FRANCE: Some commentators believe the old class struggle is over and has been replaced by a resentment of elites insulated from reality, writes Lara Marlowe, in Paris
It has been an extraordinary three months in French politics. Until he remarked on March 10th that President Jacques Chirac was "old, worn-out and tired", the socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was expected to win the presidential election.
Mr Jospin might have lost the poll anyway, but his elimination by the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen on April 21st gave France an incredible shock, followed by a two-week, anti-Le Pen frenzy that culminated with Mr Chirac's landslide re-election.
Almost overnight, the passions inflamed by Mr Le Pen's candidacy burned out. France seemed too exhausted to engage in a legislative campaign. The socialists were punch-drunk after Mr Jospin's withdrawal from political life, and the new centre-right Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, refused to debate with them. Even the National Front kept a low profile.
A pot-of-gold law on party financing spawned 8,444 candidates in yesterday's first round. France was much more concerned whether Zinedine Zidane would recover and save the country's honour in the World Cup. Now that the nonsense candidates have been cut out, the parliamentary campaign can start.
Barring huge surprises, Mr Chirac looks set to gain a majority in the National Assembly in the second round on June 16th. France gives the misleading impression of returning to the status quo ante, a presidential Fifth Republic as envisioned by Gen de Gaulle in 1958.
But two things have changed. The country has been forced to recognise the extreme right's hold over some 12 per cent of the electorate. And the left, which held power for 15 of the past 21 years, has virtually collapsed. For the first time since the second World War, the communists may not obtain the 20 seats required to form a group in the National Assembly.
Instead of trying to win the parliamentary election, the socialists have begun soul-searching in the hope of a comeback in 2007. They take heart from voters' short memory; five years ago, the centre-right Juppé government was thrown out on similar accusations of arrogance and talking down to "the people".
The socialists' debacle is part of a wider rejection of the left across Europe, but it is rooted in French phenomena. Power isolates as much as it corrupts those who wield it. Mr Jospin holed up in his Matignon office, then in his campaign headquarters. The ruling socialist elite lived inside a bubble, rarely venturing beyond the Left Bank and their country houses.
In his book The Invisible Government; Birth of a Democracy Without the People, the journalist Laurent Joffrin compares the elite to the aristocrats of the ancien régime who "ruled society while remaining for the most part outside it." In an article entitled, "How the Left Lost the People," in L'Express magazine, Eric Conan recalls that in May 1968, middle-class students rebelled in the name of "the people" and "the working classes". The Soixante-Huitards were so appalled by "the people's" rejection of their revolution, Mr Conan says, that they decided to invent a new people. They replaced the workers, who by some estimates still represent 40 per cent of the French population, with a new, idealised proletariat: immigrants, foreigners, homosexuals.
Faced with the contempt of the socialist elite, "the people" veered right. A poll conducted at the end of May showed that 46 per cent of French people without higher education agree with the National Front's ideas, compared to only 14 per cent of those with university degrees. More than a third of workers, shopkeepers, craftsmen and small business owners approve of Mr Le Pen's positions on crime and traditional values.
"The people" didn't like being taken for fools by ministers with bodyguards and chauffeurs who denounced "hysteria" over the rise in crime. "The people" sneered when the former socialist minister Mrs Elisabeth Guigou put on running shoes to campaign in an immigrant suburb of Paris, or when Mr Jack Lang, the paragon of the caviar left, praised the artistic merits of the graffiti that blights poor neighbourhoods.
French political scientists have created a new vocabulary for the schism in their society: "above" and "below"; "open" and "closed". "The gap between the people and the elites has become so entrenched that it has replaced the old class struggle", the sociologist Emmanuel Todd writes in The Fault of the Elites.
The leaders of Mr Chirac's centre-right may be as fond of privilege as the socialists were, but they are learning not to show it.
Mr Raffarin claims to represent "La France d'en-bas" (France from below). In his speeches on crime, the new interior minister, Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, sounds strikingly similar to the extreme right. The media, intellectuals and high-ranking civil servants - all associated with the socialists - are treated like pariahs.
Assuming that the centre-right wins the parliamentary majority it is seeking, Mr Chirac and Mr Raffarin will be expected to transform this populist, rural backlash into lasting change.