France’s Presidential Race Goes Down to the Wire ; Candidates Pull Out All the Stops to Cajole Horde of Undecided Voters

By ANGELA DOLAND, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PARIS France’s presidential candidates are getting nervous. With just days to go until Sunday’s election, the race is too close to call. So they’re saying just about anything that might win over undecided voters.

Take poll leader Nicolas Sarkozy. Suddenly, the free-market conservative is quoting a Marxist philosopher.

Socialist Sgolne Royal, No. 2 in the polls, proclaimed herself the candidate of “audacity” in an interview Wednesday with Mtro newspaper. Then, perhaps wondering whether that might alienate some voters, she added: “I promise a secure audacity” a comment as puzzling in French as in the English translation.

Though Sarkozy has led in the polls for months, there is a big unknown: Opinion surveys suggest as many as two in five voters have not yet chosen their candidate.

Sarkozy looks almost certain to advance to the May 6 runoff between the top two candidates from Sunday’s vote, pollsters say. He received a boost Wednesday with backing from former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, who once led the centrist party that one rival candidate, Francois Bayrou, now heads. Giscard said Sarkozy gets his vote in part because of his “capacity to move forward.”

Sarkozy’s opponent in the runoff could be Royal or Bayrou, who tries to bridge the left-right divide, or even in a long shot far- right firebrand Jean-Marie Le Pen.

After 12 years of stagnation under 74-year-old Jacques Chirac, this election was supposed to rejuvenate French politics, getting voters excited about a new generation of political leaders. The three leading contenders are all in their 50s.

But much of the enthusiasm has eroded, partly because voters are confused and dissatisfied with the choice on offer. Many complain the campaign has been hijacked by politicians’ opportunistic attempts to lift poll numbers any way they can.

Candidates have neglected no niche audience, however small. The three main candidates all gave interviews to a magazine dedicated to wood houses, while Bayrou spoke to Funerarium, a magazine for funeral parlors and Royal talked to Rottweiler News.

“The campaign is starting to look like a big show, like some kind of Hollywood production,” said Gery Vergot, a 44-year-old engineer who plans to vote for Sarkozy despite reservations. “We can see that what really interests them is power, it’s not France.”

Politicians have watered down ideas that alienated some voters, constantly readjusting their message. Sarkozy first campaigned for a “break” with Chirac’s legacy, then toned it down to a “tranquil break.”

They also have jumped back and forth across the left-right political divide. Socialist Royal supports many traditional values usually claimed by the right, such as patriotism she wants all French to keep a tricolor flag in their home.

Sarkozy’s pro-market credentials suffered when he suggested a state bailout of troubled planemaker Airbus.

He has repeatedly reached out to leftist voters, and he spoke admiringly of Italian communist and Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, telling Le Figaro on Wednesday that he agreed with Gramsci’s concept that power is won through ideas.

Bayrou, who came from behind to become the race’s third force, has capitalized on his career as a middle-of-the-road politician. Though he spent decades slightly right-of-center, he said Wednesday he would name a center-left prime minister if elected “for balance.”

An Ipsos-Dell poll Wednesday suggested that Sarkozy would take 29.5 percent in Sunday’s first round, Royal 24.5 percent, and Bayrou 18.5 percent. Le Pen was credited with 13.5 percent.

In the May 6 runoff, according to the April 16-17 poll of 1,007 people, Sarkozy would take 53 percent, with Royal at 47 percent. But all polls show that if Bayrou were to make the runoff, he would beat Sarkozy.

Le Pen, considered the wild card in the race, came from behind to surprise France by making it into the 2002 runoff against Chirac, but lost when left and right voters joined forces against him to overwhelmingly elect Chirac.

Of all the main candidates, Le Pen seems to have stayed truest to form in this race, his fifth presidential run.

He has said he would abolish laws that penalize people for making racist or anti-Semitic comments charges he has personally been convicted of, and in another interview, suggested that Sarkozy the son of a Hungarian immigrant was not French enough to be president.

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