French adopt Obama-style campaign
Presidential vote puts socialist candidate’s volunteer network to the test
PARIS — Arthur Muller, Vincent Pons and Guillaume Liegey, young Frenchmen who met in Cambridge, Mass., at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and MIT, are working hard to get out the vote, American-style, for the Socialist challenger for the French presidency, Francois Hollande.
For the past few months, they have been working to recruit and train 70,000 volunteers to knock on almost 3.5 million doors. Having witnessed the successful campaign of President Barack Obama, they are back in France, using American models of canvassing to get left-leaning voters who would normally abstain to instead cast ballots. Their work, said Liegey, 31, is concentrated in the banlieues, poorer suburbs heavily populated with ethnic minorities, where alienation and abstention are high.
Their efforts are being put to the test today, as France votes in the first round of the presidential election, choosing among 10 candidates. President Nicolas Sarkozy is fighting hard for re-election against what seem to be steep odds, since every poll shows him losing to Hollande in the second round May 6, when the top two finishers in the first round compete.
For today’s first round, opinion polls suggest Sarkozy and Hollande are running close to each other, with the rightist National Front leader Marine Le Pen and the leftist politician Jean-luc Melenchon fighting for third place. A centrist, Francois Bayrou, appears to be headed for fifth place.
But the polls also show that there are significant numbers of undecided voters among the 43.2 million registered, and that 10 percent to 25 percent of all voters have said they would abstain. All parties are trying to get out the vote, but the Socialists are trying new techniques, at least for France.
“When we saw what Obama had done, the very systematic way of door-todoor campaigning and the way he used the Internet to coordinate volunteers, we thought, ‘How can we do that in France?’” said Pons, 28. They did a pilot project in 2010 and then made their pitch to the Socialist Party and were hired by the head of the Web campaign, Vincent Feltesse, taking leave from their regular jobs as business consultants. They hope to bring Hollande close to half a million new votes, as much as 1 percent of the electorate.
Most polls have margins of error of about 3 percentage points, and in the past they have underestimated the actual vote for the National Front and, in 2007, for Sarkozy. Polling is difficult with 10 candidates, but the polls agree that the race in the first round is tight.
The two main candidates are already thinking ahead to the second round. Sarkozy is hoping to come in first today, to get new momentum for the next two weeks. The traditional French understanding is that in the first round, people vote with their hearts, and in the second round, with their heads.
Those who voted for the eliminated candidates will have to decide between the top two, and Sarkozy is eager to turn the second round into a referendum, not on himself, but on the character, competence and program of Hollande.
On Friday, in a last set of interviews, Sarkozy apologized again for mistakes of behavior and symbolism early in his term, attending flashy parties with rich friends and doing things some considered undignified, such as swearing at hecklers and jogging in public. “Perhaps the mistake I made at the start of my mandate is not understanding the symbolic dimension of the president’s role and not being solemn enough in my acts,” he told RTL radio. “A mistake for which I would like to apologize or explain myself and which I will not make again,” he said. “Now, I know the job.”
Sarkozy has also said it is not necessary to change the president, because the president himself has changed. But the French are unconvinced, and more than half of those who say they will vote for Hollande in the second round say they will do so to be rid of Sarkozy.
Even the pro-sarkozy newspaper Le Figaro said Friday that “confidence has swept into Francois Hollande’s camp” to the extent that “the candidate is having difficulty concealing his optimism.”
Hollande’s campaign chief, Pierre Moscovici, told Le Parisien newspaper that voters have a “powerful and tranquil expectation of change” and will unite the opposition to Sarkozy.
“Hollande will become the candidate of the Socialist Party and of its allies,” he said. “He will be the candidate of the left and of change.”