Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 6 May 2012

Paris, 8pm French time

Announcement of the result of the French presidential election 2012

STOP PRESS

As predicted back in January by Antigone1984, incumbent rightwing French President Nicolas Sarkozy has lost the presidency to his mildly socialist rival François Hollande following the conclusive round of the presidential ballot today in France.

Final results show that that Hollande won   51.68  per cent of the vote, compared with  48.32 per cent  for Sarkozy, who has been president since the last election in 2007.

The result is a kick in the teeth for both for the German chancellor Angela Merkel, who had snubbed Hollande during the French election campaign, making clear her preference for Sarkozy, and for the German-dominated Eurocratic elite in Brussels, who now face the unravelling of the austerity pact they had so painstakingly cobbled together at the start of this year.

The pact imposes balanced budgets on the 25 European Union countries whose leaders signed up to it. Against the wishes of Germany and Brussels, Hollande has pledged to renegotiate the pact – which has still to be been ratified in most national parliaments –  so as to offset the budgetary restrictions with measures to stimulate growth.

In the view of Antigone1984, measures to stimulate growth will necessarily temper, if not entirely negate, the budgetary restrictions so that – if Hollande is successful in his renegotiations – the EU will end up back in square one in more or less the same situation it was in before the signing of the austerity pact.

In our post on 14 January 2012, “Sarkozy loses French presidential election”, Antigone1984 predicted that Sarkozy would fail to be re-elected.

The day before, on 13 January 2012, credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s downgraded France’s sovereign debt credit rating from the top AAA grade to AA+.

Sarkozy had pinned the credibility of his economic stewardship over the four years of his current mandate on France retaining its AAA rating.

As we said in our post on 14 January 2o12:

“Antigone1984 believes that “Black Friday” 13 January 2012 will be seen as the day when Sarkozy lost the presidency. France will henceforth be regarded in financial markets as a second-tier economy and the concomitant humiliation of this once great economic power will be deeply resented by a French electorate already hard-hit by the economic crisis. Sarkozy is the natural scapegoat. It was on his watch that the downgrade occurred.”

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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