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France is set to turn a 'historic page'
By Katrin Bennhold
Published: April 20, 2007

PARIS: Breaking with the past has been the leading theme in the most unpredictable and passion-rousing presidential election in France's recent history. On Sunday voters will choose two candidates for a runoff next month. Whoever they pick to succeed President Jacques Chirac will probably usher in a new style of politics.

Three of the four main candidates are given a serious chance of winning the Élysée Palace: Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right front-runner; Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate; and François Bayrou, a centrist in third place.

Sarkozy, 52, Royal, 53, and Bayrou, 55, all represent a change in generation and in style in a country that for three decades has been run by presidents groomed in the days of Charles de Gaulle, the founder of France's Fifth Republic.

All three are post-ideological pragmatists. In a campaign that has been more about values than issues, and more about personalities than programs, they have shaken up the entrenched political landscape by breaking taboos in their own camps and venturing onto rival territory. They have called for a reform of the country's hierarchical political institutions and they have dared, though with increasing timidity, to voice the need to fully reconcile the French with the market economy.

"Whatever the result of this election, France is turning a historic page," Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former president, said in an interview Friday. "This is, in some ways, the end of an obsession to be different. For the first time we are moving closer to the classic political choices on offer in other big European democracies."

Royal and Bayrou, analysts said, could mark the birth of a social democracy à la française, one that fully embraces the market economy, especially if the elimination of one of them in the first round leads to an alliance with the other in the hope of beating Sarkozy in the second round.

Sarkozy, meanwhile, has moved away from the statist credo that marked Chirac's 12-year tenure, turning his Gaullist party into something mirroring Christian Democratic parties in neighboring countries.

Royal, who outmaneuvered several male heavyweights in her party to win the nomination in a landslide, has disappointed those who expected her to swiftly purge the Socialist Party of its Marxist impulses.

She presented a strongly leftist economic program. And Sarkozy's pledges for far-reaching economic reforms have recently been watered down with interventionist language reminiscent of old Gaullist instincts.

But once other candidates on the fringe of the 12-way race, both from the far left and the far right, are eliminated in the first round, a clearer - and more modern - choice should crystallize as the two survivors clamber to the center, Giscard said.

So far Sarkozy has faced competition from two far-right politicians, Jean-Marie Le Pen and Philippe de Villiers. Royal, meanwhile, has had to worry about four Communists trying to take votes away from her.

"The issues of the future - like a Socialist Party that hasn't managed to embrace social democracy or the market economy that is not yet really part of our mentality - those issues will only appear in the campaign for the second round," Giscard said.

If there is a good chance that France's next president will challenge at least some deep-seated traditions, it is anyone's guess who that president will be.

The last opinion polls published Friday before a campaign blackout began ahead of the voting suggested that Sarkozy and Royal would get into the second round on May 6. But with one in three voters still described as undecided or wavering, the election is wrapped in suspense.

"The novelty of this election is that four candidates have a chance of making it into the second round. That has not happened before," said Pierre Giacometti, director of political research at the Ipsos polling institute in Paris.

The unpredictability was captured in a CSA poll that showed Royal closing in on Sarkozy. Twenty-six percent of 1,002 respondents said they intended to vote for Royal in the first round, compared with 27 percent for Sarkozy.

Bayrou and Le Pen trailed at 17 percent and 16 percent respectively.

In a hypothetical second-round duel, Royal and Sarkozy ran even, according to the poll.

On Friday, the three main candidates made their last symbolic appearances. Sarkozy rode a horse through a bull farm in southern France, Royal met voters at a trendy street market in Paris and Bayrou visited a World War I memorial in Verdun. All of them appeared relieved that a hard-fought election season was drawing to a close.

A campaign that last autumn started out focusing on hard issues like economic growth and public debt soon changed into a fast-moving sequence of issues, influenced by news events and opinion polls. At one time the race was caught up in shows of solidarity with striking Airbus workers and then an outbreak of rioting at a Paris train station and talk of law and order.

But in recent weeks the tone has turned nasty. Royal accused Sarkozy of "brutality" and being too pro-American, a powerful sting in France.

Sarkozy assailed her for lacking presidential stature and competence. Bayrou denounced what he called the "collusion" of the two main parties to hold power.

Le Pen, in style, went furthest, criticizing Royal for never marrying François Hollande, the head of the Socialist Party and the father of Royal's four children, and saying that Sarkozy, a son of a Hungarian immigrant father and a mother of Greek-Jewish descent, was not French enough to run for the highest office.

Royal and her companion set a "deplorable example with their structureless family," Le Pen said at his last major rally Thursday night. On Sunday, his target was Sarkozy: "Mr. Sarkozy, the world does not revolve around your little person," Le Pen said. "Long before your parents came from Hungary or Greece, there was at the heart of the French people a national current that cared more about the interests of the country than about its ruling class."

Few believe that Le Pen can again squeeze into the runoff as he did spectacularly in 2002, when he beat the Socialist candidate and faced Chirac in the second round. If he defies the odds again, his opponent would almost certainly beat him in a landslide as Chirac did five years ago.

Le Pen's presence in the second round, however unlikely, would deprive France for another five year-term of an administration with a clear mandate.

Royal appeared concerned about being eliminated by Bayrou or Le Pen on Sunday, and peppered her last speeches with appeals to vote for her. Should she be eliminated in the first round, it would spell a deep and perhaps fatal crisis for the Socialist Party.

Sarkozy, for his part, appeared to be confident that he will make it into the second round. During his last major rally in Marseille on Thursday, he did not specifically ask the French to cast their ballot for him. The first round, he said, is "only a warm-up."

But despite his slight lead in the polls, he is not personally popular and has increasingly been the target of what is called the anti-Sarkozy movement. His posters throughout the country have routinely been defaced, his face given a Hitler mustache or Dracula fangs.

To counter the negative images, the Sarkozy campaign Thursday called on supporters around the country to organize festive events. The color blue used by his party is the motif: The operation's official Web site features a blue sandwich and penne soaked in blue coloring.

The campaign is sending up blue helium balloons with the words "Sunday, I vote Sarko" over the Jura mountains in eastern France. In outdoor markets in Rodez, in central France, Sarkozy boosters will offer passersby locally made blue cheese.

France is set to turn a 'historic page' (http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/20/news/france.php)