Support for the extreme right-wing leader, Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen, is growing with only six days left before the French presidential election. Lara Marlowe reports from Paris.
While it is unlikely that Mr Le Pen could beat the incumbent President Mr Jacques Chirac, opponents of Mr Le Pen's racist, anti-immigrant policies are having difficulty mobilising opinion against him. Attempts to turn the May 5th poll into a landslide denunciation of Mr Le Pen have come up against the reluctance of many on the left to vote for Mr Chirac. A tepid appeal by the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, to vote against the extreme right did not even mention Mr Chirac by name. Mr Jospin said: "The choice is difficult. I don't want to weigh in one direction or the other".
The personal ambitions of competing leaders from the centre left and right, combined with the belief that Mr Chirac will win without their support, seems to have lulled vast numbers of French citizens into indifference, and abstention in the second round is expected to surpass the record 28.4 per cent in the first round. Nationwide marches on Saturday mustered only 200,000 demonstrators - one third fewer than those who protested on April 25th. "It is not impossible that Le Pen could win," the philosopher André Glucksmann told French radio yesterday.
The domestic intelligence agency Renseignements Généraux will address a secret study to the prime minister and interior minister today, which will reportedly show that at least 30 per cent of the vote will go to Mr Le Pen. One week ago, he was credited with 20 per cent at most.
The director of the French Review of Political Science, Mr Jean-Luc Parodi, predicts Mr Le Pen will win between a quarter and a third of the vote in the second round. Voting for the National Front leader seemed less of a taboo after Mr Le Pen was "legitimated" by his first round success, Mr Parodi wrote in Le Journal du Dimanche. He has tapped into the discontent of many who abstained in the first round, and the virulence of anti-Le Pen demonstrators may actually increase sympathy for him.
Mr Le Pen's headquarters claim their switchboard is saturated with phone calls of support, and that 60,000 people connect to his internet television website daily. The extreme right-wing candidate says that 30 per cent of the vote would be "a bitter failure" for him. "I'm fighting for much more," he told Le Monde.