France's political establishment is still reeling from the surprise punches it took in 2002. The presidential election five years ago drew world attention, led to national soul-searching, and in many ways shaped this year's campaign.
Remember the times. The campaign kicked off in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Every major capital felt vulnerable. France had joined in the war to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The country was at a heightened level of alert. Soldiers patrolled airports, train stations, and many urban areas. Not surprisingly, questions of security and immigration dominated the electoral agenda.
Meanwhile, after five years of less-than-effective power sharing between right-wing President Jacques Chirac and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, popular disenchantment with government, as such, was at an all-time high. That cynicism encouraged a rash of protest candidates. By the time voters went to the polls on April 21, 2002 (a date now remembered in infamy by many mainstream politicians), there were a record 16 candidates to choose from - and 28.4 percent of the eligible voters stayed home.
The result would shock the nation.
From that fractured field, Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right National Front party, would need only 16.86 percent of votes to emerge in second place and win a spot in the run-off alongside the incumbent Chirac. The odd man out was Jospin, who finished a close third. But close was not enough. His defeat was a humiliating blow to the Socialist Party.
Le Pen's advance provoked mass protests. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets as even committee leftists rallied behind Chirac to prevent the extreme-right candidate from winning the Elysée Palace. On May 5, Chirac was re-elected in an 82 percent landslide, another record. But again and again throughout his troubled second term, the electorate would remind Chirac that his score was less a mandate than a reprieve.
Although Chirac enjoyed popular approval in 2003 for his opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, his party soon suffered a series of embarrassing defeats. His supporters lost heavily to the Socialists in cantonal, regional and European elections in 2004. (Ségolène Royal, formerly a Socialist junior minister, managed to restore some of her party's luster by winning the presidency of the Poitou-Charentes region.) Then came the 2005 referendum that Chirac called to ratify the European Constitution, which killed it instead.
Chirac's troubles were another right-winger's reward. Nicolas Sarkozy, the one-time protégé of the aging president, spent much of Chirac's second term presenting himself as the man of the future. An energetic interior minister (and, briefly, finance minister), Sarkozy is known for his tough talk on security and immigration, occasionally borrowing from the populist style and phrasing of Le Pen himself.
Royal, meanwhile, staked different terrain in response to 2002. During her climb to the Socialist Party presidential nomination, she looked to involve the disaffected electorate in what she calls "participative democracy," a grassroots-first approach meant to bring the abstention and protest voters back onside.
Sarkozy and Royal, the two candidates generally credited with having best understood the messages of April 21, 2002, are now the front runners for April 22, 2007. But the field still looks crowded for the first round, raising the possibility that a fringe candidate might yet make it into the run-off.
