French presidential election campaign

Polls suggest President Nicolas Sarkozy is making up ground on Socialist Party challenger François Hollande ahead of Sunday's final play-off.

The Telegraph gives a blow-by blow account of the French presidential debate between Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Party challenger François Hollande.

Nicolas Sarkozy and rival presidential election candidate François Hollande face off Wednesday evening in the one, high-stakes debate of the campaign.

Nicolas Sarkozy, running from behind before Sunday’s runoff in the French presidential election, veers sharply to the right.

French voters share their views with The Guardian on the presidential election, the candidates, the state of the nation and its future.

Twitter users made the French presidential election a war of green Hungarian wine and red Dutch cheese to thwart laws banning early result predictions.

The camps of France's last remaining two presidential candidates swap insults as the tense last fortnight of campaigning and vote-hunting begins.

European stock markets and the euro tumbled Monday over political uncertainty in two key euro-zone countries, France and the Netherlands.

The final, official scores of the candidates in the first round of the French presidential elections show Socialist Party candidate François Hollande in the lead with 28.63% of votes cast, followed by Nicolas Sarkozy at 27.18%. Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen is in third spot, with 17.9% of votes cast. Radical-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon sits fourth with 11.11%, while centre-right MoDem candidate François Bayrou is in fifth position with 9.13%. Of the remaining five candidates, Green party EELV’s Eva Joly scored 2.31%, Gaullist conservative Nicolas Dupont-Aignan 1.79%, far-left NPA party candidate Philippe Poutou 1.15%, the far-left Lutte Ouvrière party’s Nathalie Arthaud 0.56%, while maverick right Jacques Cheminade of the Solidarité et Progrès party came last with 0.25%. The abstention rate among all registered voters is estimated at 21.53%, compared with 16.23% in the first round of the last presidential elections, in 2007. Mediapart presents a graphic guide to how the major candidates scored region by region, the number of votes cast for each, the power balance between Right and Left, and how the situation compares with previous elections. 

Voter turnout  in the French presidential election first round Sunday was just more than 70% at 5p.m., down on 2007 but much more than in 2002.

The French presidential elections finally begin Sunday, April 22nd, with the first-round eliminatory vote that will see just two candidates qualified for the final knock-out second round on May 6th. But just what are the issues for the French electorate, and what is the background to a poll that foreign observers describe as “one of the most interesting in decades” (CNN), “fascinating and worrisome” (Los Angeles Times), and with “the capacity not only to change the face of politics in France but Europe too” (The Guardian)? To better understand what is at stake and, importantly, as seen from within France, Mediapart presents here a selection of reports from its extensive campaign coverage.