France is holding presidential elections on Sunday, in which the centre-right incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, is facing a tough re-election battle against nine candidates, including his main challenger, Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande.
Besides the two favorites, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, radical leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon and centrist Francois Bayrou are among the front-runners.
The presidential vote kicked off on Saturday in France’s overseas territories – islands in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans, where more than 880,000 citizens are eligible to cast ballots.
On the mainland, polling stations will open at 8 am local time (06:00 GMT) and close at 6 pm in most parts of the country, except for major cities, where they will remain open until 8 pm, when the first official results are expected to be released. Some 45 million voters are registered to take part in the polls.
Final public polls before a mandatory media blackout on campaigning from midnight on Friday showed Hollande narrowly ahead of Sarkozy for the first-round vote. If none of the candidates wins 50% of the vote, there will be a run-off on May 6, which Hollande is expected to win.
A graduate of the prestigious National School of Administration [ENA], Hollande has never held a national government office. He has been a member of the National Assembly since the late 1980s.
Sarkozy’s popularity has dropped since he took office in 2007 as he faced criticism for not delivering on his promises of cutting government spending, increasing wages and creating more jobs. In contrast, Holland has promised to create tens of thousands of public-sector jobs and raise taxes on the rich to pay for it.
Both candidates have pledged to eliminate France’s 5.2 per cent budget deficit (Sarkozy by 2016 and Holland by 2017) while slightly increasing public spending, and both aim to reduce the country’s foreign debt to 80.2 percent of GDP in 2017.
