Paris may go left in landmark municipal elections

"Whatever you do," the French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, has warned his underlings, "don't talk about a `pink wave'."

Municipal elections held yesterday - with the second round next Sunday - are very much local elections, and local politics is the right's strongest point. In France's 36,780 district boroughs - more than the rest of the EU combined - two-thirds of outgoing officials are expected to be re-elected.

Despite the record popularity of the Jospin government, four left-wing cabinet ministers lost the town halls they set out to conquer from the right. They are Ms Elisabeth Guigou in Avignon, Mr Jean-Claude Gayssot in Beziers, Pierre Moscovici in Montbeliard and Ms Dominique Voynet in Dole.

Economic growth and the fall in unemployment have made the French electorate less restive than usual. Mr Jospin is popular but so is his rival, the Gaullist President Jacques Chirac.

Yesterday's first round was to be decisive only in small towns, and we will have to wait a week to know whether Paris will, as predicted, fall to the left for the first time in 131 years.

"If Paris moves left," says Mr Philippe Mechet, the director of the SOFRES polling institute, "people will have the impression that all France has moved left."

And although the press and public treat Mr Chirac with reverence, they're bound to remember that he chose Mr Jean Tiberi to succeed him after 18 years as mayor of Paris. Mr Tiberi is under investigation in several corruption scandals. He refused to step down when ordered to do so by Mr Chirac's RPR party.

Mr Chirac also chose Mr Philippe Seguin to challenge both Mr Tiberi and the Socialist Mr Bertrand Delanoe in Paris. At his last rally, Mr Seguin's attack on right and left alike stunned his audience. The left, he claimed, "has tasted money and likes it. Money nestled in the conscience of the left and felt good there. Left-wing capitalism . . . is the product of this monstrous coupling."

It was a disastrous way to end a disastrous campaign. "Bertrand Delanoe is a left-wing bourgeois, Philippe Seguin a right-wing populist," Mr Mechet explains. "They are seen not as left and right, but as bourgeois and populist - and Paris has always been a bourgeois city."

Lyon is even more so, and it too may be lost by the right, again because the local Gaullists have quarrelled.

But the real innovation of these elections is the forced feminisation of French politics. As a consequence of Mr Jospin's law on male-female parity, adopted in June 2000, half of all candidates in towns with populations of 3,500 or more must be women. As a result, the number of female municipal councillors is expected to rise from less than 20 per cent to 40 per cent. But political sexism is deeply entrenched, and the number of women mayors will stay the same - about 8 per cent. That is even less than the proportion of French women parliamentarians, which at 8.7 per cent is the second lowest in the EU.

Another first is the participation of non-French European residents as voters and candidates. The ministry of the interior says 991 foreigners are among the half million candidates across France, including eight Irish people. At 389, the Portuguese are most numerous, followed by 144 Italians, 109 Germans and 79 Britons.

The racist right split two years ago between Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front and Mr Bruno Megret's National Republican Movement.