For months, opinion polls forecast that the socialist candidate, Bertrand Delanoe, would wrest Paris from the seemingly immovable clutches of President Jacques Chirac's Gaullist RPR party. Delanoe led the first round on March 11th, but results were much closer than expected. As he admits, "it wasn't a hurricane; it wasn't a tide, like the pollsters and commentators predicted . . . Uncertainty is a noble thing in a democracy."
Mr Delanoe's "Changeons d'ere" list is still favoured to win tomorrow, but it will be a nail-biter. His play-on-words slogan - meaning "let's change the air" as well as "let's change eras" - alludes to his ecologist leanings as well as the cloud of cronyism and corruption over Paris city hall.
Mr Delanoe (50) and his chief Gaullist rival for the mayor's office, Philippe Seguin (57), have one thing in common. Both were born in Tunisia when it was still a French colony. Auguste Delanoe, the Socialist's father, was a surveyor and a right-wing atheist. His mother, Yvonne, was a devoutly religious nurse whose English mother had been a seamstress in Montmartre. Young Bertrand attended Catholic school in the Tunisian coastal town of Bizerte.
When French troops opened fire on Arabs in the 1961 Battle of Bizerte, 11year-old Bertrand felt angry. "I thought an Arab should be equal to a Frenchman," he told Le Nouvel Observateur.
"That was my first political thought. That's how, because of colonialism, I began to identify with the left."
Three years later, the Delanoes sailed back to France. "I remember my mother's tears on the boat," he said. Today, his parents are buried in Bizerte. After Auguste and Yvonne Delanoe separated, Bertrand and his mother settled in southern France because his sister Joelle joined a convent there. During May 1968, in his last year of lycee, Bertrand organised student strikes in Catholic schools "to question the moral order".
As an economics student in Toulouse, Delanoe partied more than he studied. He joined the Socialist party at 21, gaining his first party job two years later. Thirty years of loyalty have earned him the label "apparatchik", an image Delanoe tries to counter by stressing his freedom and independence. Mr Seguin tried to exploit it in the campaign, claiming that a Socialist victory in Paris would mean a hot line between City Hall and the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin's office, a "Socialist party state".
Delanoe became a deputy in the National Assembly and spokesman for the Socialist party in 1981, but four years later he was dispatched to Avignon in a hopeless effort to win a deputy's seat there. The right-wing Le Figaro suggests President Mitterrand found Delanoe's homosexuality distasteful and sabotaged him.
In November 1999, a television journalist asked Delanoe if it was true he was gay. "Yes, I am a homosexual," he responded. But, he added, a politician had the "right to indifference" regarding his sexuality. Delanoe abandoned that "right" to campaign for the PACS, which granted property and inheritance rights to gay couples. He still avoids the issue when possible. "I don't want to be stuck in the role of the token gay," he exclaims.
AFTER the failed Avignon campaign, Delanoe abandoned politics except for his post as a Paris councillor and started a new career as an advertising executive. In 1993 - at the Socialist party's nadir - he became president of the Socialist group on the Paris city council. Two years later, the left won six of Paris's 20 districts from the right, for which Delanoe took credit.
Yet when he announced his candidacy for the mayor's office, Delanoe was the Socialists' third choice for the post, still considered a lightweight. Gradually he attracted a following, and drew up a programme declaring war on the automobile and giving priority to children, women, the handicapped and old people.
If elected, Delanoe says he will create 2,000 places in day-care centres and use 1,000 unemployed young people to direct traffic outside 700 Paris schools, freeing policemen for more important duties. He supports a tramway system between Paris suburbs, would reduce parking fees for residents but increase them for others. Authority for street-cleaning would be delegated to the mayor of each district. City council meetings would be broadcast on local television. He promises an independent audit of city finances, and a public debate on the 33 billion franc (£3.96 billion) annual budget.
Mr Seguin has picked up so many of Delanoe's ideas that the Socialist says he ought to have patented his programme. Following the first round, Delanoe announced an alliance with the Greens, while the right - which he calls "the crucible of tenacious hatreds" - continued bickering.
The ill-tempered, overweight Mr Seguin is a former speaker of the National Assembly whom the RPR brought in to stand in this election. Seguin is out of sync with what the right-wing weekly Le Point calls "new-look Paris", described as a festive haven for skateboarders, rollerbladers, ecological people, - a plugged-in, online kind of place. Mr Delanoe, with his slight build, small apartment and electric car, is more in tune with what pop sociologists call the "bourgeois bohemians" or "bo-bos". So when the ballots are counted tomorrow night, Mr Delanoe may become not only the first left-wing mayor of Paris in 130 years, but the first mayor of the bobo era.
TV5 will broadcast live coverage of the French municipal elections from 7 p.m. until 11 p.m. tomorrow.