And yet the final opinion polls ahead of Sunday's first round of voting suggest that the two survivors from Sunday's vote will engage in a straight fight between two outsiders from the usual French political elites, a man and a woman who represent the two biggest parties -- socialists and conservatives.

On the left Segolene Royal, the first woman with a decent chance of becoming president of France, confronts on the right Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian Jewish father, who studied law rather than attending the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration graduate school, the nursery of so many of France's post-war leaders.

Sarkozy holds a small but significant lead in the opinion polls. And yet more than one-third of the voters have yet to make up their minds, and many are juggling with the mathematics of tactical voting to see which two survivors on Sunday make it through to the final round two weeks later.

A straight fight between left and right would make for the clearest choice. But then neither Royal nor Sarkozy is entirely typical of their parties, nor of their base among the voters. Royal has tried hard to depict herself as a modern Socialist in the mold of Britain's Tony Blair or of former Democratic U.S. President Bill Clinton, who understands that the old working-class base and the old policies and slogans of the center-left cannot win modern elections.

Royal has sought to deny the Right its usual control of the patriotic vote, saying that she admires the American habit of displaying the national flag and calling for a similar display of the French tricoleur. She is tough on law and order, suggesting that young delinquents need the discipline of a military-style boot camp, and has defied the powerful labor unions, being caught in an unguarded moment complaining that many French teachers are shirkers. She has spoken, daringly for a French Socialist, of her admiration for Blair and for the more successful British economy with its relaxed labor laws and low unemployment.

And yet she has been let down by her fellow party leaders, several of whom she defeated to become the Socialist candidate, who have given her scant support and have burdened her campaign with the party's traditionally statist manifesto. Although her personal campaign to win the Socialist Party's nomination was based on creating jobs through opportunities, education and more room for small business and entrepreneurs to grow, she is now committed to back the party line on more state spending and more state subsidies for make-work programs. She has been reduced to that usual lame excuse of a politician whose sums do not add up, claiming that she will finance it all by "cutting back on waste."

The Socialist Party wanted to run against President George W. Bush and Tony Blair, to portray the conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy as an American-style neo-conservative and as an economic liberal who would expose France to the chill winds of globalization and competition. This negative campaign worked up to a point, but the positives of a left-of-center campaign have been lacking, and so has the party's traditions of unity and solidarity.

One of the less-than-loyal party grandees is her domestic partner and the father of her four children, the Socialist Party General Secretary Fran�ois Holland, and he grumbled openly and unhelpfully this week that it was "by no means certain" that she would win enough votes to reach the second round of the election.

France's current best-seller for the second week in a row is a book by her top economic adviser until February, Eric Besson, which is a cruel attack on the woman he worked for.

"She plays at being victimized, and manipulates feminism and the suffering of others who feel themselves to be excluded so that she builds a power base," Besson claims.

"What Segolene Royal is making of this presidential campaign is something deceitful and dangerous for the Left and for France," Besson goes on, in one of the most lethal attacks on a former boss in European political history.

Others, including former Prime Minister Michel Rocard and the popular former health minister (and founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres) Bernard Kouchner have openly predicted her defeat, unless she can reach a swift electoral pact with the centrist candidate Fran�ois Bayrou.

"I know it is politically incorrect to say so now, but if we want to win this election we need the votes from the center," Kouchner said Sunday.

Ironically, that is exactly what Royal was arguing last summer and autumn when she was campaigning for the party nomination, arguing that the Socialists had to reach out beyond their traditional base and appeal to women and to the young, to environmentalists and to business people, if they wanted to win power. That message was sufficient to win her the votes of the party membership (which grew dramatically during her campaign), but not the affection of the party bosses.

The difference between Blair and Royal is that Blair had three years to make his mark as party leader to win the internal debates and to promote his closest supporters to key positions. By contrast, Royal only won the party nomination at the end of last year, has had little time to rebuild the party and so is now in office as candidate but not in power.

If she makes it through to the second round with a straight fight against Sarkozy, she may be able to fight the last stage of the campaign more on her own terms. She could make it clear that the party manifesto is not hers and that her original message of openness and individual enterprise and social inclusion is the real guide to the way to govern as president.

But her own party's male grandees, who appear alternately jealous and affronted at her success, do not seem to want her to succeed and may condemn their party to impotence for another five years. If Royal wins, it will be in spite of her party, and could therefore be all the more significant a personal victory in that she will owe few debts to the party that let her down.

earlier related report
French left at all time low: so is electorate shifting to right?
Paris (AFP) April 18 - Four days ahead of the first round of presidential elections, France's political left is facing an awkward realisation: not since nearly 40 years ago has its combined vote been so low in the opinion polls.

While the socialist Segolene Royal can count on around 25 percent of votes on April 22, support for six minor candidates adds up to just ten percent -- an overall of no more than 35 percent for personalities campaigning on the ideas of the left.

The last time the left scored as badly was in the election that followed Charles de Gaulle's resignation in 1969 -- when the combined Communist, Socialist and Trotskyite support came to some 31 percent. That election was won by the right-winger Georges Pompidou.

The figures do not make it inevitable that right-wing favourite Nicolas Sarkozy will win in the run-off on May 6 -- other factors, notably Sarkozy's personality, will be at issue -- but they do raise the question whether the French electorate has taken this year a historic turn to the right.

"In normal times France leans to the right, but it is generally of the order of 55 percent to 45. If these figures are correct, then it is not just a swing -- it is a tsunami," said Jean-Philippe Roy, politics professor at Tours university in central France.

"In politics there is a concept which we call a 'critical election' -- an election in which the left-right balance makes a dramatic shift and taboos are broken. Nothing is the same again. Maybe we are heading for one here," he said.

However Roy said he was sceptical of the surveys, noting that the public's most pressing concerns -- as expressed to pollsters -- are themes traditionally linked to the left, such as unemployment, income levels and education.

"Either the public has decided the left's answers to these issues are not credible, or the estimations are wrong," he said.

According to most surveys, Sarkozy can count on some 28 percent on Sunday and the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen around 15.

Centrist candidate Francois Bayrou stands at around 19 percent, suggesting that he is attracting a good many votes from the left. However Bayrou's Union for French Democracy (UDF) party is certainly not a left-wing party, having been in almost permanent alliance with the right since its creation.

Royal herself appears to have recognised a rightward move among the electorate, and many of her campaign proposals clearly mark her difference from the traditional left: her call for boot-camps for young delinquents, for instance, and for national flags in every home.

Sarkozy has also moved to the right ahead of Sunday's vote -- calling for a ministry of immigration and national identity for example -- and makes no secret of his intention to poach far-right voters, who he says have been unfairly demonised.

Oddly only Le Pen has apparently moved leftwards, appealing for the first time in his party's history for the votes of Muslim immigrants.

"The shift to the right was already visible in the 2002 election, when law-and-order came to dominate the campaign," said Dominique Reynie, a professor at the Paris School of Political Sciences.

"Since then we've had globalisation, September 11, immigration has become a major issue. The Socialists had to choose someone like Segolene Royal, because she speaks about these issues in a non-naive way. In this day and age, a 'nice' candidate is not going to succeed. You have to be tough," he said.

Another theme that has been taken up by other candidates is Sarkozy's insistence on the rehabilitation of the work ethic -- the public clearly approving of calls for an end to welfare dependency.

"People think there should be less dependence on the state -- that they should take back control of their lives. In France that's a right-wing idea -- elsewhere it's just common sense," said Reynie.

"Work, homeland, family -- never in a presidential campaign have we spoken so much about these themes," said France-Soir columnist Gerard Carreyrou. "(Wartime Vichy leader) Marshal Petain must be celebrating in his tomb."

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