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Dec. 3, 2008

Steven Emerson: Yes, the terrorists are winning

Don Terry: Lifetime, no see

Dec. 2, 2008

Melanie Phillips: The Mumbai atrocity is a wake-up call for a frighteningly unprepared world

Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report: Strategic Motivations for the Mumbai Attack

Dec. 1, 2008

Max Freidlander, as told to Jacklyn C. Wadler: India Inkings

Mark Steyn: Whodunit!?

Nov. 28, 2008

Rabbi Ahron Rapps: An evil seed that didn't have to be

Melanie Phillips: Carpe diem --- or can we all relax now?

Nov. 26, 2008

Michael Feldberg: Meet the Orthodox Jew who laid groundwork for scientific development of ordnance that undergirds America's current world leadership

Andrea Simantov: Shades of life

Nov. 25, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Getting Emotional For Influence

The Kosher Gourmet by Ethel G. Hofman : Thanksiving feast!

Nov. 24, 2008

Rabbi S. Binyomin Ginsberg: 'I just Became a grandchild!'

Barry Rubin: Don't flatter your enemies, protect your friends

Nov. 21, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Money matters?

Caroline B. Glick: Civilization walks the plank

Nov. 20, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: Bronfman's blindness

The Kosher Gourmet By Linda Gassenheimer: Portobellos add a hearty flavor to pasta with pesto

Nov, 19, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Spread the wealth? Jewish tradition and income equality

Elliot B. Gertel: 'Mad Men': Tackling prejudices or reinforcing them?

Nov, 18, 2008

Dr. Debby Schwarz Hirschhorn: The End of the Age of Reason

Jonathan Tobin: Does Barack + Bibi = Disaster?

Nov, 17, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The End of the Age of Reason

Diana West: Gulling Americans into making terror legit?

Nov, 14, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: The Power of Spiritual Inertia

Caroline B. Glick: The perils ahead

Nov, 13, 2008

Stratfor Intelligence Briefing: How Bush and Obama together could change the Middle East dynamic

The Kosher Gourmet by JeanMarie Brownson: Sweet and savory, crispy and meltingly tender bestilla

Nov, 12, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Tyrannical Co-Workers

Michael Doyle: High Court to consider today donated monuments that may have religious messages in public parks

Nov, 11, 2008

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Will Obama stop government officials considering institutionalizing financial jihad?

Jonathan Tobin: They Will Decide Their Own Fate

Nov, 10, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: $8 billion, modern-day Tower of Babel being built?

Barry Rubin: A letter to the president-elect from a Middle East realist

Nov, 7, 2008

Rabbi Francis Nataf: Of Children and Immortality

Caroline B. Glick: Livni's Obama strategy

Nov, 6, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: How I tricked a classroom of apathetic students into grasping the fallacy of moral relativism

The Kosher Gourmet By Gina Kim: Tips for making the perfect soup --- includes recipes

Nov, 5, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist By Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Destitute Debtors

Bruce Weinstein: 'Religulos': Bad title,even worse movie

Nov, 4, 2008

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Treasury Dept. submits to Shariah law

Frida Ghitis: A surprise for Obama in the Middle East

Nov, 3, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: Who says Jews are Smart?

Jonathan Tobin: Was He Wrong About Everything?

March 22, 2007

J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)

Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review May 8, 2007 / 20 Iyar, 5767

How Sarkozy won France: Anatomy of a political upset

By Michael Barone


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Nicolas Sarkozy has been elected president of France by a 53 to 47 percent margin over Segolénè Royal. Here are the department-by-department results (just double-click on the map to get the election figures). To analyze these figures, I aggregated the department results by the following official regions. Here are the total votes for Sarkozy and Royal and the total vote, followed by the percentage for Sarkozy (you can get the percentage for Royal by subtracting this from 100). Contrary to my usual practice, I have used tenths of a percentage, because so many of these percentages come at or near .5 percent. I've used plus or minus signs to indicate how you should round off the .5s if you want to. Then I've indicated the popular vote margin for (or, with a minus sign, against) Sarkozy in each region.

France 18,799,721 16,634,269 35,433,990 53.1 2,165,452
Île-de-France 2,885,783 2,612,047 5,497,830 52.5- 272,736
Picardie 582,668 487,544 1,070,212 54.4 95,144
Nord-Pas de Calais 1,131,881 1,117,973 2,249,854 50.3 13,908
Haute-Normandie 543,483 492,172 1,035,655 52.5- 51,311
Basse-Normandie 476,146 402,233 878,379 54.2 73,913
Bretagne 921,256 1,023,056 1,944,312 47.4 -101,800
Champagne-Ardenne 429,686 304,442 734,128 58.5+ 125,244
Lorraine 715,233 593,561 1,308,791 54.6 121,672
Alsace 641,319 337,780 979,099 65.5+ 303,539
Franche-Comte 371,165 297,492 668,657 55.5+ 73,673
Bourgogne 515,886 434,440 950,326 54.3 81,446
Auvergne 405,244 415,695 820,939 49.4 -10,451
Limousin 207,618 249,400 457,018 45.4 - 41,782
Poitou-Charente 516,518 542,644 1,059,162 48.8 - 26,126
Aquitaine 909,768 971,805 1,881,573 48.4 - 62,037
Midi-Pyrenees 787,407 898,004 1,685,411 46.7 -110,597
Languedoc-Roussillion 809,916 687,107 1,497,023 54.1 122,809
Rhone-Alpes 1,856,226 1,440,521 3,296,747 56.3 415,705
Provence-Côte d'Azur 1,662,122 1,025,758 2,687,880 61.8 636,364
Corse 93,771 62,209 155,980 60.1 31,562
France d'Outre Mer 464,994 583,883 1,048,877 44.3 -118,889

One thing that strikes me here is that Sarkozy is carrying some regions by big margins (big Provence and little Corsica, always right-wing Alsace), while Royal is not carrying any region by a comparable percentage. Her biggest percentages come in the tiny region of Limousin (bigger only than Corsica) and in the overseas vote (where her margin is entirely due to a big vote in the Indian Ocean island of Reunion). Scarcely la France profonde. Or, more to the point, la France industrielle.

Compare this with the overwhelming percentage showings for Tony Blair's New Labour party in the industrial north of England. Yes, it's a different election system, and the results are not quite commensurate. But in County Durham, where Blair's constituency of Sedgfield is located, the results from the 2001 elections (in which Labour was down from 1997; I don't have 2005 at hand, but they weren't much different) were, in popular votes, 61 percent for Labour and 23 percent for Conservatives, a popular vote margin of 191,648 out of 505,194 votes cast. You won't see anything like that in the table above. Not in the industrial Nord-Pas de Calais, where Royal got only 49.7 percent of the vote and actually lost to Sarkozy. Not anywhere.

Maybe there's a lesson here. Blair's New Labour by 2001 stood for economic growth. The industrial heartlands, though they may have wanted more in the way of welfare protections and government subventions, responded handsomely. Royal's Socialism in 2007 stood for more taxes and more government spending. The industrial belt did not respond. Seine-St. Denis, the immigrant-packed department just north of Paris (you pass through it on your way from Charles de Gaulle Airport to Paris) voted only 56 to 44 percent for Royal. That's a long way from 61 to 23 percent (which if there were in the British system a runoff would have been a significantly bigger margin for Labour).

Here's another way of looking at it. The French have been divided, pretty evenly, between left and right, going back to the 19th century. The big division then was between a secular left embodied in the small town by the local state schoolmaster and the religious right embodied in the small town by the local Catholic priest. The French typically sent their sons to the state school, their daughters to the Catholic school. The secular left tended to win most of the time in the Third Republic from 1870 to 1940, when only men could vote; the regime was one set up for the convenience of men, with the Church disfavored or even declared illegal (you didn't have to accompany your wife or daughters to church on Sunday), with prostitution legalized and public pissoirs scattered generously around cities and towns. When women got the vote after World War II, French politics shifted to the right. But the regional differences persisted (the left impulse of the department of Nievre, for example, which Francois Mitterrand made his local base). And most of the country was pretty close to evenly divided, just as it was and is pretty evenly divided between men and women. (Actually, there was a preponderance of women after World War I, since so many men were killed in the war, but it didn't matter, because women couldn't vote.) The historic patterns of left and right support show up, mostly, in this map.

But not all of France is close to evenly divided.

Take a look at the percentages for Sarkozy in the departments across France. What you see is that most were pretty evenly divided, with most registering somewhere between 45 and 55 percent for Sarkozy. What's significant, then, is where one candidate or another runs ahead of this percentage. And there there is a huge imbalance.

Where does Royal run ahead of 55 percent? By my count, in only five departments. In Seine-St. Denis, as mentioned. But Sarkozy wins 52 percent in metro Paris (Île-de-France). In Côtes d'Amor in Brittany. In Haute Vienne in Limousin–pretty petites patates. In Hautes-Pyrenees and Ariege in the deep south.

Sarkozy, in contrast, runs over 55 percent in 34 departments. In Yvelines and Hauts-de-Seines, the affluent suburbs west of Paris, and Seine-et-Marne, east of Paris. In all but one of the eight departments in a ring around the Île-de-France region—the exurbs as we might say. In Orne in rural Normandy, in three of four departments in Champagne, in two of four in Lorraine, two of four in Burgundy, two of four in Franche Comte and, with nearly two thirds, in the two departments in Alsace. Throw in another tiny couple of departments in central France (Cantal and Lozere), hardly worth the looking at, and then you come to what's very much looking at: the departments containing Lyon and Marseille, three departments right around Geneva, Switzerland, Pyrenees-Orientale down on the Spanish Mediterranean border, and then Provence and the Riviera: Gard east of the Rhone and Vaucluse on the west, and then, east of Marseille on the Mediterranean coast, Var, where Sarkozy got 66 percent of the vote and Alpes-Maritimes, where he got 68 percent. Add in the two Corsica departments and you have 34.

What do these places have in common? I'm not sure I entirely know. But, No. 1, most of them are pretty affluent–and probably don't like being taxed to death. No. 2, some at least have had high immigration and don't cotton to the idea that Muslim immigrants should be subsidized by taxpayers so that they have time to plan and carry out car-burnings and Jew-beatings and train-bombings. Sarkozy is being treated in fashionable leftist quarters as some kind of fascist because he doesn't believe these things are desirable and that the people who do them are scum (racaille). Most French voters, it seems, happily, know better. Vive la France.

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