French Election Upset Stuns Europe
Thousands Protest Victory of Far-Right Candidate
By Paul Holmes
Reuters
PARIS (April 22) - Reeling from a stinging rebuke from voters, France's political mainstream rallied to President Jacques Chirac Monday to confront a challenge in the presidential election from far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
In a showing that shamed many French, sent tremors through Europe and ended the career of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, former paratrooper Le Pen came in second to conservative Chirac in Sunday's first round to enter a May 5 runoff.
Riding a wave of discontent over crime, immigration and establishment politics, the veteran of the extreme right, 73, pushed Jospin into third place and placed a huge question mark over the stability of France's political system.
Up to 10,000 protesters marched in Paris overnight shouting ''Le Pen is a fascist'' while police fired teargas at hundreds of demonstrators who threw barriers in the Place de la Concorde.
Further protests were planned and dismay rippled through France's Jewish and Muslim communities, the largest in Europe, at Le Pen's surge of working class support.
Pollsters who had failed to predict the National Front party leader's rise forecast a second round landslide for Chirac as the 69-year-old incumbent began gaining support from arch-rivals on the left and right to battle the threat from Le Pen.
''We shall vote for Jacques Chirac in the second round even if that obviously appears to us as an appalling state of affairs,'' said Vincent Peillon, spokesman for a Socialist Party left leaderless after Jospin announced he was quitting politics.
Unimpressed by the breadth of opposition, Le Pen switched his focus Monday to Europe in the hope of tapping a vein of disaffection with European Union integration and anger at France's perceived decline in a global world.
MARKETS SPOOKED
''I call on patriots, sovereignists and authentic republicans to unite around my candidacy, to oppose the technocratic Europe of Brussels and create a true popular force to defend national independence and oppose globalization,'' he said in a statement.
France has long regarded itself as an engine of an integrated Europe but the issue hardly figured in campaigning for the first round.
The French voted only narrowly in favor of the Maastricht Treaty on European economic and monetary integration in a referendum in 1992, when Le Pen championed a ''No'' vote.
Le Pen's anti-immigrant, anti-EU policies spooked markets into trading the euro single currency lower and French stocks also opened a fraction weaker.
Though the overall market impact was seen as limited, some economists read the first round vote as a blow to mainstream politics and free market economics that would haunt Chirac and whatever government emerges from legislative elections in June.
''You won't see Chirac saying 'Let's pull out of the euro', but there are other worries for him and the next government,'' said Jean-Francois Mercier, a Frenchman working as European economist with Schroder Salomon Smith Barney in London.
''Financial markets will have to rethink their strategy and politicians rethink their message, and voters will need a few days to reflect,'' he said.
Jospin, unable to capitalize on his coalition government's economic record in a dull and gaffe-ridden campaign, slumped to just 16 percent of the vote Sunday, one point behind Le Pen.
Chirac, bidding for a second term in the face of a string of corruption allegations, also got a slap in the face, polling under 20 percent in the worst showing by any front-runner in the 44-year history of France's Fifth Republic.
Abstentions were a record 28 percent, with nearly one third of votes spread among contenders from the extreme right and extreme left in a crowded field of 16 presidential candidates.
Analysis of the result showed Le Pen had finished first in nine of France's 22 regions and displaced the Socialists and Communists as the choice of working class voters in depressed areas hard hit by the demise of traditional industries.
FED UP VOTERS
Voters surveyed at random voiced a host of reasons for backing Le Pen, ranging from his blunt message on crime to the disappearance of the franc with the advent of the euro and the failure of mainstream politicians to keep their promises.
''I wanted to see the entire ruling class removed,'' said Christophe, a pharmacist in Paris who would give only his first name. ''I voted for Chirac in 1995, but nothing he said he would do has happened.''
Beyond France, politicians across a wide spectrum voiced a rare near-consensus of disapproval at Le Pen's showing and alarm at the message of the French vote for other EU countries grappling with alienation at the grass roots.
''A result where 30 percent of the electors abstained, and 30 percent of those who took part voted for candidates of the extreme right or extreme left, is likely to hold lessons not just for France but for the entire European political class,'' said European Parliament president Pat Cox, an Irish liberal.
Jospin's defeat was the latest in a series of blows to the European left that began in Italy last year, spread to Denmark and Portugal and could engulf the Netherlands and Germany, where ruling Social Democrats lost a key regional vote Sunday.
France also votes for a new National Assembly in June, when Chirac will clearly be hoping the debacle on the left will win him a center-right majority in parliament and draw a line under the awkward power sharing of the past five years with Jospin.
Analysts, however, said fickle voters offered no real choice in the presidential runoff might opt to limit Chirac's power by electing a left-wing government in a possible knock-out blow to France's existing political system.
''A political society has just destroyed itself,'' said RTL radio analyst Alain Duhamel. ''We will have to build another one, and it will not be easy to be the architect.''
REUTERS Reut11:06 04-22-02
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