Democracy won

The first round in the French presidential election is over.

Democracy won.

To start with, close to 85% of the voters went to the urns. That means that more voters cared about the result than they did in the last election in 2002.

The second good news is that most of the really silly candidates got just a few percent of the votes. For example the high profile but stark raving mad leftist José Bové got just 1.4%. And the trotskyist Arlette Laguiller, who has participated in every presidential election since 1974 got no more than 1.5%, down from an insane 5.7% in 2002. Among silly rightist candidates Philippe de Villiers got just 2.5%, and that will hopefully discourage him from continuing.

The French voters have taken a big step from silly candidates to just slightly silly candidates.