PARIS: The French will claim as a matter of pride and principle that they vote with their hearts in the first round of a presidential election and their minds in the second.

“Ideas and ideology first, individual and president second,” a Peugeot-Citroen car worker on strike in the Paris suburbs had given as the reason why he was voting for a Trotskyist who stood no chance of winning. The collapse of support for candidates on both extremes of the political spectrum on Sunday, however, suggested the French electorate had undergone a last-minute change of heart and mind.

About 85 per cent turned out to vote, the highest since 1965, but just over three-quarters cast their ballots for one of the three main candidates — Nicolas Sarkozy, of the rightwing UMP party, at 31.1%, Socialist Segolene Royal with 25.5 per cent and centrist Francois Bayrou with 18.6 per cent.

While support for the extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, of the National Front, plunged to 10.4 per cent, its lowest in four presidential elections, the sense of catastrophic defeat was felt most acutely among la gauche de la gauche, the far left. Apart from the Revolutionary Communist League postman Olivier Besancenot, who came fifth with 4.13 per cent, none of the six far left candidates mustered more than two per cent.

Analysts said it was a victory for the vote utile, or practical vote. Leftwing voters who had attacked Ms Royal for not being “socialist” enough rallied behind her, fearful of a repeat of 2002. Five years ago, bickering socialists snubbed the Socialist party presidential hopeful Lionel Jospin and voted for minor candidates, but ended up unrepresented in a right versus extreme right runoff. “The election was clearly dominated by a central question, for or against Nicolas Sarkozy,” said Communist Marie-George Buffet, who polled 1.94 per cent, the lowest in party history.

It was a long and hard fall from the era of Communist leader Georges Marchais, who took the party to 15.3 per cent in the 1981 poll won by the Socialist Francois Mitterrand, and saw it rewarded with three ministerial posts. In those days, the broad left represented 47 per cent of the vote. On Sunday it mustered just over 36 per cent, leading the newspaper Le Monde to describe it as “in a coma”.

Arlette Laguiller, the Trotskyist leader of the Workers’ Struggle party and a veteran of six presidential elections, polled her lowest ever, 1.41 per cent. “I will vote for Segolene Royal,” she said. “I do this without reserve and without illusion.”

Pascal Perrineau, director of political research at the Paris Institute for Political Studies, said: “In 2002, groups of socialist electors thought they would take pleasure in voting for little candidates. They saw what happened and they learned a lesson. They remembered it this time. I think a lot of socialists made up their mind at the last minute to vote Segolene Royal.”

The collapse of the extreme-right vote was seen as an indication of how successfully Mr Sarkozy had appealed to National Front voters. Mr Le Pen referred to the “ideological victory” of his party and refused to say if it was his last campaign.

“Life is a series of battles and it’s the last one that counts,” he told supporters.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service