Round One - Ding

The first round of French regional elections have shown that President Sarkozy's UMP party sits in second place. The Socialist Party took 29% whereas the UMP took about 25%. The BBC cited issues of low popularity and high unemployment. These are considerable issues impacting the strength of the party. However these issues would not impact the low voter turnout. Only 46% of eligible voters went to the polls which is significantly lower than the previous low of 57% in 1998 and 60% in 2004.

My thought is that if there is greater dissatisfaction with government more people would vote and if more people are unemployed, more people have the chance to vote. However, this does not appear to be the case. I would then pose hypotheses about the declining voter participation. One, though people are dissatisfied, they no longer believe they can affect change, or they are too disgruntled to participate. Two, though people have more flexible schedules from being unemployed, they may have less capacity to get to the polling place.

These conjectures are just mere thoughts to provoke our resident Frenchman to explain this situation--hopefully before the next round of elections. I am also curious whether or not he took the time to vote in this election or whether he left it up to his compatriots to fulfill his civic duty.