Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/conservative-socialist-candidates-to-face-off-in-french-election Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy vies with socialist Segolene Royal, who is campaigning to become France's first female president, in France's runoff presidential election on May 6. Margaret Warner reports on the election from France. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. GWEN IFILL: And now to the French elections. Margaret Warner is covering that story for us. I spoke with her from Paris earlier today.Margaret, welcome. I was struck by the enthusiasm of this election. What, 44.5 million people voted, 85 percent turnout; what drove that? MARGARET WARNER: A couple of things, Gwen. First of all, I think people recognized that they had an opportunity here to elect a real new generation of leaders.The two front-runners who will now go in the runoff, Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal, are both in their early 50s, more than 20 years younger than Jacques Chirac, and the whole generation of warhorses that's really retiring.But the other reason, the other thing that drove turnout and higher registration was that the French did not want to repeat what they found to be a profound embarrassment in 2002, when voter apathy and a huge split on the left let this xenophobic, right-wing Jean-Marie Le Pen make it to the runoff.And so, today, there's a tremendous sense of pride here in France, at least among people who I talked to, that not only was — that Le Pen was held to only about 10 percent to 11 percent of the vote versus 17 percent of the vote last time. As one woman in a pastry shop said to me this morning, "We were not embarrassed. We did not disgrace ourselves."