Oh well, it's going to have to be Royal

It gives me no pleasure to say it, but the French should now vote for Royal. It would ruin the strongly pro-Sarkozy Tony Blair's very last days in office, and it would keep France's UN Security Council seat, as well as her formidable military might (including nuclear weapons), out of the hands of a supporter of what, if that supporter won, would become the revivified neoconservative war agenda.

I know that I have previously written that one should no more vote for Royal (or Sarkozy) than for Le Pen. But Le Pen is now out of the race, and not just this time round, but (since he is 78) almost certainly for ever. Sarkozy's economic policies are so neoliberal, and his foreign policies are correspondingly so neoconservative, that no eliminated candidate's supporters have any reason whatever to vote for him, but rather every reason to vote for any other candidate against him, secure in the knowledge that she would owe them if they did and she won.

Specifically, she would owe them - from Trotskyists to monarchists, as well as the all-important supporters of Bayrou - her refusal to pursue, at least to the Blairite extent that she might have liked, either neoliberal economics or the corresponding neoconservative geopolitics, both of which include yet further European integration.