THE front lines in Frances one month parliamentary election campaign were drawn yesterday.
The Prime Minister Mr Alain Juppe, portrayed the ruling Centre-right coalition as the force of modernity, progress and European construction, pitted against an old-fashioned, immobile and discredited left.
President Jacques Chirac "kicked our sleepy ant hill" by dissolving the National Assembly and calling early elections on Monday night, France's best selling newspaper Le Figaro commented. On both sides, politicians began swarming to unify ranks. A morning conclave of opposition socialists, communists, ecologists and left-wing radicals made little progress towards reconciling differences, and another meeting was called for tomorrow.
The right was more successful in conveying an image of unity. A joint headquarters and programme for the Rally for the Republic (RPR) and Union for French Democracy (UDF) were already in place, Mr Juppe announced.
The former prime minister, Mr Edouard Balladur, lunched at Mr Juppe's office for the first time in two years: Mr Balladur had fought Mr Chirac for the RPR presidential nomination in 1995, and the sears of their rivalry are only beginning to heal.
Mr Juppe outlined the right's election platform in an address to outgoing RPR and UDF deputies at the Palais des Congres. He repeatedly attacked the Socialists, telling his coalition allies that bit will be useful and even salutary to remind voters what 14 years of Mitterrandism cost France economically, socially, politically and morally".
If the Socialists won, Mr Juppe said, they would waste public money, like in 1989; they would dig deeper deficits, like in 1990; they would bankrupt public companies, like in 1991". The right had to win the elections in the name of national interest, because "France could not bear a new Socialist fiasco."
Already, Mr Juppe and the Socialist leader, Mr Lionel Jospin, have been cast as the chief protagonists. Mr Jospin does not want to attack Mr Chirac, for if the left won the election, they would "co-habitate" as president and prime minister. It was Mr Juppe - not Mr Chirac - whom Mr Jospin criticised on Monday night. Likewise, Mr Juppe singled out the Socialist leader for ridicule in his speech yesterday.
"What in fact does Lionel Jospin want?" he asked. "Who can say today what he would do tomorrow if he took power...? Mystery!"
In their speeches of the past two days, President Chirac and Mr Juppe have offered the French people the kind of change that is already familiar to them. Both men studiously avoided the words "liberal" or "liberalism", which Mr Jospin is trying to turn into an obscenity.
Centre-right leaders hope to preempt the left's main weapon by professing concern for social welfare. "The egotistical individualism, the crude capitalism, the simplistic hyper-liberalism of the 1980s are outmoded," Mr Juppe said.
But in his attempt to be all things to all Frenchmen, he nonetheless added that France has been bogged down for the past 20 years "in a welfare logic that kills motivation, which discourages people from working and aggravates the problem of exclusion".
He was offering the French people a new contract to build a modern state, to liberate the spirit of enterprise and create jobs, to renew the French social and cultural model and to build La Grande Europe, Mr Juppe said.
The right embodied modernity, the opposition conservatism.
France did not have to choose between French identity and European construction, he added.
I believe on the contrary that France will have more chances of remaining France in the 21st century if it is a full member of a strong and dynamic European Union. France has nothing to fear but everything to gain from the euro, everything to gain from the Union, everything to gain from Europe," he said.
