With the popularity of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin and French rightist forces more broadly in steep decline, a no vote could have tipped the public against ratification.

The key strategic move for the two remaining candidates will be to attract the votes of the Center without losing their core Leftist or Rightist constituencies. That means emphasizing in a reassuring way, economic credibility for Segolene Royal, and social compassion for Nicolas Sarkozy.

For its part, the rightist Nationalist Movement Party criticizes the AKP administration s decision to denounce the current Egyptian government, arguing that the move has all but eliminated Turkey s influence in the country. Now, the party asserts, Turkey should work to defend its regional neighbors territorial integrity.

Beppe Grillo s populist Five Star Movement emerged with 25 of the popular vote the highest support for any single party. Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, confounding those who had forecast his political demise, re emerged at the head of a populist rightist coalition that ended up only 0.3 percentage points away from winning.

The Concertación is running Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, the son of a former president who was president himself from 1994 until 2000. His opponent is Sebastián Piñera, a tycoon, former senator, and presidential runner up in 2006 who represents the main opposition forces Piñera s moderately conservative Renovación Nacional (RN) and the more rightist Union Democrata Independiente (UDI).

This August, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gives a major speech to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, he has a chance either to accelerate the rapprochement or bring it to a halt. Given his rightist pedigree and revisionist views about Japan s wartime history, the region is bracing itself for a new bout of diplomatic turbulence surrounding his address.

So in this bizarre dance, where the big parties and important candidates know that it is better to start later, the real beneficiaries of today s media circus are the candidates without any real chance of winning a fascist, another extreme rightist, a communist, two Trotskyites, and a few other marginal personalities. They are candidates only in order to benefit from two years of free publicity.

Japan s expected rightward turn comes more than three years after voters put the left leaning Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in power. By contrast, South Korea s election scheduled for December 19, just three days after the Japanese go to the polls could take that country to the left, after the nearly five year rule of rightist President Lee Myung bak, who proved to be a polarizing leader.

In almost all areas, from political stability to economic development to poverty alleviation, Chile has done very well over the past two decades, certainly much better than its Latin American neighbors. The rightist opposition had to solve the puzzle of defeating a coalition that had maintained Pinochet s most successful policies (mainly the free market, export oriented economic model) without being tainted (as many Coalición leaders are) by links to his bloody regime.