Conservative, controversial Sarkozy wins French election

The tough-talking former interior minister beat Socialist Ségolène Royal to take the presidency.

from the May 7, 2007 edition

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PARIS - It's Sarkozy. France turned right – and the country enters a new era.

After 14 days of a rancorous presidential runoff to install a new, internationally untested generation in Elysee Palace, France decisively chose Nicolas Sarkozy – a sharp-witted son of immigrants who compares himself to patriarch Charles De Gaulle and has championed a "rupture" from France's decades-old system of social welfare.

"The French people want change, and I will accept that mandate, but do it in the spirit of unity and fraternity," Mr. Sarkozy said to cheering crowds in Paris Sunday night. "No one will be left behind; all will have the same opportunity ... we will write a new page of history."

Mr. Sarkozy defeated Ségolène Royal, a Socialist and would-be first woman French president, in a huge voter turnout on a cool, clear day. With more than two-thirds of the votes counted Sunday evening, Sarkozy had 53 percent and Ms. Royal 47 percent. Voter turnout was projected to be 85 percent.

Ms. Royal battled hard in the final week of the campaign against what she called the "dangerous" choice of Sarkozy, whose get-tough policies would bring civil strife to France, she said.

The election represents a clear victory for the right – possibly a mandate. France has been in a long, self-described drift, a time of deep frustration with political elites and a perceived national decline. Experts have called it a crossroads election, a choice over whether the political right or left will bring the "change" that voters here have passionately been asking for. Sarkozy is the first mainstream French politician to openly identify himself as a candidate of the right.

"Sarkozy found a new formula," says Nicolas Jabko, a political scientist at Sciences Po university in Paris. "Since the 1970s, French presidents have tried to mobilize the center. But Sarkozy has done it by mobilizing the right, especially the far-right voters of Jean-Marie Le Pen."

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