It's Not Over Yet, Folks

In the end, it was a landslide. on May 5 France re-elected Jacques Chirac as President with 82% of the vote, the biggest majority since direct presidential elections were introduced in 1962. The following day Chirac appointed a tubby local centrist named Jean-Pierre Raffarin to be Prime Minister of an interim government of Chirac loyalists, pending parliamentary elections next month. With disorienting speed, France whipped back to normality after a fortnight of unprecedented mass demonstrations against Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front (FN).

Despite the appearance of business as usual, though, the country is living through a strange hiatus. With the left-wing electorate voting massively for Chirac to signal its rejection of Le Pen, the second round vote was anything but a clear mandate for the incumbent President. He won a meager 19.9% of ballots in the first round, against Le Pen's 16.9%. "The real presidential election will take place in the second round of parliamentary elections on June 16," says Dominique Chagnollaud, director of the Center of Constitutional and Political Studies in Paris. "Chirac was elected thanks to the left. He's now going to have to get himself re-elected by the right."

Should he fail in that task, Chirac will be condemned to a rerun of his last lame-duck presidency, in which power was effectively wielded by Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's leftist government. No sooner had Chirac's victory been declared than trusted lieutenants like ex-P.M. Alain Juppé began hitting the TV studios to condemn the "immobility and impotence" that would result from the nightmare scenario of a left-wing victory in June. "These parliamentary elections are Chirac's last chance," says Pascal Perrineau, director of Paris' Center for the Study of French Politics. "Either he puts the country's institutions back on their feet again, or it's the end of the President's leading role in the Fifth Republic." That's why Chirac spent the week vigorously trying to reassert his authority, including appointing a relative nobody like Raffarin as Prime Minister. When a suicide bomb attack in Karachi left 11 French nationals dead last Wednesday, Chirac announced that he — rather than Raffarin — had dispatched new Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie to consult with Pakistani authorities. Though the new minority government can't enact any legislation, it will launch high-profile police operations to allay public fears on crime, cut taxes by 5% and start negotiations with employers and workers on the future of the 35-hour workweek. The overriding goal is building an electoral majority for Chirac's forces in June. "We need a policy that's open to the left while reassuring right-wing voters who were tempted by Le Pen," says Patrick Devedjian, the new Minister for Local Liberties. "In five weeks' time, we're going to be able to give citizens concrete indications of our policy rather than empty words."

Chirac's pitch for the center is made easier by the Socialists' lurch to the left. Following the far-left's unexpectedly strong showing in the first round and the revolutionary rhetoric on offer in the anti-Le Pen street protests, the Socialists last week adopted a new program that promises to raise the minimum wage, tax international capital flows, end all privatization of public services and make any new deregulation dependent on E.U. acceptance of state monopolies in certain industries. The aim is to seduce the party's lost voters and win a left-wing majority in June. "It's not the most probable outcome, but it's a possibility," concedes Socialist Senator Henri Weber. To make it happen, the left will have to reunify the fragile coalition that exploded during the presidential campaign. "A left victory looks impossible, but given what's just happened, nothing's impossible," says Green Party official Jean-Luc Bennahmias. "This time we've got a knife to our throats."

In contrast to the anemic presidential campaign, France looks set for an old-style right-left slanging match in June. The result will depend on which way the FN's electorate jumps. Out of 577 constituencies "there'll be at least 250 three-way battles in which the FN holds the balance of power, and their outcome is completely unpredictable," says Chagnollaud. "It'll come down to purely local criteria." And the stakes are high. If the presidential battle turned into a national referendum on Le Pen, June's parliamentary election will constitute a plebescite on the Gaullist institutions and their bizarre mixture of presidential and parliamentary regimes. Depending on whether he wins or loses, Jacques Chirac will go down in history as either the man who reasserted their authority or the man who dug their grave.