May 7, 2002	Tuesday	Safar 23, 1423

PARIS: The euphoria of Sunday night’s champagne celebrations at Jacques Chirac’s campaign headquarters is unlikely to have lingered much beyond the early hours of Monday morning: rarely has a newly elected French president faced such an uncertain and obstacle-strewn first 100 days.

Mr Chirac, comfortably returned to the Elysee palace with an expected 82 per cent of the vote against his far-right rival Jean-Marie Le Pen’s 18 per cent, starts his five-year term unsure how much real support he has, uncertain of being able to put his programme into practice and unconfident of his future in a France shaken to its political roots.

The 69-year-old president’s first problem — and one he will have difficulty escaping throughout his tenure — is that he will never know just how many of the 33.5 million people who turned out yesterday actually voted for him, as opposed to casting their ballot against Mr Le Pen.

“Sadly for him, he wouldn’t have had a real mandate no matter how high he scored,” said one EU diplomat last night. “His re- election wasn’t about him being re-elected, it was about shutting the door on Le Pen. By rights, Chirac shouldn’t be able to claim any endorsement of either himself or his programme from it.”

After 40 years in French politics, the battle-hardened Mr Chirac is unlikely to take that view, at least in public. But the fact remains that the bizarre circumstances of his re-election — in which even his most bitter foes campaigned for his victory — will further weaken a credibility dented by unanswered sleaze allegations and an all but non-existent record from his first seven years in office.

The only meaningful figure likely to be retained from Mr Chirac’s re-election, in fact, is his score from the first round: 19.88 per cent, the lowest ever recorded by a front runner in French presidential election history.

More concretely, Mr Chirac will not know until June 16 whether he will be able to implement his election pledges to crack down dramatically on crime, cut taxes and bolster business performance. That will depend on whether the French right, led by the president’s RPR party, manage to land a majority in the National Assembly after next month’s two-round general election.

For the time being, winning a comfortable parliamentary majority is the conservative president’s over-riding priority. Key to that goal will be Mr Chirac’s choice of prime minister and cabinet, due to be announced within the next 24 hours after the defeated Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, formally resigns this morning.

The two chalk-and-cheese favourites to replace Mr Jospin as interim PM, Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Nicholas Sarkozy, reflect the next major dilemma facing Mr Chirac. To what extent should he and his future government take account of the unique circumstances of his re-election — showing, for example, that the voices of the vast anti-Le Pen rallies of the past two weeks have been heard and noted?

The president’s camp is divided over this issue. Some, like the influential RPR MP Francois Fillon, argue for a broad-based, unifying government encompassing businessmen and centrists and aimed at carrying out a number of key, uncontroversial reforms in a bid to appeal to — or at least not offend — as many French as possible. Their candidate is Mr Raffarin, an amiable, provincial moderate and popular former state secretary for small businesses from the free-market Liberal Democracy party.

The rest, headed by the RPR’s spitfire party chairwoman, Michele Alliot-Marie, say the reason why Mr Chirac (and, incidentally, Mr Jospin) performed so badly in the first round was that voters could no longer tell the difference between left and right. Their candidate is Mr Sarkozy, long-standing Chirac loyalist, mayor of the smart western Paris suburb of Neuilly and a political pitbull on the right of the RPR.

However he decides to solve the issue of his non-traditional voters, Mr Chirac will also face the problem of defusing those who voted for Mr Le Pen and who feel unhappy that their candidate’s democratic advance to the second round was greeted with a deafening campaign labelling his supporters Nazis, fascists, racists and the Republic’s worst enemies.

Those voters are only likely to have been more reinforced in their views over the past week or two. Their votes will transfer automatically to the National Front candidates in June’s general election, which will leave the far-right party holding the balance of power in some 250 of France’s 577 constituencies. If, as in 1997, that ends up splitting the right-wing vote and seeing a left-wing parliament elected, Mr Chirac’s second term in office will effectively be over almost before it has begun. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.