FRANCE has a rendezvous with Europe, President Jacques Chirac told the French people last night. If his country is to be on time for the spring 1998 euro day of reckoning, its own schedule for legislative elections would have to move forward.

Never before has a European leader dissolved parliament and called snap elections in the name of Europe. Rarely has European integration been so firmly anchored on the front centre stage of domestic politics.

But Mr Chirac is having a hard time convincing the French that Europe building is the sunlit path to the future.

In Ireland, political parties agree on Europe and a high economic growth rate means the Maastricht convergence criteria can be met without sacrifice. The picture could hardly be more different in France, where two years of right wing government have failed to turn the economy around, and where Maastricht is blamed for the seemingly endless and ineffectual economic strait-jacket.

Even before the campaign started, the opposition Socialist leader, Mr Lionel Jospin, was using Maastricht against Mr Chirac the centre right's implied message of "vote for us so we can impose more austerity measures" does sound like political suicide.

In a radical departure from past pro-Europe Socialist policy, Mr Jospin told French television last Sunday night that "if to respect the 3 per cent (of GNP budget deficit criteria) . . . we have to impose, with our unemployment rate, ... a new round of austerity treatment on the country, my answer is no. No to the absolute respect of the 3 per cent criteria."

The Communist leader, Mr Robert Hue, immediately hailed Mr Jospin's statement as positive, opening the way for a Socialists Communist election alliance, to be concluded at a meeting between the two men on April 29th.

Mr Chirac has taken a huge risk in calling elections now on the grounds that a nine month campaign would paralyse his government and muddle the drive toward Economic and Monetary Union.

THE French newspaper Liberation compared the French President to a soldier who has pulled the pin on his hand grenade and so must throw it after speculation on the dissolution of parliament set in early this month, Mr Chirac was caught up in his advisers' logic and the move became inevitable.

Mr Chirac's decision was not entirely dictated. by the European deadline there were many tactical reasons for calling an election now. A secret poll by the Renseignements genernux, the intelligence agency, concluded that although the right would lose seats in an early election, it stood to lose far more if the present Assembly continued until March.

The administration needed a second wind for the second stage of Mr Chirac's seven year term, officials kept saying. A brew of corruption scandals involving Chirac associates has simmered for months, and risks boiling over later in the year.

A long campaign would also have helped opposition candidates by giving them time to become as well known as the centre right incumbents who held four fifths of the seats in the outgoing assembly.

Time would have allowed the extreme right National Front to build on the momentum of its February mayoral election victory in Vitrolles, and it might have helped the Socialist Party recover from its defeat in Vitrolles, itself a result of the now discredited Mitterrand era.

Furthermore, the Socialists last year promised that one third of their candidates would be women. In a May campaign chopped up by three long holiday weekends, these female candidates will gain little voter recognition.

LAST but not least, time was working against the right's economic record. At

8 per cent, French unemployment is among the highest in Europe and shows little sign of improvement.

A ministry of finance report leaked to French newspapers last week predicted a worst case scenario of a 3.8 per cent budget deficit in 1997 and 4.5 per cent deficit in 1998 far in excess of the Maastricht limit.

Worse yet, the French social security system which the Prime Minister, Mr Alain Juppe, has in theory been overhauling since November 1995 is now expected to run a 50 billion franc deficit again this year the government had predicted 30 billion francs.

It was fitting that fewer than 20 members of parliament showed up to debate the draft law on social exclusion yesterday.

This legislation was to have been the fulfilment of Mr Chirac's 1995 presidential campaign pledge to heal France's "social fracture". The unfinished debate was the first victim of the dissolution, and the promise is now to be cast aside in favour of a new, more liberal economic policy, whose theme will be lower taxes and less state intervention.

Mr Jospin is already campaigning on the slogan of "no to hard capitalism and ultra liberalism".

Calling snap elections for political expediency may be a common practice in Britain until now it just wasn't done in France.

Only four times in the fifth Republic in 1962, 1968,1981 and 1988 had French presidents called early elections. Each was the result of a serious crisis either between the government and the public, as in 1968, or between the executive and the legislature.

Now that Mr Chirac has broken the precedent, the instrument of early elections bound to be used again. If an opinion poll published by yesterday's Figaro can be believed, he may win his gamble.

The poll predicted that although the centre right may lose up to 150 seats, it will keep a comfortable majority of 318 deputies. But four out of 10 voters said they might change their minds. If they do, France's commitment to Europe could change with them.