Mr Chirac, seeking a second term as president, is embroiled in scandal after scandal involving his party, writes Lara Marlowe from Paris
The presidential election campaign is shaping up to be the nastiest in French history. After five years of "cohabitation", President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin can barely stand to be in the same room together. Each suspects the other of devising the low blows of which he is victim. Mr Jospin's ministers no longer hesitate to make disparaging comments about Mr Chirac in public, while the President's aides accuse the socialists of manipulating the justice system and the media to undermine Mr Chirac.
Mr Jospin will not officially declare his own candidacy until the end of the month. In the meantime, "Les Affaires" - dozens of scandals involving political party financing, but especially Mr Chirac's Gaullist RPR - emerge at such speed and numbers that the average French voter is saturated. There was the Méry video-cassette in which a dead Gaullist fund-raiser accused Mr Chirac of being present when a satchel of cash was handed to his chief aide, the council housing and lycee contract kick-backs, cash for airline tickets and most recently "L'Affaire Schuller", in which a dubious former Gaullist official returned from the Caribbean to face charges of embezzlement after saying the funds he extorted from public contractors helped finance President Chirac's party.
When he went on the evening television news to explain his candidacy on Monday night, Mr Chirac was on the defensive. It was wrong to think there were only dishonest people on one side, honest people on the other, he said.
To survive, all of the political parties had been forced to use "means that they didn't consider immoral at the time, but which today, and rightly so, are considered worthy of condemnation".
Mr Chirac dated these "methods worthy of condemnation" to 15 years ago. True, as Prime Minister in 1988 he oversaw the first law on the financing of political parties. Two more laws were passed in 1990 and 1993. But the judicial investigations involving the RPR go up to 1995. It takes time to break bad habits.
OF Didier Schuller, the high-living former RPR official who spent the past seven years on the lam, Mr Chirac said he had "perhaps been in the same place with him, but I didn't know him personally". The next day, several French dailies published photos of the men together.
Mr Chirac also had to explain the damaging revelation that he twice met with the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen during the 1988 presidential campaign.
"It happened to me to meet, or more exactly to be in the same place by chance, with Monsieur Le Pen, one time in particular, and anyway it gave me a chance to tell him face-to-face what I thought." Mr Chirac was exploring the possibility of a pact under which Mr Le Pen would have asked National Front voters to support him in the second round.
For their part, the socialists have been accused of collecting money from a supermarket chain and of involvement in the Angolagate weapons scandal. This week, as Mr Chirac struggled to leave Les Affaires behind him, the former socialist minister René Teulade and 14 associates were arrested on suspicion of having exploited the real estate holdings of a semi-private retirement fund for civil servants to house Teulade and the socialist party at lower than market rates.
If Mr Jospin is perceived to be more honest than Mr Chirac, he is also seen as stiff and boring. "Something has to happen between Mr Jospin and the electorate - at the moment the encephalogram is flat," says Pascal Perrineau, one of France's leading political scientists. Mr Jospin was caught lying about his Trotskyist past, and three recent statistics have damaged his credibility: the 8 per cent rise in crime last year; the finance minister's downward revision of economic growth, from 2.5 per cent to 1.5 per cent, and the fact that France now ranks 13th out of 15th in per capita income in the European Union.
The "extreme confusion" surrounding Les Affaires is preventing France from addressing serious issues such as unemployment, pensions, education and insecurity, Prof Perrineau says. "This is no way to run a presidential election." He expects record abstention, and a high number of blank ballots.
The first round on April 21st will be a circus, with a dozen candidates on the ballot. (Twenty have already declared, but some will fail to obtain the required 500 signatures from elected officials.) The French will express their dissatisfaction by scattering their first-round protest vote among ecologists, hunters, the extreme left and right.
IF either Mr Chirac or Mr Jospin makes a major blunder during the campaign, the third-runner, the former leftist cabinet minister Jean-Pierre Chevénement stands a good chance of making it to the second round run-off. Mr Chevénement appeals equally to voters from left and right, but especially older, white-collar workers who can understand his literary and historic allusions. "Chevénement represents the France of nostalgia," Prof Perrineau says. "It's a dangerous thing to approach the future walking backwards."