Sex and politics have always been bedfellows, especially for the French, whose presidents have always been renowned for their bed-hopping antics.

 

But what about when a crucial and divisive presidential election is taking place? 

 

Swingers networking group Wyylde has tried to figure out, with the help of a survey of 4,000 people carried out by polling firm Ifop, the link between French people's bed habits and their political views.

 

And the results showed some intriguing correlations. 

 

For example, hard leftists are most likely (by far) to have had a threesome. 

 

Yes, 37 percent of those who vote for the hard left say they've been with (at least) two others at once in bed, while just 19 percent of far right voters could say the same, and it was 13-15 percent for those in the centre right and left respectively. 

 

The hard left were also far more likely to have been swingers at some point, with 23 percent of those surveyed admitting to sharing partners, compared to 12 percent of far right voters, and nine percent of people on the left or right. 

 

While the survey got into extremely intimate details about French people's sex lives – which we're not even going to get into, but which you can find on PDF here – it also took a look at the correlations between partners and politics. 

 

It revealed, for example, that 62 percent of French people said they'd never sleep with someone who supported the far right. 

 

READ ALSO: Revealed: The ultimate sex map of France 

 

 

And while three quarters of those surveyed said they were against the idea of going out with someone of opposing political views to their own, an even greater proportion of the French admit to having slept with someone of a different political stance.

 

So many French people will probably relate to the unlikely partnership of the right wing ex-president, Nicolas Sarkozy with his wife, Carla Bruni, who claimed she was leftwing in 2009. 

 

Or perhaps they take inspiration from the French film, “The names of Love”, in which a fiery spirited leftwinger sleeps with right wing men to convert them to her politics. She claims that they are most susceptible to persuasion when at the point of orgasm.

 

But, fiction aside, the French are unlikely to intentionally select politically dissimilar partners because most of them don’t pay attention to their spouse's politics. 

 

The survey found that nearly three quarters of people don’t know the political affiliation of all their previous partners and only one in two of those surveyed know exactly who their partner will vote for.

 

And although the French don’t mind having sex with political opponents, it seems that in the end political monogamy comes hand in hand with sexual monogamy.

 

With three quarters of the French partnered with political allies, the French are more likely to be in a couple with someone who shares their politics. Most of such couples also claim to share the exact same political stance.

 

This is lucky for the French because the survey also suggests that politically aligned couples are more likely to have a thriving sexual relationship.

 

Only a third of couples who vote for different candidates claim to be “very satisfied” with the sex they’re having, whereas this is the case for just under half (45 percent) of couples who vote the same way.

 

By Blyth Brentnall