Yesterday was the final round of the French presidential election. As expected, François Hollande defeated the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, becoming the first Socialist president since Mitterand in the 80s. The general feeling isn't so much that there was massive support for Hollande, but instead that people were simply sick of Sarkozy and in need of a change.
The announcement of the (forecasted) results was pretty comical, as in France it is illegal for media outlets (TV, radio, print, internet, etc.) to release the results before all polling stations have closed at 8pm. As such, the French media are forced to play a game of pretending not to know who the projected winner was, despite the fact the results had been leaked via foreign news outlets, twitter messages, blog posts, etc. hours earlier.
It was particularly funny whenever the TV news programs cut to live shots of the two candidates respective supporters. The commentators basically had to pretend not to know the results even though the moods conveyed by the crowds were dead giveaways as to who had won (e.g., ecstatic Hollande supporters; subdued Sarkozy supporters).
And perhaps the biggest joke of the night was the forced drama around the 8pm countdown to the results announcement, which relied on the manufactured suspense of a bad reality TV program (imagine dramatic music and countdown graphics). How the commentators kept straight faces throughout the broadcast is beyond me, though the €75,000 fine for leaking the results surely played a role.
The best part of the legal anachronism surrounding "premature annunciation" was definitely the length to which average French citizens would go to hint at the results without breaking the spirit of the law (most notably via coded blog posts and twitter messages). Here's the link to an article that I found describing this phenomenon with respect to the first round of the election.
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