Sarkoland and Segoland: an election of two nations

The map looks like France in the middle ages: a country split down the middle, owing allegiance to different monarchs.

It shows, in fact, the France of April 2007 or rather it shows "two Frances" - the deeply divided country that voted in the first round of the presidential election on Sunday.

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To the north, east and south is "Sarkoland": the départements (or counties) where the centre-right candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, topped the poll. To the west and south-west, with one outlying island in the centre, is the much smaller territory of "Ségoland": the départements where the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, scored the largest number of votes.

François Bayrou, the centrist candidate, came first in only one département, his home area of Pyrénées-Atlantiques on France's Atlantic border with Spain. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right candidate, who came first in many areas in the east and north and south in 2002, topped the poll nowhere in 2007.

The sheer size of the Sarkozy territory illustrates the magnitude of Mme Royal's challenge as she tries to become France's first female president in the second round on 6 May.

The map is, in some ways, misleading. In some of France's great cities, within the "pro-Sarko" boundaries, Mme Royal came first on Sunday. She won in Toulouse, Montpellier, Lille, Caen and in Grenoble. She came a very creditable second in Paris and even did well in Marseilles, a city that has been a graveyard for the left.

She stacked up votes in the multi-racial high-rise housing estates around Paris and Lyons but not enough to overtake the Sarkozy votes from the middle-class, or white blue-collar, estates of bungalows in the same départements.

M. Sarkozy racked up huge scores - 40 per cent or more of the total vote - in some of the départements and cities along the south-east Mediterranean coast and in Alsace and Champagne-Ardennes in the north-east. He also did remarkably well in some areas regarded as traditionally "to the left", such as Pas de Calais in the north and Upper Normandy in the west.

How can the regional divisions be explained? Mme Royal did well in her own region of Poitou-Charente in west, central France, where she has been president since 2004. She did well in some traditional bastions of the left, such as Brittany, the south-west and the central departement of Nièvre, once the fiefdom of François Mitterrand.

Her greatest coup was to top the poll in Corrèze, in Limousin, for many years the fiefdom of M. Sarkozy's nominal ally, President Jacques Chirac.

M. Sarkozy scooped the pool elsewhere. He did particularly well in the "arc of exasperation": the former heavy industrial areas to the east and north of the country, where M. Le Pen polled heavily in 2002.

Mme Royal is MP for a département called Les Deux Sèvres. On 6 May, she and M. Sarkozy will seek to be President of "Les Deux Frances".