The French presidential election of 2012 is the 10th presidential election in the 5th Republic and the 9th election by direct universal suffrage. The winner will serve a term of five years. The first round was held on April 22 and the runoff will take place on Sunday, May 6.

France elected a new president on May 6 in a majority runoff in which Francois Hollande defeated incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy. FairVote's director and FairVote intern Huseyin Koyuncu, a French student from Sciences Po, report on the election and five notable facts about how France votes.

After previously explaining the hybrid election system recently used by Egypt in its parliamentary elections, we here analyze how use of winner-take-all elections for many seats distorted fair representation of political views and women. Seats elected by proportional representation provided far more representative results.

Egypt recently held important parllamentary elections. We explain how some seats were elected with proportional voting and others with winner-take-all and the impact of these voting rules on representation.

President Obama's travel patterns over the past  months have been leaning toward battleground and fundraising states. How does the whole of 2011 shape up? We summarize the past year and look at what is to come as the 2012 presidential election year comes into full swing. 

Amidst controversies and protests, Egypt last month held the first in a series of elections for a new parliament. FairVote has covered the region's moves toward representative democracy in our Arab Spring series. Here’s the first of a series of posts analyzing the elections, starting with a focus on the state country before the voting last month.

Francois Hollande, the so-called “Mr. Normal” of French politics, will now represent the Socialist party in the April 2012 general election as his party seeks to unseat incumbent first-term president Nicolas Sarkozy. The party’s most critical challenge will be to unite behind its official candidate, lest bitter feelings and ideological squabbling endanger the party’s chances against Sarkozy. Those focused on electoral process are particularly interested in how Hollande won France's first-ever national primary to pick a major party nominee

 The election is seen as a democratic success for new Tunisia, with some 4.1 million registered voters voting to select the members of the Constituent Assembly – using a method of proportional representation that ensured nearly every participant elected someone, and no one faction earned the winner-take-all power to dominate other factions.  Tunisians have fulfilled their duty peacefully and with great pride, whether in the capital or in provincial towns. European Union observers saluted the election’s “transparency.” Clearly, the strong desire of Tunisians to be governed by democratically elected authorities guided the electoral process.   

 With less than one week until the first round of the socialist primaries on October 9, the haziness presently reigns about voter participation in the first-ever open primary..  According to a poll conducted by CSA (Conseil Social Analyse) 67% of supporters of the Socialist party (PS) admit to not knowing on which issues to vote during the primaries,   which are to take place on October 9th and 16th. 

The French Socialist Party (PS) is defined as the main opposition to the ruling party. It is one of the largest political parties in French political life. On October 9th and 16th, the PS will hold the first open presidential primary in French history. Privately administered by the party itself, the election will be in two rounds, unless one member obtains an absolute majority in the first round. The winner of the primary will be the Socialist nominee for president.