Overseas French start tense last-round presidential voting

Voting in the deciding round of France’s presidential election started on Saturday on a group of islands off Canada. Mainland France votes Sunday with Socialist challenger François Hollande showing a narrow lead in the polls over incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.

Reuters/Jean-Paul Pelissier

Voting started at midday Saturday in Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, an archipelago in the north Atlantic near Canada. French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Barthélemy, Saint-Martin and French citizens on the American continent will then be able to cast their votes, followed by French territories in the Pacfic and Indian Oceans.

This year’s presidential election is the ninth under the Fifth Republic, founded in 1958.

About 46 million people are registered to vote.

The campaign has seen a record 400 opinion polls published.
 

The early voting, which started in 2007, is designed to prevent overseas voters going to the polls after the result on the mainland is already known.

With Hollande’s lead narrowing in the latest polls, Sarkozy predicted a “razor’s edge” vote on Sunday at his last rally in Sables d’Olonne in western France.

“I think we can still win,” Interior Minister Claude Guéant told RFI on Friday, pointing out that the gap between the candidates has shrunk from three to four points to one and a half.

Hollande told his final rally in the central city of Perigueux that he needed a convincing majority to have “the capacity and the means to act”.

As the weekend’s legal ban on campaigning and poll-publishing started, Hollande took a stroll on the market in his home base of Tulle, in the Corrèze region. Sarkozy told journalists that he would spend Saturday with his wife and daughter.

A son-in-law of former Libyan Prime Minister al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi on Saturday denied reports that his father-in-law had told lawyers that Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign had received donations from Moamer Kadhafi’s regime, confirming reports that have led the president to sue a French website.

Al-Mahmoudi’s lawyers hit back with a claim that their client was indignant at Mahmoud Mohamed Bou Chaala’s statement, claiming that the son-in-law is a supporter of the country’s new government, the anti-Kadhafi Transitional National Council.