Chirac Lends Ear to French Voters : Election: In his quest for the presidency, mayor of Paris is being viewed as a man of the people.

As Sunday’s presidential elections loomed and candidates urgently preached their gospels, front-runner Jacques Chirac passed a recent afternoon here doing a lot more listening than talking.

While the Paris mayor waited, pen in hand, community group leaders in southern France bent his ear about everything from better wheelchair access in public buildings to the wisdom of telling young children about AIDS.

“We’ve been slow in making our buildings accessible to the disabled,” Chirac agreed, concern etched on his face. As for teaching youngsters about AIDS, he said, “it may shock many parents, but it is essential.”

The tall, gregarious 62-year-old has been working the political soil at dozens of similarly intimate round-table talks in the two years since his conservative coalition came to power in France’s National Assembly.

He has erased his image as a calculating, quick-tempered politician and has become a man of the people. And now, after two undistinguished tours as prime minister, two unsuccessful shots at the French presidency and 20 years as mayor of France’s largest city, Chirac appears to have the big prize--the presidency--within his grasp.

“He’s a man of action, and he has the stature of a chief of state,” said Toulouse businessman Claude Marty, speaking above the horns and cheers at a rally for Chirac after the round-table session. “You can tell that he’s changed over the years.”

In all, nine candidates, covering the political spectrum from Trotskyites to far-rightists, are on the ballot to replace two-term President Francois Mitterrand when French voters head for the polls Sunday.

The Socialist president, 78 and ailing with prostate cancer, is retiring from political life.

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The country’s opinion polls, which have proved generally reliable in the past, make Chirac the heavy favorite. His two main opponents, Edouard Balladur, the current prime minister and fellow conservative, and Socialist Lionel Jospin, are battling for a distant second place.

If no one receives more than half the vote Sunday--and no one has accomplished that feat since World War II--the top two finishers will advance to a runoff May 7.

Although an estimated 35% of voters still are undecided, the polls suggest that Chirac is capable of dispatching either of his opponents in the final round too, which would mark the first conservative presidential election victory since 1974.

And as the candidates have carried their promises and their well-honed images from city to city, there is in the spring air the unmistakable sense that France is on the verge of completing the rightward political shift begun in 1993.

The race has boiled down to an internecine fight on the moderate right between Chirac and Balladur, longtime friends now separated by political ambition.

The conservative coalition headed by their party, the Rally for the Republic, which Chirac founded, now controls 80% of the seats in the National Assembly.

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Balladur, 65, a solid though colorless administrator, was given the job of prime minister after the conservatives took power.

The idea was to let Balladur manage the day-to-day business of governing during Mitterrand’s remaining two years in office while Chirac mounted a grass-roots campaign for president.

But their unwritten pact was broken when Balladur quickly became one of the most popular prime ministers in French history, managing the conservative agenda and even halting the rise in unemployment while avoiding divisive confrontations with Mitterrand.

Balladur’s campaign began strongly, bolstered by his decisive orders to storm an Air France plane held by Algerian Islamic terrorists in late December. But a wiretapping scandal involving one of his key Cabinet ministers, admissions of favorable stock deals Balladur has made and other missteps have given Chirac the upper hand.

On the issues facing France, the differences between the two men are more rhetorical than substantive.

Both have promised to create more jobs and reduce the nation’s 12.3% unemployment rate. And both support a unified Europe, albeit with protection for French industries.

But the differences in style are sharp and growing more pronounced by the day. And it is on style that the voters are making their decisions.

Although Balladur has been in government for two decades, he has never campaigned for national office.

On the stump, he appears overly formal, belying his bourgeois background, and his expression is often fixed in an uncomfortable grimace. Even his closest associates use the formal vous form of address with him.

Chirac, on the other hand, clearly loves the campaign trail.

Hurt in past years by poor appearances on television, he has softened those rough edges, becoming less domineering and more friendly on the small screen. With the voters, he is relaxed and informal. He basks in their attention, smiles easily and pauses patiently for their photographs. He is universally called by the familiar tu form.

“There’s no fundamental difference between the two men,” said Pierre-Louis Toulouse, a 26-year-old agriculture student at Chirac’s rally here. “And I supported Balladur at first. But it comes down to a question of image. Chirac has the charisma and the experience.”

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On the left, Jospin, a 57-year-old former education minister, has suffered from the same ailments afflicting the Socialist Party. Since its election defeat two years ago, the party’s ideas have remained largely out of favor, except with urban intellectuals and the traditional left.

Jospin has been unable to attract energetic backing among his traditional supporters. Even Mitterrand, whom many blame for the party’s misfortune, has so far declined urgent appeals to campaign for Jospin.

Chirac supporters, though, clearly hope to face Jospin in the final round, if only to avoid an ugly, one-on-one battle between Chirac and Balladur, both of whom claim the late President Charles de Gaulle as their ideal.

Such a fraternal confrontation, which is likely to include a televised debate, could only damage the conservatives, perhaps permanently splitting the right and making it difficult for the winner to govern effectively.

The campaign has already interrupted policy-making in the conservative government, with Cabinet ministers taking sides.

The most prominent of the Chirac supporters is Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, who is frequently mentioned as the likely prime minister in a Chirac government. And Chirac supporters say privately that Balladur backers can kiss their government jobs goodby after the election.

So far, though, Chirac and Balladur have kept their public swipes at each other to a minimum. But even their small-scale attacks have echoed throughout the country.

Balladur criticizes Chirac as a demagogue who is beholden to party interests, and the prime minister suggests that his own ostracism from Chirac’s party would make him a president “of all the people.”

Chirac warns voters of an immovable “Balladur state” in which bold change is impossible.

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The momentum at the moment, though, rests with Chirac. His campaign swings through the country are tracked by 50 reporters, and he is amassing dozens of important endorsements, from conservative politicians who have deserted Balladur to big-name entertainment figures such as director Roman Polanski.

Balladur insists that he’s still in the race.

“At this hour when destiny hesitates,” he said recently, “all will again become possible.”

But the prime minister has been hurt by dozens of recent strikes by public sector workers and the corruption investigations that have rocked France and snared several of his former Cabinet ministers.

Balladur’s attempts to portray himself as a man in touch with the people were particularly damaged by revelations that he made a windfall from the sale of stock in a company he once headed and later, as finance minister, helped privatize.

Balladur confirmed the transaction, as well as a $20,000-a-month consulting fee he received before becoming prime minister, but contended weakly that it should not matter because he had paid taxes on that income.

Chirac has managed to largely avoid any taint of scandal, even though many of the corruption investigations involve illegal financing of local officials in his party and reach right into the Paris mayor’s office. Even revelations that Chirac paid well below market rent for his Paris apartment, in a sweetheart deal with a company partly owned by the city, have slid off the mayor’s shield.

The reason, analysts say, is that many French voters have come to believe that Chirac’s lifetime in the political arena has earned him a crack at the top job.

His two unsuccessful campaigns for the presidency, which once prompted many to label him a loser, now are considered an asset. Many in France remember that Mitterrand also made two unsuccessful bids for the presidency before winning in 1981.

Chirac has also succeeded in convincing voters that he has learned important lessons from the more than 70 local round tables, such as the one in Toulouse. And the most important lesson, for a country accustomed to aloof leaders, is how to listen.