PARIS: France’s 40 million voters yesterday (SUN) unveiled the full and shocking extent of their political disenchantment, apparently sending the veteran far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen through to the second round of presidential elections to face the outgoing Jacques Chirac.

Exit polls by three different agencies gave Chirac between 19.8 per cent and 20 per cent of the vote, against 17 per cent to 17.9 per cent for Le Pen. Chirac’s presumed rival in the May 5 run-off, the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, polled between 16 per cent and 16.5 per cent.

Socialists and conservatives alike described the result as “cataclysmic”, “dramatic”, “shameful”, a “disgrace to French democracy” and “an outrage”. The Socialist party secretary, Francois Hollande, said it was “a huge upset for our country, a terrible defeat for the left but an unjustified defeat for the work of this government”.

The result does not mean there is any serious risk of Le Pen becoming president of the republic. A snap opinion poll on Sunday evening showed Chirac would win the May 5 second-round runoff with 78 per cent of the vote against 22 per cent for Le Pen.

Jospin has headed a coalition government of Socialists, Greens and Communists for five years in an uneasy power-sharing arrangement with the conservative Chirac. Polls had predicted for months, if not years, that the two men’s progression to the second round would be automatic and yesterday’s polls mark the first time that a socialist candidate has not been present in the final round of a modern presidential election.

The exit polls have proved accurate in all previous French elections, although pollsters warned that late results from France’s overseas departments meant the final outcome was not yet completely certain. The polls showed that more voters stayed at home than ever before in a French presidential election, putting the abstention rate at 28 per cent.

Le Pen, 73, a former paratrooper who has contested every election for head of state since 1974, said the provisional result was “a great flash of lucidity by the French people” and represented “first and foremost their rejection of those who have governed them so inefficiently”.

The founder of the anti-immigrant, law-and-order National Front added: “The chances of me winning the second round do not depend on me but on France’s voters, on the French people’s desire to rip out the decay that is hitting our country. The result is what I expected.”

The extraordinary outcome of the first round vote, confirmed on Monday by the interior ministry, stemmed largely from the strength of the protest vote on both right and left. A record 16 candidates qualified for the first round, including three from the hard left and two from the far right, reflecting French voters’ disaffection with the mainstream Socialist and Gaullist movements that have governed them for 40 years.

Many Socialists, disillusioned with what they see as the centrist drift of Jospin’s party, plumped for candidates such as Arlette Laguiller, an unreconstructed Trotskyite whose call for the overthrow of parliamentary democracy earned her 6.3 per cent of the vote. On the right, observers said voters were swayed by Chirac’s determination to make crime and insecurity the central issue of his campaign.

Le Pen, who supports the death penalty and has blamed immigrants for both high unemployment and urban violence, has never scored higher than 15 per cent in previous presidential polls. He has courted controversy ever since he founded the National Front in 1972, and sparked outrage by saying the Nazi extermination of Jews was “a detail of history”. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.