As I sort my life out in Spain and get back into regular blogging, I’m pleased to offer this bit of continuity.
On the 14th and 21st of March, elections for the Conseils Regionals all over France will take place.
These will be a decisive test for French politics because, as it stands, the Parti Socialiste has [...]

I have been working for our French colleagues in the Parti Socialiste for 6 months now, and though I don’t know what a Jedward is, I have been able to experience ‘continental democracy’.
The debate about electoral reform in Britain has always been “PR or not to PR”, with the third way of AV or AV+ [...]

Since I wrote my last article (here) explaining the situation surrounding the elections of the Conseil Régional PACA (Provence-Alpes-Cote D’Azur) we have had an important development!
Hubert Falco, who was widely tipped as the man to wrangle PACA from the Socialists, has officially refused orders to lead the UMP list.

The papers (including myself) were all too [...]

PACA is one of the 23 regions of France, it stands for Provence-Alpes-Cote D’Azur. The capital is Marseilles, which holds the regional assembly where most of the elected Regional Councillors work. I visited there once when they had some sort of big session going on ; it’s rather like any other hemicycle based parliament, and [...]

The results came in last night, I was at party HQ as our various agents rang in to tell us the result from the polling station as we filled in the data one piece at a time.

The final result:

Xavier Garcia, Parti Socialiste: 40.54%
Lauriano Azinherinha, UMP: 59.46%
A surprisingly good result for Garcia in fact, in the [...]