2007 French presidential election
22 April 2007 (first round)
6 May 2007 (second round) | |||||||||||||||||
| Turnout | 83.77% (first round) 12.17 pp 83.97% (second round) 4.26 pp | ||||||||||||||||
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Presidential elections were held in France on 21 and 22 April 2007 to elect the successor to Jacques Chirac as president of France (and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra) for a five-year term. As no candidate received a majority of the vote, a second round was held on 5 and 6 May 2007 between the two leading candidates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal. Sarkozy was elected with 53% of the vote.
Sarkozy and Royal both represented a generational change. Both main candidates were born after World War II, along with the first to have seen adulthood under the Fifth Republic, and the first not to have been in politics under Charles de Gaulle. In addition, Royal was the first woman in France's history to reach the second round in a presidential election.
The election result has been interpreted as an example of center squeeze, a kind of spoiler effect common to the plurality-rule family of voting rules, since Sarkozy, a conservative, and Royal, a socialist, eliminated moderate liberal François Bayrou in the first round, despite polls showing a majority of voters preferred Bayrou in a one-on-one match with either of his opponents.
Sarkozy ran for re-election in 2012, but was defeated by Royal's lifelong partner at the time, François Hollande.