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France's far-right fear over

Chirac cruises to a second term, appoints new PM

AGENCIES, Paris
Jacques Chirac cruised to a second term in elections Sunday and moved swiftly to capitalise on his massive victory Monday, appointing a new prime minister to lead the right into crucial legislative polls just five weeks away.
The conservative incumbent, who shrugged off the challenge of far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, garnering an unprecedented 82.08 per cent of the votes cast, asked Jean-Pierre Raffarin, 53, a little known former junior minister who played a key role in the presidential campaign, to form a government.
Earlier Chirac accepted the
resignation of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, his partner in government since 1997, who after his shock defeat in the first round of the election had announced his retirement from politics.
The 69-year-old president is looking ahead to the next act in the country's political drama, which is the two-round election to the National Assembly on June 9 and 16.
With the presidential vote over, the broad coalition of forces that assured his victory over the far-right has already broken up, and Chirac's supporters must now fight a new battle against a political left bent on revenge after the humiliation of Jospin's defeat.
Without a victory in the legislative election, Chirac will find his second term reduced to the same degree of powerlessness that he suffered during the last five years of "cohabitation" with Jospin's Socialists.
The choice of Raffarin was interpreted as a signal that the president acknowledges the massive turnout by normally hostile leftwing voters to ensure his reelection.
A Chirac loyalist and vicepresident of the free-market party Liberal Democracy (DL), Raffarin is a consensual figure with a less ideological profile than his main rival for the job, former budget minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
Earlier on Sunday, flag-waving crowds braved cold rain to take to the streets of Paris to celebrate Chirac's triumph -- and the humiliation of the National Front (FN) leader, who said Friday he would regard a vote of less than 30 per cent a defeat for himself and for France.
"Tonight we are celebrating the Republic," Chirac said at a brief appearance at the Place de la
Republique, accompanied by his wife Bernadette. "France has refused to give in to the temptation of intolerance and demagoguery."
Earlier on national television, he promised to use his victory to bring France together after the trauma of Le Pen's breakthrough. "I have heard and I understand your call for the republic to live, for the nation to rally together."
The victory followed two weeks in which a nation, shocked out of inertia by Le Pen's surprise first-round triumph, staged a series of public demonstrations not seen since May 1968 to condemn his isolationist and xenophobic policies.
The scale of Chirac's triumph was larger than expected and a record for French presidential elections.
Immediately hailed as a massive endorsement by the president's supporters, it also allowed the French left, which had urged supporters to vote for Chirac after the first-round defeat of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, to claim victory as its own.
"France has rediscovered its colours, and the world has rediscov-
ered France," said Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande.
For the FN leader, who garnered 17.92 per cent votes, only slightly above the first-round score, the result was a severe disappointment, signalling a failure to break out of the core vote he achieved on April 21 but he blamed it on "Soviet-style methods". The 73-year-old promised to lead his party to success in parliamentary elections in June.
"All the television, radio, press -all methods of exerting influence -were at the service of the same cause - this great honest man who everyone was calling 'super liar' a short time ago," he said.
Chirac's re-election represents a remarkable victory for a man who has been the butt of criticism and ridicule after being named in a series of corruption scandals during his time as mayor of Paris.
After successfully claiming presidential immunity in 2001 to resist the approaches of investigating magistrates, it means he can defer for another five years the moment when he has to testify before the courts.