PARIS, 22 March 2004 — President Jacques Chirac’s center-right government was facing a key mid-term test yesterday as first-round regional elections took place across France amid predictions of a voter backlash.
Some 42 million voters were called to the polls. Turnout half-way through the day was 18.09 percent, slightly higher than the 17.29 percent recorded during the last regional elections in 1998, although Paris voters were staying away to a greater degree, according to the Interior Ministry.
Sunday’s elections were the first of two rounds. Slates of candidates were vying to exceed the threshold of 10 percent of ballots cast in order to make it into the deciding second round in a week’s time.
That later stage will essentially see a three-way competition between Chirac’s Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), the opposition Socialists and the far-right National Front (FN) of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
France’s struggling economy and high unemployment are seen as having fuelled discontent with the UMP. Opinion polls last week suggested several regions could swing to the left, with as many as seven out of 10 voters declaring themselves ready to express their unhappiness with the government.
The political future of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, whose popularity has been in constant decline, was widely expected to be determined by the final outcome. Some media predicted he could be replaced if the UMP fared badly. The ruling party currently holds 14 of the 22 regions in metropolitan France. Of those, eight regions will be particularly hard fought over, including the greater Paris area and the Riviera.
France’s four overseas regions — French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Reunion — are also included in the polls.
Analysis of the first round of the election was to focus on the scale of the expected punishment vote against the government and the degree to which the FN can take advantage to on Le Pen’s breakthrough at the 2002 presidential race.
Le Pen himself is not a candidate. Authorities rejected his application to stand in the Riviera on the grounds that he could not prove he was a resident of the southern region. As a result of a recent equal opportunities law, half of those running in the regional elections are women. In some regions, alliances have been struck between parties of left or right to maximize their chances of getting through to Sunday’s second round.
Under a new law designed in part to avoid assembly presidents having to rely on FN support, the winner in the second round is given a bonus of 25 percent of seats before the rest are divided proportionally among all parties that reached five percent.
The opinion surveys indicated that as many as two thirds of the public have no or little interest in the election. An abstention rate that greatly exceeds the 42-percent figure for the last regional polls in 1998
