The French disconnection

JUST when everyone thought French politics had gone to sleep comes a dramatic wake-up call, not only for France but for Europe. The failure of Lionel Jospin, the French prime minister, to mobilise sufficient votes and so lose second place to the extreme nationalist candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is a massive blow, not just for the fissiparous French Left, but for the entire political class.

Le Pen’s breakthrough - if 17 per cent of the vote can be called such - is due not to any conversion to moderation on his part, but to the massive abstention level in this election. At least 28 per cent of France’s 40 million voters - a record - opted to stay away. That abstention has now delivered to both France and Europe the biggest political shock for a generation. It is a stunning French political disconnection. It is one that has allowed Le Pen - a right-wing extremist on the fringe of French politics who would otherwise have remained in the political cold but for the apathy of France’s broad centre - to appear as "mainstream".

The result will spark huge controversy, for it gives respectability to a view of Europe that is utterly beyond the pale of its political establishment. What caused so many voters to stay away? The proximate cause of this debacle was the clear failure of either of the two main candidates to mount a campaign that captured voters’ hearts and minds. On law and order, an issue of widespread concern in France, Chirac talked tougher, but appeared to have no distinctive new policy on offer. On other issues, the campaign positions of Jospin and Chirac appeared almost indistinguishable, enabling extreme left candidates to take votes away from Jospin: there were no less than four Trotskyists standing against him.

For Europe, this signals a deeper problem at the heart: that there is still not a European demos around which people can rally with conviction and enthusiasm. This shocking result in France is an alarm bell across Europe. Meanwhile, not just the French Left, but the centre and moderate Right have no choice but to rally round Chirac come 5 May.