In other words, could the supporters of the main parties stay at home to watch the rugby without risk??

We're regrouped by 4, to count votes by packs of 100. First we count the envelopes to ensure that we have 100. Then they are opened: one picks up the bulletins, one opens them and announces the content, and the other two separately note the count on prepared lists.

All bulletins are of the same size, and follow a given format, so they are easy to distinguish.

We ended up counting 2 series of 100 (there were two other tables like ours; the voting booth has about 1,200 voters, with roughly 50% voting, there were less than 600 envelopes to count.

This is heavy rightwing territory, but the UMP barely reached 50%, and the socialists and greens came secnd and third (usually, the National Front, sovereignist and centrist right wing lists take the top 4 slots, so this is in line with the national trend where the right is getting whupped.

Wind power

• Languedoc-Roussillon (Montpellier with two "l", Nimes, Perpignan...): Georges Frèche who was recently expelled from the PS for his racists slurs, is the only left-wing list remaining for the second round with 35-37%. The official PS list got less than 10%.

• Poitou-Charentes (La Rochelle, Poitier, Cognac...): Segolène Royal trounced her UMP opponent Dominique Bussereau (Minister of Transportation in F.Fillon's Cabinet) with 40% vs 29.

• Île-de-France (Paris and surrounding cities): UMP 29%, PS 25% and the Greens 16.5%.

Final official results gave the opposition Socialists 29.48 percent of votes, with the UMP candidates tallying 26.18 percent. European Greens gathered 12.47 percent, ahead of the right-wing National Front's 11.74 percent.

France's Ministry of the Interior put the abstention rate at 53.65 percent, a record low for a regional election.

A coalition of the far left, the Left Front, won up to 5.7 percent of votes, bettering the centrist MoDem party, historically France's third best vote-getter, which struggled to reach 4.24 percent on Sunday.

They are almost all run by the Socialist Party. So, predictably, that party tends to defend its record, while the UMP attacks it. As far as positive measures are concerned, the UMP will as usual stress lowering taxes and encouraging private enterprise, while the PS will offer more concrete public projects.

Europe Ecologie (not just les Verts, this is a broader coalition in which, fortunately, les Verts are opening out instead of concentrating on their internal battles) offer a fairly full platform including increase in regional powers, in favour of public services and public transport, renewable energy, "green jobs", "green" farming, localisation, management of territorial problems like urban sprawl. They have by far the fullest bill of proposals (I'm looking at the tracts put out in my region, Midi-Pyrénées).