June 3, 2002	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 21,1423

PARIS: A week before crucial parliamentary elections, France seems to have already forgotten the shock that electrified the country in the presidential vote in April.

Four weeks ago May Day rallies brought over 400,000 marchers onto the streets of France in panicked protest at the sudden rise of right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen just days before, when he came second behind President Jacques Chirac.

Commentators said voter apathy and political fragmentation, with numerous candidates standing, had allowed Le Pen to beat Socialist premier Lionel Jospin into second place in round one.

Now, as France gears up for June’s legislative elections that will determine whether conservative Chirac has a parliament behind him or is hobbled by another era of power-sharing with Socialists, political analysts say the country seems not to have learned its lessons.

“We are repeating exactly the same mistakes as before the first round of the presidential election...as if (Le Pen’s) National Front hadn’t made any waves,” political commentator Alain Duhamel wrote in an editorial.

“Difficult debates are being avoided, candidates are proliferating...and everything is happening amid generalised indifference, like a film without its soundtrack.”

Opinion polls give Chirac’s Union for a Presidential Majority (UMP) 36 per cent in the June 9 first round of the parliamentary election, to 34.5 per cent for the left.

They also give the anti-immigrant National Front (FN) a solid 13 per cent of the vote — in line with the 14 per cent it was averaging before the presidentials.

Yet most French are, once again, heartily bored by the campaign. Most are more concerned about the state of injured World Cup footballer Zinedine Zidane’s left thigh than the future of French democracy.

Just 15 people showed up to greet Communist Party leader Robert Hue on Friday at the gates of the Dassault Aviation factory in the former working-class bastion of Argenteuil.

And only 700 showed up when Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin held his first electoral meeting 10 days before the polls. Pundits say thousands would have turned out in the past.

DANGER BEHIND THE TORPOR: Campaigning has failed to light up on the left as it licks its wounds after its presidential wipe-out, unable to rally wholeheartedly behind the idea of cohabitation, or power-sharing, that it condemned ahead of the presidential poll.

The right meanwhile, afraid to rock the boat with contentious themes, is campaigning by default via the anti-crime actions of its interim government.

“Never has the political climate been so anaesthetized,” lamented an editorial in Montpellier-based daily, Midi Libre.

The pre-electoral torpor, proliferation of candidates and the absence of debate all look like a replay of the presidential elections.

A rainbow-hued spectrum of 8,455 candidates will stand across France’s 577 constituencies next Sunday, meaning voters can pick and choose between an average of 15 representatives.

That echoes the record 16 choices they had for president, where the huge choice of candidates fragmented the vote of the mainstream, to the advantage of the extremes.

“I fear the dispersion (of votes),” Raffarin told reporters on Saturday. “There are a lot of candidates and that could create confusion...between electoral tickets, between local and national interests.”

Indeed, his conservative UMP grouping may have most to lose. The FN could split the conservative vote in as many as 300 constituencies, political analysts say, creating three-way run-offs on June 16’s second round between the far-right, the conservatives and the Socialists.

Such races generally benefit the left.

The FN itself could also win enough deputies to deprive the National Assembly of a clear majority.—Reuters