France: The European elections have dramatically altered the political landscape of France, confirming the socialists as the country's leading party and smashing President Jacques Chirac's hope of establishing a single party of the right.
According to exit polls, the opposition socialists received more than 29 per cent of the vote, their highest score ever in a European poll and seven points higher than their performance in the 1999 European election.
Most important, the socialists received nearly twice the number of votes scored by Mr Chirac's Union for a Popular Movement, which was credited with just over 16 per cent of votes. The UMP failed in its goal of narrowing the percentage point gap between themselves and the socialists to less than 10 per cent.
In a further reversal for Mr Chirac, the centre-right Union for French Democracy (UDF), headed by Francois Bayrou, received 12.4 per cent of the vote, three points higher than its 1999 score. Mr Chirac called on the UDF to merge with the UMP when the latter was established as the "presidential party" two years ago, but Mr Bayrou resisted.
The UDF is the most pro-European French party, comparable to Fine Gael in outlook. It is, Mr Bayrou noted, now the third-ranking party in France.
It was a measure of the government's defeat that the combined score of the UMP and UDF (28.9 per cent) was still lower than the socialists' score alone.
Another winner was Jean-Marie Le Pen's extreme right-wing National Front, which nearly doubled its 1999 score of 5.7 per cent, attaining 10.5 per cent. Mr Le Pen boasted that anti-European parties like his own totalled close to 20 per cent of the vote. In 1999 they received nearly twice that figure.
The green party's low score of 6 per cent (compared to 9.72 per cent in 1999) may be the result of a highly publicised homosexual marriage ceremony performed by a prominent green leader.
Mr Laurent Fabius, a former socialist prime minister and contender for the 2007 presidential election, said the results were "magnificent" and called on the government to "take account of these results". Earlier, the president of the socialist group in the National Assembly, Mr Jean-Marc Ayrault, said Prime Minister Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin should resign if the UMP lost the elections. For his part, Mr Le Pen called on President Chirac to dissolve the National Assembly.
But no one expects any radical changes. Mr Chirac responded to a comparable defeat in the March regional elections by making a minor cabinet reshuffle. "You don't change the government because you lose European elections," said an aide to Mr Chirac. "The European elections are not a deadline for me," Mr Raffarin said before the poll.
The government's determination to ignore the results was a key factor in the high abstention rate of 57.5 per cent. Though a record for France, it paled by comparison with the average 70 per cent abstention rate in new member countries.
Sixty-five per cent of French voters participated in the second round of regional elections in March, which means that 11 million French people who voted two and a half months ago boycotted yesterday's poll.
France's previous record of a 53.8 per cent abstention rate in 1999 had prompted the government to divide the country into eight regional constituencies, in the hope it would bring politicians closer to voters. But the public found the system confusing and asked how the French Alps could be slotted in the same region as Corsica.
The government spent millions of euros on a campaign intended to encourage people to vote. The theme was that decisions taken in the European Parliament have a significant effect on daily French life. But commentators pointed out that the European Commission and Council wield far more power than the Strasbourg assembly.
