Sarkozy on course for landslide victory

President Nicolas Sarkozy looks certain to win a crushing parliamentary majority after utterly dominating the first round of the French legislative elections.

The new President's centre-right party and its allies are forecast to win well over 400 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly in the second round of voting next Sunday.

Despite a poor turnout of just over 60 per cent - reflecting the fatigue of the electorate after the April-May presidential election - M. Sarkozy will claim a mandate to pursue his fiscal, economic and social reforms. Computer projection suggested that his centre-right party and its allies could take between 405 and 445 seats.

M. Sarkozy's aim had been not just to defeat the left and centre, but to "crush all hope" that they could put together a coherent opposition. In the event, the main opposition party, the Socialists, looks capable of achieving a respectable result next week with around 120 seats, compared to 149 at present. The new centrist party of Francois Bayrou, the Mouvement Démocrate, looks likely to take fewer than four seats.

The Economics Minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, said the result showed that the French people "understood and approved" M. Sarkozy's plans to "open up" and "rejuvenate" French society. The defeated Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, urged left-wing voters to put aside their "sadness" and "pessimism" and turn out massively next week to ensure a powerful voice for "social justice" in the new assembly.

The first round results imply a radical redrawing of the French electoral map. The new National Assembly will be dominated by centre-right and centre-left and will have fewer political groups than any parliament in the past century.

The decline of the French Communist Party, still a significant force two decades ago, will finally be reflected in parliament. Its seats are likely to fall from 21 to between 6 and 12. The far-right National Front will once again have no seats but its share of the vote collapsed yesterday from 11 per cent to only 4.6 per cent. This could mark the end of the Jean-Marie Le Pen era. The NF leader, 79 this month, is now likely to face internal moves to persuade him to stand aside.

A victory for M. Sarkozy was inevitable. The French electorate is sometimes perverse, but not so perverse as to deny a newly elected president a majority in the National Assembly.

The scale of M. Sarkozy's victory reflected the large fund of goodwill he has built up in his first three weeks in office. Without actually doing much, he has reinforced his image as a man of action. After fighting the presidential campaign by appealing to the tribal instincts of the right, he has gone out of his way since 16 May to create an impression of openness and readiness to break down the normal party boundaries.

M. Sarkozy's choice of a foreign minister from the left and a defence minister from the centre has been well received. So has his appointment of a woman of north African origin, Rachida Dati, to the post of Justice Minister.

How "open" these appointments really are remains unclear. Foreign and defence policy, at least, seem likely to be mostly controlled from the Elysée Palace. M. Sarkozy has already shown that he intends to be a different kind of president, taking over much of the day-to-day role of the Prime Minister in deciding and implementing policy.

Openness and pragmatism are one side of M. Sarkozy's character. The other is an obsessive need to control all that surrounds him. This extends to the media and the opposition.

One of the new President's first acts was to appoint the former head of his private office to run France's most-influential television channel, TF1.

He has already created a "new centre" party of ex-Bayrou followers, who will follow the Sarkozy line in the National Assembly. According to Le Monde, heplans to try to create a breakaway, parliamentary group of "Leftists for Sarkozy".

Even in their present mood of Sarko-idolatory, the French may find this one controlling step too far.