'We will have a real choice of society in the second round'

"On a gagné, on a gagné". The deafening chants of "we have won" penetrated inside Socialist party headquarters 20 minutes before the French television channels were allowed to announce the projected results of the first knock-out round of the presidential election. The party heavyweights - known as the "elephants" - were beginning to trickle in, joining the invited officials, party workers and journalists who had gathered more than an hour earlier.

The wildest rumours were circulating inside, sent via text message or relayed by officials emerging from behind closed doors. But all reported that Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate, was through to the second round - although behind the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy. "He's done well," a party official grimaced, referring to M. Sarkozy's projected 30 per cent score.

At 8 o'clock precisely, the news was confirmed on a giant television screen, and the activists broke into applause and cheered. Their candidate Mme Royal, coming in at 26 per cent, had broken the spell cast by the 2002 shock defeat of the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin. The relief was palpable. A Jospin associate, former interior minister Daniel Vaillant, was dripping with sweat. "The second round is not won, but it's winnable," he said. Ms Royal "will rally people together," he added, saying that M. Sarkozy's score could be attributed to votes stolen from the extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.

"This will create a new dynamic. We will have a real choice of society in the second round," said a Royal adviser, Dominique Bertinotti. Mme Royal's team had framed the election as a fight between left and right, in the hope that the other two candidates, the centrist François Bayrou and M. Le Pen, would be marginalised by the mainstream.

But with M. Bayrou garnering 18 per cent, party strategists are already focusing on the next step. The former prime minister Michel Rocard drew howls of protest after suggesting, one week before the first round, an alliance with the centrist M. Bayrou to head off M. Sarkozy.

M. Sarkozy later told cheering supporters that he was relishing debate with MmeRoyal over the next two weeks, between "two ideas of the nation, two programmes for society, two value systems, two concepts of politics."

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