On the last day of campaigning today before the final round of voting in French municipal elections, Paris' fractious right faced defeat in its bid to hold to its 24-year-old monopoly on city hall.
A last minute opinion poll, published in the Swiss daily La Tribune de Geneve, predicted that Mr Bertrand Delanoe's left-wing supporters could scrape a victory against the divided right despite not winning a majority of the vote.
The failure of the official right-wing candidate Mr Philippe Seguin and outgoing mayor Mr Jean Tiberi to mount a united front could cost their Rally for the Republic (RPR) the mayorship for the first time since the post was re-established in 1977, the survey indicated.
Such a result would be a blow for President Jacques Chirac, who founded the RPR and was Mr Tiberi's predecessor as mayor.
Mr Delanoe is on course to win 49 per cent of the vote compared to 51 per cent for the right, and would bag between 84 and 95 of the city council's 163 seats by coming in ahead in key districts, according to the survey, which can not be published in France so close to the vote.
Mr Delanoe, a 50-year-old senator - who is also one of France's few openly homosexual politicians - struck a deal with the Greens after the first round of voting in which his broad-left coalition lists won 33 per cent.
But Mr Seguin and Mr Tiberi, who was sidelined by his party after being implicated in a series of corruption scandals, could not even agree to meet each other after round one last Sunday, leaving their allies to thrash out electoral pacts in certain districts but allowing damaging three-way fights in others.
The Paris vote is the centrepiece of municipal elections in 36,500 cities, towns and villages which occur every six years.Nationally, the centre-right held its own against parties of the Socialist-led coalition government in the first round, outperforming them by 48 percent to 43.
AFP