French voters in Britain, part of the new Northern Europe constituency introduced for the first time in this presidential election, bucked the general trend in Sunday's first round vote.
The overseas voters selected Nicolas Sarkozy narrowly over François Hollande but rejected the Front National's Marine Le Pen, who was relegated to sixth position behind the ecology and green party candidate Eva Joly.
The new constituency covers all French citizens living in 10 countries in northern Europe: Denmark (including Greenland), Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden and the UK.
It counts 140,731 registered voters, by far the greatest number of whom live in the UK, which has the third largest number of French residents of any country in the world.
Northern Europe constituency voters will elect their first MP in the French legislative elections, which follow the presidential elections.
More than 400,000 French citizens living abroad voted in the first round election out of a total number of more than 10.43 million.
The full results for the Northern Europe constituency were:
Nicolas Sarkozy: 33.56%
François Hollande: 32.28%
François Bayrou: 13.87%
Jean-Luc Mélenchon: 7.52%
Eva Joly: 6.92%
Marine Le Pen: 3.29%
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan: 1.3%
Philippe Poutou: 0.72%
Jacques Cheminade: 0.31%
Nathalie Arthaud: 0.22%
