Election countdown: France searches for its saviour

As the French prepare to vote in a vital Presidential election, there is an air of despondency, says John Lichfield in the first of a series of final-week reports from the electoral frontline

Monday, 16 April 2007

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France faces a momentous choice this week - and knows it. In the calamitous presidential election of 2002, the country fell asleep at the wheel. It took little interest in the campaign and woke up after the first round of voting to find itself in a moral ditch.

The far-right leader Jean-Marie Pen sneaked into the second round five years ago partly because so many people failed to vote and partly because so many left-wing votes scattered to minor candidates. This time the country is wide awake. Voter registration is up by more than 4 per cent. Interest in the campaign is high.

France knows that this is a cross-roads election. A "new" generation of 50-something candidates promises to abandon the muddle of the past two decades and - finally - reconcile a divided, skittish, anxious nation with the menacing 21st century.

All those candidates - Nicolas Sarkozy on the centre right, Ségolène Royal on the centre-left, François Bayrou in the centre-centre - are insiders running as outsiders. All promise to adopt a more pragmatic, non-ideological approach to France's problems of low growth and high state debt, low work-rate and high unemployment, high taxes and low competitiveness. In their different ways, they are all Blairists.

But none of them have fired the imagination of a country which desperately wanted to believe that a new democratic Messiah was at hand. The hungry M. Sarkozy scares people, even on the right. The dilettante Mme Royal disappoints people, even on the left. The likeable M. Bayrou fails to galvanise people, even in the centre. The opinion polls (which have been wrong before) suggest that Mme Royal - after a shaky January and February - has stabilised in second position. The polls suggest that she and the clear front-runner, M. Sarkozy, will qualify next Sunday for the second round on 6 May. The polls suggest that M. Sarkozy will then become the next President of the Republic, even though there is clearly a growing wave of anti-"Sarko" feeling in the country.

M. Le Pen, at the age of 78, has not gone away. He is still as effective and as witty and as fluent and as loathsome and as poisonous as ever. He remains obsessed with the past and especially the Second World War.

If anyone is tempted to believe in the "kinder, gentler" Le Pen who began the campaign, they need to look only at the comments of "Le Chef" on radio yesterday. He said that he "regretted" President Jacques Chirac's decision to recognise formally that the collaborationist French state had played a role in the extermination of Jews in 1940-44. The opinion polls suggest that M. Le Pen will not reach the second round for a second time. These polls have been wrong - especially about Le Pen - before.

Over the next week, The Independent will undertake a Tour de France to try to gauge the mood of the nation before next Sunday's first round of voting.

France is a vast country - four times the land surface of England. It is a disparate country and often a divided country. The patterns of voting in national elections show sharp differences between north and south, east and west. It is a country which has already changed - both for good and for ill - more than is generally admitted. It is a country which gets many things right; and other things badly wrong.

The French - aided and abetted by their presidential candidates - sometimes have difficulty in deciding which is which. The country finds it hard to look at the "real" France of 2007, instead of the "virtual" France of its own imagination. This "imagined" France is sometimes much blacker and more dismal than the hopeful reality. In other cases, candidates peddle an idealised picture-book view of France, which barely exists. This is one of the themes of our first tour stage in rural Normandy. The rest of our tour will try to address regional and social divisions but also national themes.

Eighteen months after the riots which shook the multi-racial suburbs of most French towns and cities, what is the state of race relations in France? Is an Islamist intifada bubbling in places with bucolic names like Fontenay-sous-Bois? The Paris "banlieue" is the scene of our second tour stage tomorrow.

On Wednesday, we will be in Forbach, a former mining town on the Lorraine-German border to look at the white, working-class vote. Why did Forbach - without crime or a large immigrant community - vote nearly 50 per cent for Le Pen in 2002?

In Grenoble, on Thursday, we will be looking at the French middle classes. For many years, the "French model" - good schools, good health care, high job protection - favoured the "insiders" of the middle class, especially those in state jobs. Now their real incomes are declining and their children can no longer get a foot on the first rung of the ladder.

In Toulouse, on Friday, we will be looking at the youth vote and the French attraction to the extremes of the left, as well as the right. On Saturday, back in Paris, we will try to draw conclusions and maybe - foolishly - make a prediction on the outcome of the election.