France desperately needs a new Mr Chirac

He is like a bruising footballer who knows how to get the ball but has no idea what to do with it afterwards

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Polls show Chirac will trounce Le Pen in second round

On Sunday, the worst President in the history of the Fifth Republic will be re-elected with the highest ever score in a French presidential election – and democrats everywhere will cheer. What an extraordinary last chapter to an extraordinary career. Jacques Chirac, who has always wanted to be everything to all men, will be re-elected with the support of millions of left-wing voters who despise him.

The President, who attracted less than one in five of the electors who bothered to turn out in the first round, will win the second round in a landslide, although perhaps not quite the landslide of epic, banana republic proportions indicated by the polls. The politician who, more than any other, symbolises the selfishness, immobility and corruption of some – not all – mainstream politics in France, is stomping around the country as the saviour and guarantor of its democratic future.

"This battle (against Jean-Marie Le Pen) is the battle of my life. It is a battle in the name of morality, in the name of a certain idea of France, which is rooted in the grandeur and the unity of the nation," Mr Chirac boomed last week.

At the same time, Mr Chirac is refusing, in the name of democracy, to meet Mr Le Pen in a face-to-face televised debate of the kind that has occurred in every presidential election since 1974.

He has some reasonable arguments for refusing. In the distorting mirror of television, it is difficult to marshall the complex arguments – for Europe, against gut racism, for economic openness – to defeat the demagogic one-liners of a television preacher like Mr Le Pen.

Unfortunately, many French people, including many supporters of Mr Chirac, have concluded that the President is scared. He is scared that, live on television, Mr Le Pen would tease him about the half-a-dozen or more criminal investigations into alleged corruption during Mr Chirac's time as mayor of Paris. He is scared that Mr Le Pen would raise the embarrassing issue of their secret meeting (denied by Mr Chirac) to discuss tactical voting between the two rounds of the 1988 presidential election.

Certainly, democracy could have wished for a less tattered standard-bearer than Jacques René Chirac. How seriously can one take the President's Damascene conversion to democratic morality? How credible a mandate will President Chirac II have to tackle the genuine problems and ease the often exaggerated anger of France in the next five years?

To be fair to Jacques Chirac, he has a mostly good record of resistance to racism and the far-right. The President has stood for everything and its opposite in the last three decades, but he has rarely lapsed in his visceral distaste for Mr Le Pen. Their meeting in 1988 was one such lapse; so was the use by Mr Chirac's party during this campaign of a leaflet on crime and violence that showed a grasping black hand on the cover.

Nonetheless, it was Jacques Chirac – not the alleged humanitarian François Mitterrand – who became the first French President to acknowledge the role of the French state in the deportation of Jews during the 1939-45 war. It was Jacques Chirac who organised the resistance of most of the centre-right to local alliances with Mr Le Pen after the far right scored heavily in the regional elections of 1998.

When the first-round result came through last Sunday week, showing that Mr Le Pen had reached the second round and that the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, had been eliminated, Mr Chirac's campaign workers celebrated with tribal joy. Mr Chirac was reportedly distraught. "I wish it had been Jospin," he whispered. He later called the Prime Minister to offer his commiserations.

Since then, Mr Chirac has been speaking in sombre tones about a "wounded France". He has banned music from his campaign meetings, as a way of saying: this is not a normal campaign; this is a national crisis. And yet, at the same time, under the cover of his shield of morality, the other Mr Chirac, the selfish, political manipulator, has been at work. In recent days, he has used the political crisis to force through something that he has long wanted. He has obtained agreement on a ramshackle, single party of the centre right, expanding his neo-Gaullist RPR to capture some of the leading barons of the other centre-right parties – the UDF and the DL – with promises of ministries in the next government.

François Bayrou, the leader of the UDF (and the principal victim of this mini-coup) said: "After the result of the first round, I thought: at last, everyone will grasp the depth of the what has gone wrong [with our political system]. It was 1958 again. Time to rebuild all our institutions ... I thought that we had reached a moment of history. Now I find that it is the moment for trickery."

Rather than set out a clear programme for government, rather than respond honestly to the confused anger of the electorate, Mr Chirac's mediocre lieutenants, and the mediocre lieutenants of other centre-right parties, have spent the past few days scrambling for personal advancement.

The prospects for the next five years, if the centre right returns to government, are correspondingly dim. But will this happen? After Sunday's second-round vote, Mr Jospin will resign and Mr Chirac will name a new centre-right Prime Minister to lead the democratic right in the campaign for parliamentary elections on 9 and 16 June.

With the new strength of the far right, with the belated resurgence of support for the mainstream left, Mr Chirac is not guaranteed a parliamentary majority on 16 June: far from it. His choice of Prime Minister will be crucial.

Two names have risen to the top of an unimpressive pile. One is Nicolas Sarkozy, 47, the son of a Hungarian aristocrat and the mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the richest suburbs of Paris. Mr Sarkozy is a lawyer and has been an apparatchik in Mr Chirac's party since he was a young man. The other is Jean-Pierre Raffarin, 53, a former businessman and minister for small businesses, a provincial political baron from Poitiers, and a member of Mr Bayrou's party, the UDF.

In this season, when a part of the French electorate has been persuaded by the far right that their own, and national interests, have been sold out to a pointy-headed, foreign-influenced, Parisocentric, technocratic élite, who will Mr Chirac choose? Almost certainly the pointy-headed, half-Hungarian Mr Sarkozy, rather than the solid, provincial Mr Raffarin, not for any good stick-it-to-Le Pen reasons but because Mr Chirac would feel more comfortable with an acolyte from his own party.

As a national politician, Mr Chirac's record is abysmal. He was an ineffectual Prime Minister for two short periods. He was President, in power as well as name, for only two years before calling an unnecessary parliamentary election which he lost in 1997.

He is like a bruising footballer who knows how to get the ball but has no idea what to do with it afterwards. France in the next five years needs a new Mr Chirac, a Mr Chirac who will justify, finally, his 35 years in politics: a man who will be able to separate the myths from the realities of the economic, social, European and international difficulties facing France. But nothing in his record, or in the way he has behaved since the first-round result, suggests that Mr Chirac is truly a changed man.

j.lichfield@independent.co.uk