France reels under Le Pen's success in presidential polls
Monday April 22, 9:37 PM
A shocked France was reeling under protests after Jean-Marie Le Pen unexpectedly soared through a preliminary poll to a showdown election with incumbent conservative Jacques Chirac for the country's presidency.
National newspapers were devoted to Sunday's first-round presidential elections in which Le Pen -- against all indications by pollsters -- beat Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin into third place, gaining 17 percent of the vote behind Chirac with 19.7 percent.
Fourteen other candidates collected the rest of the ballots.
Jospin, 64, who scored 16 percent after a record low turnout, announced he would resign from political life after the second round of the elections, which take place on May 5.
His departure leaves the mainstream left-wing leaderless just before June legislative elections.
Politicians from Jospin's Socialists and other left-wing parties said they would vote Chirac in the second round just to counter Le Pen, and leaders of Muslim communities said they would do the same.
Le Pen was savouring his triumph. He told a jubilant audience at his headquarters west of Paris late Sunday that his victory was a "big defeat" to the country's two establishment leaders.
"Don't be afraid to dream, you the ordinary folk, the excluded grass-roots, the miners, steel workers and impoverished farmers, workers in all the industries ruined by the Maastricht treaty's euro-Globalism," he said.
But in the Paris metro, in cafes and at work, the French were grim or animatedly talking about the upset.
Commentators in the French media said they believed the vote for Le Pen was in fact a protest vote against 69-year-old Chirac and, in particular, Jospin.
They blamed the similarity of the men's policies, the "cohabitation" that forced the two to share executive power over the past five years and the feeling that elections would change nothing.
Jospin and Chirac's unremitting focus on crime especially played against them, and into the hands of Le Pen, who has long believed that a growing crime wave has its roots in the high rise in immigration.
In a bid to undo Le Pen's rise, high-profile Socialists close to Jospin -- Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former economy minister with ambitions to replace Jospin, and Jean Glavany, a former agriculture minister who managed Jospin's ill-fated campaign -- made it plain they would overcome traditional opposition and vote Chirac on May 5.
Political pundits said that, with such support, Chirac would undoubtedly win re-election, but that the June parliamentary elections were in question, as indeed was the whole constitutional arrangement that allowed cohabitation.
sg.news.yahoo.com
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