French election '97: Tremor shakes right and raises fears of a European earthquake to come

Chirac's forces are set to tear themselves apart as FN surveys wreckage with glee

The humiliating defeat of the centre-right in the French parliamentary election could lead to the biggest and bloodiest re-alignment of party politics for 20 years.

President Jacques Chirac's RPR or neo-Gaullist party is in danger of tearing itself into at least two pieces. The UDF alliance of small centrist and rightist parties may collapse. There was talk yesterday of renegade elements of both groups merging into new parties: a free-market, liberal party and a statist, nationalist party. The most centrist part of the UDF, the Force Democrate, was even said to be considering throwing in its lot with the new Socialist-led government.

The far-right National Front (FN) is surveying the wreckage with glee. It hopes to form tactical alliances with bits of the old coalition, helping to bring its anti-immigrant, anti-European, anti-American extreme-nationalist ideas into the mainstream of French politics.

But the election may also bring to a blood-splattered conclusion the internal power struggle within the FN itself. The party's de facto number two, Bruno Megret, yesterday raised for the first time in public, during a radio interview, the most taboo subject on the far-right: the successor to Jean-Marie Le Pen, who will be 69 this month. Mr Megret, who was once in the RPR, believes he is better placed than the rabble-rousing Mr Le Pen to take advantage of the new opportunities presented by the rout, and internal strife, of the centre-right.

Before the election, the RPR had 257 seats in the National Assembly; it now has 134. The UDF had 206 before the poll; it now has 108. In the first round, the RPR-UDF coalition took just 31 per cent of the vote, the worst performance by the centre-right in nearly 40 years.

The blame for this debacle falls mostly on President Chirac, who called the election nine months early and insisted on maintaining his unpopular acolyte, Alain Juppe, as Prime Minister.

Mr Chirac will, in theory, remain President for another five years. He was said yesterday to be desperately attempting to persuade the scattered forces of the right to regroup around himself. But the bitterest of the repercussions were within the RPR, the party he founded 21 years ago to take over the mantle of General Charles de Gaulle. The editor of Le Monde, Jean-Marie Colombani, wrote yesterday that the death of Gaullism, so often predicted, may have been made inevitable by Mr Chirac's miscalculations and the magnitude of Sunday's disaster. Without the glue of success and self-preservation, the contradictions in Gaullism may burst open.

Philippe Seguin, the man who might have been prime minister if the right had won, stated yesterday that the "knives were out" in the RPR. He made it clear he would challenge Mr Juppe for the leadership of the party, or perhaps create an alternative nationalist and statist party of his won.

Edouard Balladur, the former prime minister and a leading RPR figure, was meeting supporters in private yesterday. He was said to be considering forming a new, liberal party, dedicated to the shrinking of the French state. Charles Pasqua, the former RPR interior minister, was said to be considering striking out to "refound" Gaullism.

Life was little easier in the other partner in the ejected centre-right coalition, the UDF, which is itself an alliance of small right and centre parties, whose main centrist and rightist components were said to be considering desertion.

Alain Madelin, the former finance minister and free-marketeer, said he would "reclaim his liberty", which may mean that he will join forces with Mr Balladur and the economically conservative wing of the RPR. Francois Bayrou of Force Democrate talked of the need for "new political forces". He was reported to be considering taking his 43 deputies out of the UDF and forming a separate force in the National Assembly, possibly in loose alliance with the new government of the Left.

The great unknown was whether any of these splinters of the centre-right might be tempted to make tactical bargains with the FN. In making the first signs of a move against Mr Le Pen, Mr Megret was encouraging the possibility of such unholy alliances. But it seemed unlikely that any of the mainstream centre-right figures would be tempted to take such a potentially ruinous step.

How they voted

Rally for the Republic (RPR) - 134 seats; Union for French Democracy (UDF) - 108; Independent Right - 14; Socialist Party - 241; Communist Party - 38; Ecologists - 7; Independent Left - 21; National Front - 1; non-affiliated: 1

Voter turnout: 71.1 per cent