Analysis: Once again France goes to the polls. But will it be a farce?

A disaffected electorate votes for the fourth time in eight weeks in what looks certain to be a reprise of the presidential contest

Having put out the flames of populist revolt only five weeks ago, French politicians will hand out matches and oil cans to the electorate once again this Sunday. The chances are that, once again, they will have to call out the fire brigade to repair the damage the following weekend.

To seek the opinion of a disaffected, apathetic and confused electorate is to take a risk in any democracy. To ask it to vote four times in eight weeks, as the French electoral system demands this year, amounts to organised, constitutional and political lunacy.

The system is perverse; the electorate is in a perverse mood, verging on manic-depression. The probability is that there will be another perverse, and damaging, result.

In the first round of the parliamentary elections on Sunday, there may be another record performance by Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front, despite its overwhelming rejection (by 82 per cent of French voters) in the second round of presidential elections only five weeks ago.

A week on Sunday, in the second round of the parliamentary election, the far right will be crushed once again. It will probably win no more than two or three out of the 577 seats in the National Assembly. It may win none at all.

In other words, history is about to repeat itself. The success of Mr Le Pen in the first round of the presidential election was a tragedy, for France's image abroad and its unity at home, even though four in five voters squashed him in the end. The whole process may now be repeated, as farce.

There are many explanations. There is the odd mood of a French electorate, divided between those open to Europe and the world and those who fear the EU and globalisation. There is a (media-exaggerated) rise in crime. There is, undoubtedly, a latent racism. But the oddities of the French electoral and political system must also carry a large part of the blame.

By the time that this bizarre season of elections is finally over on 16 June, President Jacques Chirac and his ever-quarrelling legions of the centre right might have scooped the pool. The President has already been re-elected with the highest score of any politician in any modern democracy. Over the two weeks of the parliamentary election, his supporters will probably achieve a comfortable majority and maybe a landslide.

President Charles de Gaulle's vision of a supreme presidency, backed by a tame parliament and a submissive and expendable prime minister, will have been restored. The nightmare of nine years of power-sharing out of the past 16 – which forced the democratic enemies of the centre right and left to "cohabit" in divided government – will have been ended. But many of France's problems will remain: the disaffection with the political system; the willingness to flirt with extremes of right and left; the hatred of change, masquerading as demand for change; the weak, top-down political parties, manipulated by egotistical politicians.

Seven weeks ago, the country, and the world, was shocked when the racist, anti-European, anti-American Mr Le Pen took second place (with nearly 17 per cent of the vote on a low turn-out) in the first round of the presidential election. The Socialist candidate, and prime minister, Lionel Jospin was eliminated, despite five years of moderate economic success in government.

Mainstream politicians of the right and left, and mainstream voters of the right and left, immediately confessed their sins. The politicians promised to put the interests of voters ahead of their own petty ambitions. The voters promised to vote and not to scatter their ballots over a rag-tag army of small parties.

The curious, and cumbersome, French election timetable gave them a chance to put their promises into action almost immediately. Unlike in the United States, where voters choose their president and congress on the same day, the French constitution demands separate presidential and parliamentary elections, each with two rounds of voting.

Why? The elections come so closely together because of an accident of the timetable. Both presidential and parliamentary mandates expired at roughly the same time. With the reduction of the presidential term from seven years to five, this threatens to be the normal electoral pattern in the future.

The two rounds were created to solve the problem of the chronic weakness of political parties in France. They allowed everyone to scatter their vote in the first round and then come together behind two broad families of left and right in the second round. The system has not been able to cope with the growth of a third force: Mr Le Pen's far right.

The dispersal and abstention of the left-wing vote in the first round of the presidential election on 21 April, and the slight increase in the working-class vote for the NF, left Mr Jospin in third position and eliminated.

Less than two months later, despite all the promises of a bright new political dawn, what do we see? There are 8,633 candidates in the parliamentary elections, an average of 15 candidates per constituency. Many of these candidates are no-hopers, seeking mostly to gather the public funds now available to political candidates in France (to discourage politicians from stealing money).

Both the centre right and centre left (Socialist, Communists and Greens) have made efforts to impose some "family" discipline and make sure their vote concentrates on one authorised candidate in the first round. President Chirac has even bolted together a completely new party, with the third-worldish title "Union pour la majorité présidentielle".

This effort has been succesful in some constituencies but has failed in scores of others, where there are two, or even three, rivals for the "mainstream" vote of left and right. Beyond that, there have been constant, sterile quarrels within the leadership of the left and accusations that Mr Chirac has used the political crisis to kill off all rival parties on the centre right.

The resolve of the vast majority of French people to reject the far right, which produced the huge pro-Chirac vote on 5 May, has, in any case, subsided. The old indifference and disaffection has returned. Visits to constituencies around the country suggest that even those voters who are determined to cast their ballots are often confused about whom to support. The mainstream vote will scatter again.

As a result, on Sunday night, the National Front will probably have scored its most impressive result in any French parliamentary election. It will have topped a scattered poll in scores of seats in the north, east and south of France. It may even be able to claim, statistically, to be the most powerful, single, political party in the country.

In the parliamentary elections, unlike the presidential poll, three, or even four candidates, can qualify for the second round. The first two go forward, plus any candidate who polls 12.5 per cent of the potential electorate. In about 100 seats there will be three-way battles the following Sunday between the right, centre right and left. In dozens of others, the NF will fight the centre right alone. In a handful, it will fight the left alone.

And yet, just as in the second round of the presidential election, Mr Le Pen will find it impossible to break out of the (worryingly large) minority that he commands. Almost all of the the seats where the NF topped the poll with a first-round score in the 20s, or below, will fall eventually, by large margins, to the centre right or centre left.

This is at once reassuring and dangerous. So long as it is accepted as a democratic party, the National Front ought to be represented in parliament. It is the exclusion of the far right's concerns from mainstream debate that makes the NF so poisonous and powerful.

If you exclude Mr Le Pen's paranoiac vision of a world run by Jewish lobbies, the NF's most productive vote-getting issues are little different from the themes of the Daily Mail or the right wing of the Conservative Party: rejection of Europe; fear of crime; fear of immigration. It would be better if such issues could be dealt with inside the system.

At the very least, the election of a few NF MPs would expose the debilitating lack of talent in Mr Le Pen's one-man band of a party (and that man is not even standing).

Many difficult issues will face the new French government, which will almost certainly be under the continuing premiership of Mr Chirac's interim choice, Jean-Pierre Raffarin. How to fund health care and pensions, while reducing the crushing tax burden? How to reassert the French influence in Europe? But the most urgently needed reform of all is a recasting of the constitution, the electoral system, and the mainstream political parties, to reflect the modern realities of French society and politics. What are the chances of that happening in the next five years? Nil.