Jospin takes the lead in battle for French presidency

The French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, has taken a narrow lead in the presidential election campaign, reinforcing doubts and divisions within the camp of President Jacques Chirac.

With less than seven weeks to go before the first round of the presidential election, Mr Jospin is given a narrow lead in most opinion polls for the first time in more than a year.

The two men – political rivals but uneasy partners in power for the last four years – remain almost certain to reach the second round run-off between the two leading candidates on 5 May. Opinion polls still put them neck and neck but Mr Jospin has eroded Mr Chirac's four-to-six-point lead. In two polls, he has crept ahead by two to four points .

A large mass of French voters, unhappy with the broad but all-too-familiar field of first round candidates (16 and rising), is threatening to stay at home on 21 April, the day of the first vote. The outcome of the election remains, therefore, deeply uncertain.

But the Chirac camp has been jolted by the combative performance of the Socialist Prime Minister since he formally entered the race 10 days ago. Last autumn, some unwise figures on the right – not Mr Chirac – wrote off Mr Jospin. They said the stumbling French economy and Mr Chirac's presidential bearing in the war against terrorism had destroyed Mr Jospin's chances of becoming the first sitting Prime Minister in the Fifth Republic to be elected President.

History is on Mr Jospin's side. In the Fifth Republic (since 1958), any presidential candidate who has taken the lead at this stage in the campaign has gone on to capture the Elysée Palace.

Mr Chirac's supporters are also disturbed by a reversal of roles between the two men. Mr Jospin has been running a rumbustious campaign, denouncing Mr Chirac's record (or lack of it) and making scarcely veiled references to the financial skeletons tumbling from the President's cupboard.

President Chirac has been unusually passive, refusing to trade blows with Mr Jospin. He has told anxious supporters he believes the French people are not ready for a partisan, name-calling campaign. If he began to throw mud, he says, he would lose two of his main electoral advantages, his presidential aura and his amiable image, which contrasts with the widespread view of Mr Jospin as plodding and forbidding.

Chirac supporters fear their champion has been trapped into fighting a passive campaign because he knows the other side has greater stores of mud. They criticise also the influence of President Chirac's daughter and media adviser, Claude, as arrogant, ignorant of grassroots opinion and and too soft politically (too left wing).