French Voters Suffer Election Day Hangover

by Julio Godoy

"I thought that the first round was only a show, and the important vote would be in the second round on May 5," she says.

She discovered how wrong she was when she returned to hear that low voter turnout had allowed the arch-conservative candidate Jean Marie Le Pen to qualify for the final run-off with incumbent President Jacques Chirac.

"I feel guilty," Janine confesses. "I am ashamed to see that this ogre Le Pen has got this far. I am ashamed that now I have to go to vote for Jacques Chirac, a corrupt man with no morals, whom I despise, only to stop Le Pen doing any more harm to my country."

Janine regrets her own apathy, and that of thousands of others who did not vote. Those abstentions sealed the defeat of Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin.

"If I had known that his presence in the second round depended on my vote, I would have cast my vote even if I were dying," Janine now says.

Incumbent Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who came third in the Apr. 21 elections, needed 200,000 votes to beat Le Pen.

Chirac got 5.7 million votes, Le Pen 4.8 million and Jospin 4.6 million. Results show that Le Pen gained from the abstention of some 12.6 million voters.

Jospin also suffered from the split of leftist vote. With just a third of the votes cast for left-wing candidate Christiane Taubira, who got less than 3 percent of the vote, Jospin would have comfortably beaten Le Pen.

Janine is not alone in her regrets over that fateful Sunday.

"I voted Olivier Besancenot (a Trotskyite candidate, who took 1.2 million votes) out of protest, but now I'm sorry," says Anthony, another Parisian.

Both Janine and Anthony say that neither the media nor the major parties helped them understand the importance of the first round of the elections. Opinion polls and the media misled voters by publishing survey results suggesting that Jospin and Chirac were sure contenders in the final run-off.

Since Apr. 21, Janine and Anthony have been attending rallies against Le Pen. In a demonstration last night, Janine carried a banner saying "Voter escroc, pas facho," -- "Vote the crook, not the fascist."

The banner speaks of the hard choice many voters are facing: choosing Chirac, who is suspected of misappropriating public funds, just to stop Le Pen.

French leftist voters and most left-wing political parties seem to have accepted this choice. With the sole exception of the Trotskyite party Force Ouvriere, all other left parties, including the Socialist, Green and Communist parties, have called on French voters to "form a front against fascism."

Francois Hollande, general secretary of the Socialist Party, seemed to speak for many on the left when he said: "That I publicly admit that on May 5 I will vote for Chirac shows that my vote has only one meaning: to make clear that we cannot accept Le Pen."

Hollande said: "Chirac is our adversary, but Le Pen is our enemy."

The Catholic Church, unions and several non-governmental organizations have also publicly urged French citizens to reject Le Pen.

The Central Generale de Travailleurs (CGT) has asked French voters to "do everything possible to stop Jean Marie Le Pen." In its declaration, the CGT did not mention Jacques Chirac.

New opinion polls make Chirac a sure winner in the final round, with more than 70 percent of the vote.

Le Pen, 74, a former French military officer, has been accused of torturing Algerian independence activists in the 1950s. He has called the genocide of Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War a "detail of history."

Le Pen wants immigrants expelled, an end to France's participation in European institutions, and reintroduction of the franc in place of the new European currency, the Euro.

Several political parties, unions and NGOs have called for a massive demonstration in Paris on May 1, celebrated as Labor Day and also the day the French honor Joan of Arc, a national symbol of heroism and popular resistance.

On that day, Le Pen's party, the National Front, is also preparing to hold a demonstration in Paris.

The Socialist defeat in the Apr. 21 elections has brought a wave of sympathy for the party. Francois Hollande says "hundreds of young people are coming to our headquarters all over the country to join the party."

But for Jospin, who announced his resignation as prime minister and retirement from political life, the sympathy now cannot replace the votes he lost.