This is a cut and paste job from some e mails Murray Smith has sent out about the French elections.

The papers give a figure of 3.3 per cent for the “far left” – essentially LCR and LO. I haven’t been through all the constituencies, but I’ve looked at enough for it to be clear that the LCR did significantly better than LO, for whom these results are more bad news following on the presidential election. The best result I’ve seen for the LCR (but there may be better ones) is 4.78 per cent in Montreuil. Penny got 3.5 per cent, which is well above average. The CP did better than a lot of people expected – they got 5 per cent or not far off, which by my calculations means that they got twice as many votes as at the presidential election. I think a lot of people who saw no reason to vote for Buffet (their candidate)in the presidential election did see reasons for voting for CP candidates in these elections, esepcially where they had a chance of winning. So the CP might keep betwen 6 and 12 of their current 21 MPs. Which in their present situation is good news for them. The Greens also did better than in the presidential election, but they are only likely to get one, two or three MPs.

Definitive results in Le Monde – The far left got 3.44 per cent, 895,000 votes, as against about 2.5 million for Besancenot, Bové and Laguiller in the presidential.

The CP got 1.2 million, 4.62 per cent, as aginst about 800,000 in the presidential.

LCR,2.02 per cent, LO 0.84, Gauche alternative 0.36 (but they only stood in about 85 constituencies out of 577).

The “Gauche alternative 2007” candidates (mostly ex-Bové campaign). They are saying that they got better results than predicted, but it’s hard to verify – since they ran in a lot less places than the LCR and LO they are not always clearly labelled. I’ve seen some results at 4, 5 and 6 per cent, but also some in the one per cent range. To get an overall picture, we’ll probably have to wait till they publish the results themselves.