FRANCE: For once, there was a clear logic to the behaviour of French voters on Sunday, when they eliminated enough candidates to ensure that President Jacques Chirac will have an absolute majority in the National Assembly that will be elected on June 16th.
Sunday's vote followed in the spirit of the May 5th presidential poll, when - albeit with misgivings - France made Mr Chirac the embodiment of "republican values", to stop the extreme right-wing leader, Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen. Mr Chirac then begged for an end to "cohabitation" with the left, and France granted him his wish. His victory could be slightly diluted if there is strong left-wing mobilisation this week, but it is already almost embarrassing.
"Too strong a majority in the assembly is never a present for the resident of Matignon (the prime minister)", the Chirac-idolater Le Figaro said yesterday.
France has taken on some of the attributes of a Third World dictatorship: a hastily-constructed presidential party, the Union for the Presidential Majority (UMP) centred on himself; an 82 per cent "yes" vote on May 5th; an assembly in which parties loyal to Mr Chirac will hold around 400 of 577 seats, and a government that refuses to debate with its political opponents because it prefers to commune directly with "the people".
In an unprecedented concentration of power, Chirac loyalists will control the Senate and the National Assembly, the media watchdog CSA, the Constitutional Council, the majority of regions and departments.
France's two biggest cities, Paris and Lyons, are the only important power centres to escape Mr Chirac's purview.
The temptation to create a "Restoration", picking up where the centre-right went out in the 1997 general election will be great. The left-wing newspaper Le Monde pleaded with President Chirac to "rise above the fray" and remember that he owes his victory over Mr Le Pen to votes from the left. The ultimate check and balance is the certainty of another general election in, at most, five years' time. In 20 years, no outgoing French government has ever been re-elected.
Mr Le Pen had the ill grace to attribute the poor showing of the extreme right (12.48 per cent) to, among other things, the high number of female candidates fielded by his party.
It was difficult for Mr Le Pen's party, the National Front (FN), to mobilise voters behind hundreds of little-known candidates without Mr Le Pen's charisma or oratory skills. Some voters may have been frightened by Mr Le Pen's racist and anti-Semitic record, which was dredged up after April 21st. Allegations that he tortured in Algeria, published by Le Monde last week, didn't help either.
But the biggest blow to the FN came from the centre-right interior minister, Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, chosen in part for his appeal to extreme right-wing voters.
"The French are not fascists," Mr Sarkozy declared in the last campaign rally before Sunday's vote. "France in 2002 is not Germany in 1932. It is men and women who can't stand it anymore, who are fed up and who turn to us saying, 'Enough!'. They say it badly, by voting in the wrong direction, but they have a message for us . . ."
Mr Sarkozy commiserated with honest citizens "who cannot sleep at night because gangs of delinquents in the entry of their building keep them from sleeping - delinquents who've never worked in their lives."
The only thing that distinguished Mr Sarkozy's speech from a Le Pen tirade was his failure to mention the delinquents' ethnic origin. The message was simple: you don't need to vote for the FN; the centre-right will deal with crime and immigration.
The extreme right will be watching. "The UMP can't afford to slip up," the FN's national secretary Mr Carl Lang said. "If it does, the FN will be an immediate fallback."
