Hooray! I remembered one of the things.

The French elections have made me think once again about the inadequacy of democracy. I won't go into all the obvious stuff - tyranny of the majority, the average person being too stupid to be able to run a country, etc.

On the news, I saw a young French woman deliberating whom to vote for. "I want to case a useful vote, which would mean Ségolène Royal and the Socialist Party. But my heart is with the Revolutionary Communist League."

This highlights the flaw in almost any democracy, which is that people have to vote tactically for who they think will get the most votes. I have no doubt that the communist parties would be quite a bit stronger if people actually thought they had a chance of winning.

The best idea I've seen to combat this is multiple rounds of voting. Whoever gets the least votes is struck off, and everybody votes again. Then, again, the candidate with the least votes is struck off and everybody votes for the remainder. This continues until there is only one left, ensuring that this one candidate has the greatest possible following in the country.

Yes, it would be horribly long and horribly expensive, but that would be proper democracy. If democracy is your kinda thing that is... Can't say it's mine, except on a local level.

French elections are very different to Britain or the USA. For one thing, they have about 10 parties.

April 22nd, in 4 days, is the first round of the presidential elections (presidential elections take place separately from elections for the Assemblé Nationale, their equivalent of the House of Commons, the lower house).

I say first round because the two candidates who gain the most votes go on to a second round, where everybody votes for one of the two. Whoever wins is president.

Now, usually, these two candidates are from the moderate left and moderate right. However, in 2002, for the first time ever, the far-right candidate made it into the second round, knocking the moderate left party, the Socialists, to third place. He beat them by just 0.5%. This shocked the world, and of course, the moderate right candidate won the second round by a huge margin.

Everybody is waiting to see if this will happen again. This time, even the moderate right candidate has shown himself to be racist. And, completely shockingly, a fourth candidate has emerged from the centre.

At the moment, polls show Sarkozy, the moderate-but-racist right in the lead with 27%, followed by Ségolène Royal from the Socialist party with 25%, the centist Bayrou with 19% and finally Le Pen, the fascist, with 15.5%.

What's notable, as I predicted, is that support has drained away from the various communist parties as the left are desperate to prevent another run off between two right wing candidates. This would usually mean the socialists would get to the second round, but Bayrou becoming a credible candidate has ruined this, as he's attracted a lot of left-leaning votes.

It's notable that in 2002, the polls said Le Pen only had about 14% support, and he still managed to get into the second round. Anything could still happen in the second round... lots of people probably lie to the pollsters because they're ashamed of voting for him.

I am of course supporting Ségolène Royal, though I wouldn't mind Bayrou. "Anything but Sarkozy" is my feeling, mirrored by much of the French left. I heard Royal admired Blair, which made me wary at first, but looking up her policies, I still support her. She only admires the sensible things Blair has done.

The Socialist Pary's logo is almost the same as that of the Second International, whose logo you see here as my userpic.