PARIS -- Until last Sunday, the campaign for the French presidency seemed to be the dullest ever. But when the returns of the first round were made public at 8 p.m., commentators were shocked by an earthquake that President Jacques Chirac's wife, Bernadette, had been, according to her husband, the only one to forecast.
Of course, electoral law shares the blame. The difference in the vote count between extreme-rightist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who will face the president in the runoff, and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, whose third-place finish eliminated him from the race, was only 1 percent. If you take the highest-ever voter abstention rate of almost 28 percent into account, the front-runner Chirac got less than 16 percent on Sunday.
Still, how many more people would have voted if Sunday had not been a school vacation day? What if people had known that their abstention would cause Jospin to give up his political career and leave his party beheaded for the coming general elections? How many people who would have given Jospin their ballot in the runoff now regret having voted for low-ranked candidates that had no chance of surviving the first round?