France set to hand Chirac greater power

A rollercoaster French election season seems likely to end with an overwhelming concentration of power in the hands of President Jacques Chirac's centre right tomorrow.

Final opinion polls point to a landslide victory for his recently created, unified party of the right and centre in the second round of the parliamentary elections.

With Mr Chirac already re-elected President for another five years, and the centre right controlling the Senate (upper house) and most regions and big cities, France faces the most intense concentration of power in its recent history.

Depending on your view-point, this is either an unrivalled opportunity for the President and his supporters to push through overdue reforms or an invitation to arrogance, triumphalism and the kind of petty, personal quarrels that have long disfigured French politics, especially on the right.

Mr Chirac's new party, the Union Pour la Majorité Présidentielle, was the clear victor in the first round of parliamentary elections last Sunday.

With the left scattered and demoralised, and the far right eliminated in all but 38 of 577 seats, the six-week-old UMP is expected to scoop the pool tomorrow.

The opinion polls suggest that Mr Chirac's UMP, bolted together from three centre-right parties in May, will take about 400 seats.

The dissident centrists of the UDF should win about 30 seats and the Socialists about 130. A scattering will go to other left-wing parties and independents.

The far-right National Front, which shocked France and the world by coming second in the first round of the presidential election in April, is not expected to win any seats after its poor showing last weekend.

A victory for the centre right tomorrow would put an end to the co-habitation, or power-sharing, between right and left that has helped to undermine respect for mainstream politics in France in recent years.

Mr Chirac's interim Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, will be confirmed in his position on Monday, with a mandate to cut taxes and crack down on crime.

Otherwise, the outcome of the 2002 electoral season of four voting days in eight weeks could be said to be perverse.

In the first round of the presidential election, voters expressed disgust with politics as usual, either failing to vote or turning to the extremes of left and right.

The mainstream left was rejected, but so, in effect, was President Chirac who scored slightly less than 20 per cent of the popular vote.

The fact that his only surviving opponent was Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front gave Mr Chirac a huge victory – by 82 per cent to 18 per cent – in the second round on 5 May.

In the parliamentary elections that followed, the French people had a choice between another co-habitation of the left and right, and giving Mr Chirac a centre-right majority in the national assembly.

They chose the centre right. And so the second round of the parliamentary elections tomorrow will hand plenipotentiary powers to Mr Chirac, 69, a man who could be said to have epitomised politics-as-usual in France for the past three decades.