The "cohabitation" between the Gaullist President Jacques Chirac and the socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin is the longest presidential campaign France has ever seen. Five years will have passed between the left's victory in the 1997 legislative elections and the presidential poll in 2002. Until then, the rivalry between Mr Chirac and Mr Jospin is the focal point of all French politics. Opinion polls have continuously placed Mr Jospin ahead of Mr Chirac since 1997. In a study conducted by Sofres for the Figaro Magazine at the end of May, Mr Jospin received a 62 per cent confidence rating, compared to 52 per cent for Mr Chirac. Mr Jospin is the only prime minister in the past quarter of a century whose Sofres confidence rating has never dipped below 50 per cent.
The right claims the Jospin government has simply been the lucky beneficiary of a worldwide economic recovery. The left, of course, says it deserves credit for bringing unemployment down to 9.8 per cent this spring - the first time joblessness has fallen below 10 per cent since 1991. France's economic growth rate is one of the highest in Europe. The social security system is at last breaking even, and Mr Jospin promises to reduce taxes by Ffr80 billion this year. He can also claim credit for enacting the "PACS", which recognises the rights of homosexual couples, and the law on political parity, which stipulates that 50 per cent of candidates in future elections must be female.
The French public find Mr Jospin competent, courageous and honest. Yet a CSA poll for Liberation last month showed that if the presidential election took place now, Mr Chirac would win with 53 per cent of the votes, against 47 per cent for Mr Jospin.
How could a popular, trusted prime minister possibly lose an election to an incumbent who inspires less confidence than he does? Mr Jospin is the serious, hard-working partner in France's "cohabitation" and this is the basis of his popularity. When he attempts to appear more human - by attending the opening of the Cannes film festival or talking on French television about his affection for James Bond films - it often backfires.
And despite his high ratings, the winter of 1999-2000 was Mr Jospin's worst in power. In November, his finance minister Mr Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a pillar of the government, was forced to resign over a corruption scandal. In February, Mr Jospin trampled on President Chirac's foreign policy reserve when he denounced the Lebanese Hizballah as "terrorists" while on a trip to Israel. Palestinian students threw stones at him, and Mr Jospin's margin of approval over Mr Chirac fell from 13 percentage points to five.
The finance ministry managed to turn the good news of tens of billions of francs in windfall budget surpluses into a public relations disaster. Strikes by civil servants forced Mr Jospin to reshuffle his cabinet in March. The socialists strengthened their position in the government - which led to disgruntlement among their communist and Green coalition partners.
Mr Chirac doesn't have to dirty his hands with the daily business of running the country. He has presence and gravitas when dealing with foreign leaders, but at home he has the common touch. Even left-wing newspaper columnists refer to him as "le president sympathique", and Mr Jospin will never be able to rival the back-slapping, beer-drinking bonhomie that endears Mr Chirac to the public.
But Mr Chirac, too, has handicaps. At 67 he is only five years older than Mr Jospin, but is seen to represent an earlier generation of politicians. The French left renewed itself in the last years of Francois Mitterrand's rule, and Mr Jospin commands a cohesive, strong political party. Most of the Gaullists, like Mr Chirac himself, have been in party politics for three decades. Mr Chirac has consolidated his position as sole possible candidate for the right in 2002. But most of his former Gaullist allies are now enemies - Edouard Balladur, Nicolas Sarkozy and Philippe Seguin.
Mr Jean Tiberi, the man Mr Chirac chose to succeed him as mayor of Paris, stands accused by gendarmes of faking 3,300 ballots to win his seat in the National Assembly in 1997 - he won by only 2,725 votes. The vote fraud most outrages the public, but there are other scandals at Mr Tiberi's Hotel de Ville, involving kickbacks on contracts for low income housing and phoney jobs for Gaullist party workers. The Green deputy Noel Mamere recently accused President Chirac of permitting these misdoings when he was mayor. Mr Chirac enjoys immunity as long as he is president, but the possibility that the disgraced Mr Tiberi will reveal all ticks away like a time bomb.
The March 2001 municipal elections will be a trial run for the 2002 presidential poll. Paris and Lyon are the two key cities, and both could pass from the right to the left. If the Gaullists lose Paris, Mr Chirac will be seriously weakened in his contest with Mr Jospin.
This month, Mr Chirac lost what has been called "the first round of the 2002 presidential" - a battle of wills over reducing the presidential term from seven to five years. Proponents argue that the move will lessen the risk of long and awkward "cohabitations" like that between Chirac and Jospin.
Mr Chirac had long opposed the change, but he was stabbed in the back by his old right-wing enemy, the former president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who proposed a draft law shortening the term with the full support of Mr Jospin. Because three-quarters of French people want a shorter term, Mr Chirac announced a referendum on the question next October. His television appearance was disastrous because his lack of enthusiasm was so obvious.
So the prize that Messers Jospin and Chirac are fighting for will be truncated. "With the five-year term, we have found a way to cut down our republican monarchs," Franz-Olivier Giesbert of Le Figaro said. "A painless, civilised guillotine. In psychoanalytical terms, the reduction of the presidential term is a sort of mini-regicide."
