Well, I'm a french guy in London, so I'd say the vast majority of us were in favour of Sarkozy.
A lot of my french acquaintances who studied or are currently studying economics were also very pro Sarkozy.
HOWEVER, in mainland France from the people I know the general sentiment is that people despised Sarkozy
things like this:
never really helped his public image, basically old people were fed up with and him and thought of him as unable to keep his promises and young people well a strong chunk of them hated him for his strong authoritarian image.
But at the end of the day, with every possible PR error or Gafffe, he was still able to hit 48.50% of the votes. Newspapers and the older population were anti-Sarkozy and as such any kind of change gets highly publicized and Francois Hollande being from the PS evokes the memories of Francois Mitterand who is one of the single most polarizing presidents in the history of french politics.
IN GENERAL, more people see this as a good thing but the tendency seems to be BECAUSE they felt let down by Sarkozy instead of thinking Hollande was the answer. I would say a sizeable chunk voted in the "le moins pire" fashion.
What this ACTUALLY means is that now "Les Legislatives" became that much more important and we'll have some strong indications of the direction france will take from there. But even before that, the appointment of the next Prime Minister is what is going to count, because the PM is the head of the government and from the looks of it we'll get someone who ON PAPER should be fit for the job, but as with most PMs he'l prolly get torched soon enough.
--
Dr voltchball - best in the world.