The French general election Round one to Jacques Chirac and the centre-right

In France's two-round general election, the mainstream right is well ahead Jun 13th 2002 | From the print edition

AN OVERWHELMING victory for the right; the humbling of the Reuters Socialists; and the collapse of the extremists, of both right and left. Take the results of last weekend's first round of voting for France's next National Assembly and President Jacques Chirac is entitled to feel blessed.

A year ago, the headlines all spoke of financial scandals attached to his past. More recently, they contemplated a presidential victory for his Socialist rival, Lionel Jospin. Now they unanimously predict that the outcome of this weekend's second round of the general election, on June 16th, will show a “blue wave” of conservatism sweeping across France, just as in several other parts in Europe. Both houses of parliament—the National Assembly and Will Chirac let Raffarin the Senate—will owe their allegiance to a centre-right president. step ahead? So probably will most of France's 36,861 local communes (each with a mayor), 100 departments and 26 regions. And likewise the Constitutional Council, France's highest court.

Quite what Mr Chirac will do with this power, unprecedented in the Fifth Republic's 44 years, is unclear. For all the campaign talk of modernising the state, reforming taxes and pensions and cracking down on crime, Mr Chirac's team has been careful between the two rounds to be neither too precise nor too boastful. Indeed, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, whose appointment last month as an interim prime minister may well become permanent, says firmly: “Let's listen hard to the message the French people have sent us.”

But what exactly is that message? Part of the answer is surely that the French no longer want a president of one colour to “cohabit” with a parliamentary majority, and thus a government, of another. They have tried it three times, the most recent being the forced marriage over the past five years between Mr Chirac and Mr Jospin. A fourth time is now, it seems, impossible. Extrapolate from the first round's results and between 380 and 420 of the next assembly's 577 seats should be held by members of the pro-Chirac Union for the Presidential Majority (UMP). In contrast, the Socialist Party, which had 248 seats in the last assembly, may be restricted to between 120 and 170. As for the Communist Party, which was once the biggest party on the left and still had 35 seats in the last assembly, pundits reckon it will be lucky to get between eight and 17 seats—less than the 20 that constitute a parliamentary group with consequent access to financial support from the state. For the Greens, who, with the Communists, were part of the last government coalition, things look even bleaker: they will get a maximum, say the forecasters, of three seats.

The rest of the answer is harder to decipher. On April 21st, in the presidential election's first round, a third of the votes went to candidates at the extremes of left and right, including 17% for Jean-Marie Le Pen, of the xenophobic far-right National Front. Not only did that promote him ahead of Mr Jospin for the two-man run off with Mr Chirac on May 5th, but it also encouraged the National Front to imagine it would qualify for up to 300 contests in the second round of the general election.

Instead, the Front last weekend got less than 12% of the vote nationwide and qualified for a mere 37 contests in the second round. Of these, 20 will pit it in a duel with the moderate right; eight will be straight contests with the left; and the rest will be “triangulars”, with the Front up against both the right and the left. Translate that into power politics and the damage the Front can do this weekend to the pro-Chirac right is feeble—in contrast to 1997, when it qualified for 132 second-round contests, of which 76 were “triangular” and for the most part split the right- wing vote to the benefit of the left.

So Mr Le Pen's predictions (and those of many pollsters) have proved spectacularly wrong. The puzzle is why, since pollsters on the eve of last weekend's voting had found that a good quarter of France's adults more or less shared Mr Le Pen's hostility to the European Union, globalisation, immigration and so on—and that only 49% completely disagreed.

The most obvious explanation is electoral arithmetic. To qualify for the second round, a candidate must come first or second or secure the ballots of at least 12.5% of registered voters— a hurdle the far right thought it would leap with some ease following Mr Le Pen's presidential scores. But the Le Pen team reckoned without electoral apathy. Last weekend's abstention rate was a smidgen below 36%, higher than in any round in any of the Fifth Republic's previous 11 general elections. The bigger the abstention, the bigger the actual vote needed to match the 12.5% benchmark of registered voters. A second explanation, offered by Mr Le Pen, is that only the Front took seriously a recent law requiring, under pain of financial sanction, equal numbers of men and women candidates; a sexist French electorate allegedly then discriminated against the Front's women.

But a third explanation may in the long run be the most telling. The adage of France's two- round elections, be they for presidents or parliaments, is that the voters “choose in the first round and eliminate in the second”. In other words, they use the first round to send a message to the second-round survivors. On April 21st that message—a fear of crime, unemployment, the remoteness of the EU and the impact of globalisation—showed in the protest vote not just for Mr Le Pen on the far right but for Trotskyite no-hopers on the far left.

It was this message that Mr Chirac seemed to hear so much more clearly than Mr Jospin ever did, hence the appointment as his prime minister of Mr Raffarin—a man who is ostentatiously not one of the over-clever Paris elite—with a mandate not just to tackle crime and vandalism but to be seen to be doing so. Assume comfortable victory this weekend for the UMP, and President Chirac will have five years in which to reassure the voters while still carrying through the reforms France needs.

There is, however, a caveat. In 1995, when he was first elected president, Mr Chirac had a similarly friendly parliament, with similar ideas of modernising the nation. And what happened? Within two years Alain Juppé's reformist government was swept away, a victim of street protests and strikes in favour of the status quo. Mr Raffarin may be a deliberate contrast with the arrogantly brilliant Mr Juppé, but the problems he and Mr Chirac will face could well be the same. The president must be hoping history does not repeat itself.

From the print edition: Europe