The latest opinion poll makes interesting reading, confirming that Sarko is the clear front runner but making the second round look very interesting. In the first round Sarko has 31%, back up 4% from last week's decline while both Sego and Bayrou lose a point or 2 to 24% and 22% respectively. Le Pen is solid at 12% and the lefty loony fringe is arounf 5% split between three equally zany choices. However it is the second where things become fun because Bayrou is very definitely the 2nd choice of a large number of people so if Bayrou can make it into the second round he beats either Sego or Sarko quite handsomely. Sarko on the other hand wins in the 2nd round if his opponent is Sego, something that has been the case for months, so he has a strong interest in making sure that the Sego campaign doesn't collapse or implode.
Of course all this assumes that Sarko doesn't have a cunning plan for defeating Bayrou int he second round. Sarko has proven to be a very good political strategist so I would not count that option out and I am certain that his team is working as hard on the Sarko-Bayrou fight as it is on the Sarko-Sego one.
So far I would say that the campaign has been remarkably tedious. Bayrou has provided interest because we already knew what Sarko and Sego were planning on but since his platform is almost a 50:50 mix of the Sego and Sarko ones it doesn't provide much of interest either. I thnk we need some sort of major external event to make things interesting although that may be a bit optimistic. Not even Airbus has managed to make any great difference although I suspect that it was Airbus that helped push Sarko down the last couple of weeks.
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