the rhetoric when it comes to Iran) would win a rather sizable mandate from voters, garnering an estimated 29 seats, followed by Kadima (center-right) at 18 seats, Yisrael Beiteinu (far right) at 14 seats, Labor (center-left) at 12 seats and Shas (ultra-orthodox Sephardic Jews) at 10 seats. In short, Israelis are significantly more conservative in their outlook today than perhaps they have ever been.

But a major corruption scandal focused on Likud, which has prided itself as the clean government alternative for Israelis, could seriously undermine the Party's abilities to triumph in any upcoming election -- particularly if it is their standard-bearer, Benjamin Netanyahu, who the focus of investigators.

Now corruption is not a new issue to Israelis. They have certainly seen their share of scandals before and have, in the past, been willing to overlook similar scandals as broader issues of security come to the fore. That said, if the Netanyahu probe continues and the deescalation proves to hold (with Israel not reentering Gaza and the Palestinians not continuing to fire rockets into Israel), thus helping to refocus the electorate on Kadima's agenda of bringing more stability through withdrawal from Palestinian territories, Olmert might be able to recapture his support among voters and stave off any challenge from the right.

Yes, there are a lot of "ifs" there. But things move very quickly in the region and Israeli voters are more than willing to change their alliances with the coming of new successes or failures. So while Netanyahu and the Israeli Right appear ascendent today, there is yet a very good chance that a coalition of the middle will be able to retain power in the coming months and years and at least try to move the situation between Israel and the Palestinians forward.

In an election with the polls this close, with such great differences between the two candidates, with massive class and cultural differences between the supporters of the two candidates, in a country with a history of rigged elections (though mainly carried about by PRI, the party that finished in third place), something like this was almost bound to happen. From the Guardian: The rallies seem to be getting larger than the figure cited above. Legal challenges loom: These challenges could lead to a Constitutional crisis in Mexico : Now, Lopez Obrador has produced some rather stunning evidence: Whether or not there was fraud, I don't know (how could I know?) However, there is an interesting precedent in this election: Anyone who thinks this is over is not paying attention. Anyone who thinks that whoever eventually becomes President will have an easy time is crazy. This is going to be a long, hot summer in Mexico: The implications of this election are massive. Fasten your seatbelts.

Cross Posted at The Great Society

Over the past week or two I became clued into the election happening in Mexico. The countries politics still live in the shadow of 71 years with a single eminent political party (the PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party), yet the PRI will continue to lose power for the second straight election. Two days after the election ... that is about all that is clear . The two candidates outside the PRI are the rightist Felipe Calderon (of the PAN, National Action Party) and leftist Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (of the PRD, Democratic Revolutionary Party). The race between that has been so bitter and incisive that is has been called the dirtiest election in Mexican history. Not surprising is that Calderon has brought in Texas based political consultant Rob Allyn (of George W. Bush in 2000 fame) to run his day to day operations and advising from none other than Dick Morris. As Dan Lund pointed out in a editorial in the Miami Herald:

Morris is the guy who claims to have written the "campaign book" for Fox in 1999-2000, and is now spreading tail feathers about his role in the Felipe Calderón campaign...

The book is that of a relentless negative campaign, using all forms of media, electronic and informal -- all, at a cost that simply cannot be met by other campaigns. This campaign book has become the choreography of a strange Morris dance that enables the very different factions and interests to hold together and focus on the real enemy, namely Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, came in to the election as one of those most popular figures in Mexican politics. Yet, Calderon has been relentless. He often compared Obrador to Hugo Chavez and even Fidel Castro.

Bumped from the diaries -- Jonathan. Consider this an open thread on the Mexican election, foreign elections in general or Latin American politics.

According to Mexican Newspaper Universal with 80% of the votes recounted AMLO (Lopez Obrador) now leads Calderon 36.69% to 34.67%

I am afraid I can't read Spanish very well so I won't know much else until my Mexican husband gets home- but since this is getting no press as far as I can tell in the American press I thought people might want to know this exciting news!

If any of you know more please add info in the comments.

This is it. The biggest election since November, 2004. You can follow the returns here (if you have a better website, say so). Post your thoughts in the comments.

Update: Here is a better link. With 20% of the vote in, PAN candidate Calderon (right-wing, Clintonista) leads PRD candidate Obrador (left-wing, possibly pseudo populist) 38.91--35.50. The early results heavily favored PAN, and more recent returns have been pro PRD, so the lead might be temporary. Exit polls indicate too close to call. Ten thousand diebold commenters claim fraud instantly.

Update 2: Here is another link. The slow trend toward Lopex Obrador continues. Will it be enough?

The second most important election this year undoubtedly takes place one week from today. Meixco, which is among the top ten nations in the world in terms of population, gross national income, and land area, would be the piece de resistance (pun intended) on the general Latin American trend to the left already witnessed in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru and Venezuela. The election looks close: In Latin America, a wholesale rejection of both neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism appears to be under way (again, pun intended). As more and more governments in Latin America turn to the left, it is becoming possible to envision an entirely different direction for the region, one where, among other things, the United States has significantly less economic influence. That this has taken place under the watch of an administration filled with people determined to create "a new American century," goes to show exactly what the Bush administration has really done to the reputation of America in other counties. That voters are rejecting neo-liberal trade policies that we were all told would lift Latin America out of poverty I think goes to show that those policies did not benefit the majority of people in Latin America after all.

For more information on this election, check out Technorati and Google News.

Bumped from the diaries -- Jonathan

It's Sunday. Time to pray. Parliamentary elections are being held today (and tomorrow) in Italy. The race is extremely tight between Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right-extreme right coalition and former Prime Minister and former EU Commission President Romano Prodi's centre-left-extreme left opposition.

In the last opinion polls ten days ago Prodi was slightly ahead. But, really it's a toss up. Berlusconi is apparently so afraid he could lose that he actually promised to withdraw troops from Iraq by the end of the year.

Links and more info below the fold.