Three hundred million pamphlets have been delivered to French homes, containing taxpayer-funded appeals from each of the twelve Presidential candidates to voters. On Sunday, the French will vote.

I know you’re dying to understand it all.

Nearly everyone I know in France who can vote is voting for Nikolas Sarkozy and everyone thinks ultimately he will win. That is mainly a reflection of the wealthy area we live and privileged groups we mix with. Across France barely one in four voters will tick Sarkozy. He is consistently polling in the high twenties. The Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, is in the low to mid-twenties. If those two make it through to the second round run off between the two highest polling candidates, Sarkozy is polling a lead of a couple of points on average - not much more than a statistical dead heat.

But look closely. In the first round, Sarkozy is supported by a few percent who will end up voting for the ugly racist slug Jean Marie Le Pen. Second, Royal's support is much higher among younger voters, who have cell phones not landlines and who are therefore under-sampled. Some analysts think the gaps might close up, Le Pen will come up strongly, and Royal pull ahead in the second round.

Madame Royal's support dipped sharply in mid January and hasn't recovered. It almost all went straight to Francois Bayrou, He was touted for a few weeks as a 'centrist' but closer inspection revealed he is a run-of-the-mill European christian democrat. The basic idea of christian democracy is (a) post-war rejection of socialist softness on the soviets (so in Italy Romano Prodi could be a christian democrat who now governs with socialist support ); plus (b) corporatist economic policy based on industrial development of heavy industry; plus (c) a value system that says rich people should look after the poor as a charity project, intervene like a bunch of know-it-alls and take a paternalistic, slightly illiberal approach to social issues.

If Bayrou gets to the second round he will probably win. Everyone wants to stop whoever he would face more than they want to stop him. But his support peaked in February and he is now stuck in the high teens. Unless he can break more away from Sego, he is a goner. If he gets knocked out on Sunday some of his supporters will go to Sarkozy, but the majority will go back to Royal, from whence they came.

If you had to find a New Zealand politician like Ségolène Royal, it would be Laila Harré. She is striking, capable and intelligent, but prone to public sulkiness and completely unable to form alliances with anyone at all. She is easily the most left wing of Europe's major social democratic leaders, although she won the nomination by running to the right of her party and also promising to change France. Senior Socialists have refused to back Sego - like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is the closest the Socialists have to a potential third way finance minister; the genial vegetable Lionel Jospin, a lump of porridge who didn't make the second round as Socialist candidate last time; and Laurent Fabius, who was prime minister when the French blew up the Rainbow Warrior, helped orchestrate the cover up and now claims it was all nothing to do with him. Nice guy. Unlike Ms Harré, Sego has a compelling informal touch - some have speculated she may promote abandoning the formal 'vous' form, in favour of the familiar 'tu' - which would be a cultural revolution. She can be hardline on social issues - she supports compulsory military training for urban trouble-makers. She advocated more homes should fly the French flag with pride.

Royal has praised Britain's more flexible labour laws and low unemployment, though she has never met Tony Blair. Nikolas Sarkozy made a point of flying over to be photographed with him.

If M. Sarkozy were a New Zealander he would be a blend of Winston Peters and John Banks. He is frenetic, cynical, given to inflammatory language about social misfits, he hammers populist themes and he's somewhat cuddlier on close inspection than the brutish larriken-come-good image he likes to play in tv news clips. He advocates mildly right-of-centre economic reforms that would upset very few applecarts and on this score the Economist magazine is backing him. But he has spent ten years in government, achieved nothing and backed down every time there has been concerted opposition. There is no chance he will do anything much.

His support is mainly built around two pillars: Economic reform and immigration.

His platform pledges repeal of the 35-hour working week. He might have aimed for deep microeconomic reforms - why is there a law prohibiting shops from holding sales outside two mandated seasons? But opposition to micro-reform and deregulation runs very deep. It's just mad that most people cannot be paid to work longer hours even if they want to - they simply go on to salaries and do the extra hours unpaid. Meanwhile, misguided first-job protections have resulted in nearly everyone taking a first job that is unpaid. The jobs are called 'internships'. They are deeply exploitative opportunities to take on free labour. Employees get no protection but hope for employment references. Labour reforms are critical, but opposed by extraordinarily powerful unions and interest groups.

Everyone says they want the economy shaken up, but there is little consensus on how. Most American and British commentary claims the French economy is struggling. It isn't. It is under-performing on employment, and it is growing more slowly than it grew during thirty post-war years. But it has been growing at the average of developed countries in this decade, the French standard of living is far higher than ours, French companies are some of the most dynamic in the world, it owns more intellectual property than any country, it has many of the world's strongest brands, the world's most global retailer and ten of Europe's forty largest companies.

Sarko would try to style something like the nordic country reforms that have produced vital economies and still maintained high levels of social protection. They also have stingingly high tax rates.

Sarkozy's opposition to illegal immigration is a much more popular strength than economic reform. He subtly links immigration to crime and violence in the metro areas with the highest jobless rates - his talk of washing 'rascals' out with a brand of high pressure hose helped create the anger around last year's car-BQs in the Paris outskirts.

It's common to hear voters blame immigrants for causing unemployment in the same breath as condemning them for being so commonly unemployed. France has a vigorous belief in assimmilation. The 'equality' in its revolutionary slogan means everyone should be treated the same. Sarkozy is seen as threatening equality because he supports preferential positive discrimination for the disadvantaged urban young.

High levels of social exclusion, combined with France's comprehensive social protections, have left many taxpayers worried about paying welfare costs for outsiders. While the EU has brought a lot more East European workers into France, and they've had a share of resentment, veiled racist comments about French Africans and Arabs are ubiquituous in social conversation.

Sarkozy has made a central plank of his campaign total opposition to Turkey ever joining the EU. The policy is popular, but it would be disastrous. Turkey is a secular state with a higher per capita income than Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, which are all in the EU now (and Turkey ruled half of Europe back in the Ottoman days.) If Europe turns its back on a modern secular muslim state it will face a century of instability.

Opposition to Turkey is not limited to the right, however. There is a brace of Trotsykites and unreformed communists representing various shades of the insane left, and hogging nearly ten percent of the vote mainly by dressing up their anti-foreigner messages as being pro-worker. Most have run for President before and last time round they knocked the left clean out of the race, leaving the final round a non-contest between Le Pen and Slaphead Jack (Chirac). Royal fears their power to do the same this time too, while Sarkozy is fending off a couple of swivel-eyed rural conservatives. Far left posters appeared alongside those of neo-fascists opposing the EU constitution in 2005 and while the rhetoric is very different it's still very hard to see how far left and far right here differ on major economic and social issues. Bayrou aside, polls indicate there has so far been no surge from the outside this time.

The promises of Sarkozy and Royal have been independently costed and both would massively increase the rapidly growing public debt. Sarkozy probably has the greater ability to manage the economy better, but in a better world his opposition to Turkish EU membership - ever - would make him unelectable. As it is, he will probably go through to the second round as top qualifier.