MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The first round of the French Socialist Party primaries to determine the presidential nominee finished on earlier Sunday.

"According to the results obtained from 3,090 polling stations, Benoit Hamon receives 35.21% of votes, Manuel Valls gets 31.56%, Arnaud Montebourg gains support of 18.70% voters," the High Authority said.

The polling stations closed at 19:00 local time (18:00 GMT). The turnout at the primaries was rather low, with some 1.7-1.9 million people casting their ballots.

The two top candidates will participate in the second round of primaries set for January 29.

The PS candidate will have to face French far-right National Front leader Le Pen, center-right The Republicans’ nominee Francois Fillon and independent candidate from the left Emmanuel Macron as his or her most important competitors.

The first round of the French presidential elections will take place on April 23.

Never miss a story again — sign up to our Telegram channel and we'll keep you up to speed! </s> Paris, Jan 23 (IANS) About 1 million left-wing French voters on Sunday headed to polling stations to cast ballots in a presidential primary, organisers said.

Based on account of 70 per cent of 7,534 polling sites, one million had voted by 5.00 p.m. (1600 GMT) against 1.5 million at the same time in the first round in 2011, Xinhua news agency reported.

Seven candidates are competing to win the conservative ticket to challenge for the upcoming two-round French presidential election scheduled for April 23 and May 7.

According to pollsters, the primary will be a three-horse race among former Prime Minister Manuel Valls and his main rivals Arnaund Montebourg and Benoit Hamon, both former ministers in his government in 2014.

Marred by record low popularity of the Socialist President Francois Hollande and growing public discontent over the government’s controversial reforms, no left-wing candidate will pass to presidential run-off, pollsters said.

The top two winners of the first round of the primary will compete in the second round of the primary next Sunday, unless one of the seven contenders collects more than 50 per cent of the votes in the first round and will directly be nominated as the presidential candidate.

The primary is the second such competition held by the Socialist Party and allies. In 2011, the Socialist Party had opened a two-round contest to all registered voters regardless their political view as long as they share the left-wing values and donate 1 euro ($1.069). </s> France's governing Socialist Party will choose Benoît Hamon or former prime minister, Manuel Valls as their presidential candidate after five other contenders were eliminated in the first primary.

Mr Hamon is fractionally ahead of Mr Valls - early results put Mr Hamon on around 35% of the vote with the former premier close behind on 32%.

Whoever wins the second round next Sunday will be unlikely to make it through to the second round of the presidential contest according to current polls which put the Socialist Party fifth.

Current polling suggests far right leader Marine Le Pen and the centre right's Francois Fillon will contest the presidency on 7 May. </s> PARIS—Candidates from opposing wings of France’s Socialist Party emerged as the top two vote-getters in the first round of the country’s leftist primary, marking the deep divisions hobbling the party’s attempt to select a credible successor to President François Hollande.

Benoît Hamon, a lawmaker who hails from the left of the Socialist party and who has centered his campaign on a plan to create a universal basic income, took the... </s> PARIS, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls called on Monday for a big turnout in the second round of the Socialist primaries after a first round vote made left-wing rival Benoit Hamon frontrunner to represent the party in this year's presidential election.

Opinion polls show that no Socialist is likely to win the presidency. They make conservative Francois Fillon the favourite, and put Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front in second place.

But they also show that a victory for Hamon in next Sunday's decisive Socialist primaries second round runoff against Valls could expose the centre ground to which Valls hopes to appeal, and thereby boost the presidential prospects of independent centrist Emmanuel Macron.

"To all those voters who believe in the Left, do not despair, mobilise," Valls said on RTL Radio. Late on Sunday he said the choice between Hamon and himself was one of "certain defeat and possible victory" in the presidential election.

Hamon, 48, a traditional leftwinger, was sacked from government by President Francois Hollande in 2014 for criticising his economic policies.

In Sunday's first round he coasted to a comfortable win ahead of Valls, 54, who represents the more business-friendly second half of Hollande's term in government.

"I think there is no chance for the left to win unless it can put forward a imaginative and powerful policy against a right that is full-on and an extreme right that is dangerous," Hamon said on France Inter radio.

Hamon won about 36 percent of the vote to Valls' 31, according to partial results. The former education minister also secured the backing of Arnaud Montebourg, another left-winger who came in third with 18 percent, and was therefore eliminated along with four other candidates.

The outcome of next Sunday's head-to-head vote remains uncertain though.

This year's primary is only the second in the history of the Socialist party and its allies. Anyone of voting age can participate, and the first-round turnout involved only between 1.6 and 1.7 million of France's 44 million-plus voters. (Reporting by Andrew Callus and Yann Le Guernigou; Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta) </s> PARIS, Jan 22 (Reuters) - Benoit Hamon, a former Socialist education minister on the left of the party, led in the first round of a primary to pick a Socialist presidential candidate on Sunday, with more moderate ex-prime minister Manuel Valls in second place, partial results showed.

Hamon, 48, who was sacked under the government of President Francois Hollande for criticising his economic policies, had won 35.2 percent of the vote and Valls about 31 percent with just over a third of the total votes counted.

If the final count confirms this result, the two men will go face-to-face in a Jan. 29 runoff to decide who will be the Socialist candidate in the April-May presidential election. </s> The voting booths have opened in France . For the next twelve hours, the French will decide which two presidential candidates will move on to the next round.

The voting started at 8 am Sunday morning. They close at 8 pm in the larger cities and at 7 in smaller places.

Eleven candidates participate in the first round of the presidential election. The two candidates who get the most votes continue on to the final round of presidential elections on May 7th unless in the unlikely event that anyone gets more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round.

A total of 47 million people are entitled to vote in France, including 1.3 million French nationals living elsewhere.

In the last 44 hours preceding the election, it is, under French law, illegal to campaign. The last polls were therefore presented on Friday evening.

Both give the independent centre candidate Emmanuel Macron a lead over the National Front Leader Marine Le Pen, followed by the conservative candidate François Fillon, the liberal candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon. </s> France’s governing Socialist Party will choose between Benoit Hamon and ex-prime minister Manuel Valls for its presidential candidate after five other contenders were eliminated in the first-round of the party’s primary contest on Sunday.

Mr Valls, who quit as premier last month, qualified for next weekend’s decider but was trailing in early counting to Mr Hamon who performed well in debates leading up to the poll.

Whoever wins next Sunday’s contest, however, will face an uphill task in trying to maintain occupancy of the Elysee Palace for the party with France’s current head of state Francois Hollande having decided not to seek a new mandate after a first term blighted by terror attacks that forced him to call a state of emergency.

Current polling suggests the official Socialist candidate could come fifth in the first round of the presidential contest in April which whittles the field down to two contenders for the deciding round on May 7 where the victor claims the keys to the Elysee Palace.

Mr Valls has found it hard to disassociate himself with the policies of Mr Hollande having been in charge of delivering them until a few weeks ago.

Early results put Mr Hamon on around 35% of the vote with Mr Valls close behind on 32%.

The third-placed candidate in the field of seven, Arnaud Montebourg, was back on 18% and he, Vincent Peillon, Francois de Rugy, Sylvia Pinel, Jean Luc Bennahmias are now eliminated. Mr Montebourg, conceding defeat, immediately endorsed Mr Hamon for the second round.

Between 1.5 million and two million votes were cast on Sunday, a lower turnout than the 2011 primaries which saw Mr Hollande emerge as the Socialist candidate against deeply unpopular centre-right incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he defeated in 2012.

That win saw the Socialists end 17 years of centre-right rule at the Elysee.

Current polling suggests far right leader Marine Le Pen and the centre right’s Francois Fillon will contest the presidency on May 7.

However, with former Socialist and now centrist Emmanuel Macron polling well in third place overall, closing in on Ms Le Pen and Mr Fillon, and leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon also outperforming the Socialists there could still be a left wing presence in the second round if enough voters coalesce behind one candidate in the first round on April 23.

Mr Macron, 39, is proving popular with younger voters in the big cities although is yet to make an impact in the countryside where Mr Fillon, a 62-year-old married to Welshwoman Penny Clarke, has his core support.

Polling suggests Mr Fillon, whose victory in the centre-right primaries shocked the pollsters, or Mr Macron would beat Ms Le Pen in the second round even if she wins the first round.

Mr Hollande was in Chile visiting a solar project in the Atacama desert during Sunday’s voting.

Apart from Georges Pompidou, who died in office in 1974, he is the first president under France’s Fifth Republic system not to seek a second term. </s> French voters on Sunday were electing the Socialist candidate who will face a tough battle against rivals from the far-left, far-right and the political center in the presidential election this spring.

The Socialist primary runoff offered a stark choice between two candidates — Benoit Hamon and former Prime Minister Manuel Valls — on opposite poles of the beleaguered party, with sharply different plans for France.

With a headline-grabbing proposal to pay all French adults a modest monthly stipend, Hamon, 49, emerged from obscurity on the Socialist left to win the primary's first round against six other candidates last weekend.

Casting his ballot Sunday in Trappes, the blue-collar town west of Paris where he is the elected lawmaker, Hamon expressed hope for high voter participation. Voting in Evry, south of Paris, Valls echoed that call. The primary was open to all voters who paid 1 euro ($1.04) and signed a document saying they share the left's values.

A more robust turnout than the anemic 1.6 million votes cast in the first round of the primary would help bolster the legitimacy of the runoff winner entering a potentially bruising campaign.

In the sometimes testy primary campaign, Valls, 54, emphasized his experience in government. As prime minister from 2014 to 2016, he was on the front lines of France's response to gun and suicide-bomb attacks that killed 147 people in Paris in January and November 2015. He was also in office in July 2016 when a man drove a truck into crowds in Nice, killing 86 people.

Casting his ballot for Valls in a gymnasium two blocks from the presidential Elysee Palace, voter Jean-Pierre Abehassera said the ex-prime minister offered a stronger bulwark against militant Islam than Hamon. The 69-year-old web publisher lost a friend in the November 2015 attack on the Bataclan concert hall, where 90 died.

"The No. 1 problem is security," Abehassera said.

But Valls' close association with chronically unpopular President Francois Hollande, who isn't seeking a second five-year term, has made him vulnerable in a race against Hamon, who quit Hollande's government in 2014 amid infighting over economic policies.

Hamon, a former junior minister and briefly Valls' education minister, picked up backing from Arnaud Montebourg, another Socialist left-wing rebel who defied Hollande. The 290,000 votes the former economy minister received in the primary's first round were expected to help Hamon defeat Valls in the runoff.

Hamon's signature proposal is for a 750 euros ($800) "universal income" that would be gradually granted to all adults. Valls sharply criticized the idea as unrealistic and ruinous, both for France and the Socialist Party's credibility. Hamon also proposes legalizing cannabis and allowing medically assisted deaths.

Voting for the first time, student Maayane Pralus, 18, backed Hamon, saying: "He has a lot of the youth vote with him, which is sick of the old politics."

"People call him utopian, but that's the politics we've been waiting for," she said.

The presidential race was rocked this week by ethics questions faced by conservative candidate Francois Fillon, a former prime minister. Financial prosecutors are investigating an allegedly fake but handsomely paid job as a parliamentary aide held by this wife, Penelope.

She appeared at his side and was given a standing ovation during a boisterous rally in Paris on Sunday to bolster his troubled campaign, where supporters chanted her name and "Fillon, president!"

"Through Penelope they are trying to break me," he said. "I will never forgive those who chose to throw us to the wolves."

The first order of business for Sunday's winner will be trying to unite the Socialist family that has been torn for years between advocates of a radical left, including Hamon and Montebourg, and party members with center-left views, like Valls and Hollande.

"It's always been hard to unite the left," Hamon said as he voted.

Divisions are so deep that some of Valls' support is expected to shift to centrist Emmanuel Macron, running for president as an independent, if Hamon wins the Socialist ticket.

In such a complex political landscape, some voters cast ballots strategically. Bernard Biassette, 74, a retired bank worker, voted for Hamon only to eliminate Valls, whom he saw as a greater threat to his preferred presidential candidate — Macron.

Hamon "is throwing money out of the window," Biassette said. "He's not a serious candidate."

Early polling has suggested that the Socialist nominee will struggle to advance from the presidential election first-round in April to qualify for the runoff in May. Macron, Hollande's former economy minister, and fiery far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon are squeezing the Socialists from both sides.

But Fillon's legal problems have thrown a cloud of uncertainty over expectations of a two-horse race between him and far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

"I still think he is the best candidate for France, to help us get out of the crisis and reduce unemployment," said Laurence Benoist, who was among the 15,000 people Fillon said attended his rally.

Despite being "a bit surprised, a bit upset" by the allegations against Penelope Fillon, Benoist, 43, added: "I still believe he is sincere when he says he tells the truth about France's situation".

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Nadine Achoui-Lesage and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.
Voting takes place in the first round of the French Socialist Party presidential primary to select a candidate to run in this year's presidential election.