France's Constitutional Council announced this evening that only 12 out of 21 presidential hopefuls actually will be allowed on the ballot come election day. The rest were unable to muster the requisite 500 signatures (known as "parrainages") from elected local officials.

What's most interesting about all this is that two men who did make the cut - one on the far left, the other on the extreme right -- got a critical boost from front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy.

The path to the French presidency goes over a lot of road kill and Sarkozy is known as an aggressive driver, so there was some surprise when he called on his party's mayors to sponsor the candidacies of both the Revolutionary Communist League's Olivier Besancenot and Sarkozy's political nemesis on the far-right, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The two were struggling to garner the 500 signatures as the March 16 deadline approached.

"My idea of democracy is that candidates can express their ideas," Sarkozy declared on French television earlier this month. "I fight against Mr. Le Pen's ideas, but I will fight to ensure that Mr. Besancenot, as well as Mr. Le Pen, can defend their ideas."

This was noblesse oblige with a strong odor of self-interest. The charismatic 32-year-old Besancenot, an articulate opponent of the EU constitution, is the far-leftist most likely to siphon off young votes from Sarkozy's main rival, Socialist Ségolène Royal. And for Sarkozy to win a potential second-round run-off against either Royal or centrist François Bayrou, he will need to seduce a wide swath of Le Pen's far-right electorate. Sarkozy did nothing to promote faltering candidacies that might divert votes away from his party's traditional base.

Socialist leaders have engaged in a few political calculations of their own, of course. After watching the leftist electorate fracture among nine parties in 2002 - causing Socialist presidential candidate Lionel Jospin to lose to Le Pen in the first round -- party leaders called on their rural and municipal representatives not to sponsor non-Socialist candidates at all this time around.

The candidates who have now made it into the official starting gate, in addition to Sarkozy, Royal, Bayrou, Le Pen and Besancenot, are:

On the still fractious and fractured left, 53-year-old José Bové, a star of the anti-globalization movement, Green Party leader Dominique Voynet, Communist Party leader Marie-George Buffet and Worker's Struggle head Arlette Laguiller. (Besancenot and Laguiller garnered almost 10 per cent of the vote in the first round of the 2002 elections.) Gérard Schivardi, a lapsed Socialist, is backed by the Workers Party even though he is officially running as the "candidate of mayors."

On the right, anti-immigration candidate Philippe de Villiers, 57, who scored almost 5 percent when he last ran for president in 1995.

And, somewhere out there, the Hunting Fishing Nature Traditions Party's Frédéric Nihous, a goatee-wearing outdoorsman who can thank rustic rural mayors for helping him to obtain the necessary number of presidential sponsorships easily even though he is expected to earn less than 1 percent of the vote.

Photo of Nicolas Sarkozy campaign poster by Eric Pape