Key issues in balance with French runoff vote

France gave its final verdict on Sunday in the tense presidential battle between right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and his Socialist challenger Francois Hollande.

The election outcome will affect its debt crisis, how long French troops stay in Afghanistan and how France exercises its military and diplomatic muscle around the world.

China-France relations will be further cemented regardless of which of the two assumes the leadership of France, said Zhang Jinling, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"The next president will never neglect France's ties with its strategic cooperative partner, especially when China's emerging economy may serve as a cooperation and growth engine for it," he said.

Opinion polls and electioneering were banned in the final 32 hours before polling stations opened on Sunday morning, but Hollande began the day as a firm favorite despite signs that Sarkozy was closing the gap.

When the French went to the polls on Sunday for their second and final round of voting for a president, they may also have tilted the balance of power in Europe in the midst of the European Union's worst crisis, the British newspaper Observer said.

Under Sarkozy, fears of low economic growth, rising joblessness and the 25-nation EU austerity pact have worked in favor of the Socialists.

Hollande has campaigned as a critic of austerity policies associated with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Sarkozy, which he said choke growth.

For Merkel, who has struck up a close, if awkward, alliance with Sarkozy through more than two years of single-currency turbulence, France's runoff is more important than many of her domestic campaigns, Germany's Der Spiegel magazine said last week.

Hollande has said that if he wins the election, he plans to meet Merkel as soon as he is sworn in.