Jospin, Chirac Launch Drives to Lead France : Presidency: Socialist who made surprise showing is underdog in runoff with conservative. Final vote is May 7.

Socialist Lionel Jospin and conservative Jacques Chirac launched their one-on-one race for the French presidency Monday, beginning a two-week campaign in which they hope to woo the 55% of voters who cast ballots for other candidates in the preliminary round Sunday.

Jospin, a 57-year-old former education minister, surprised pollsters and analysts with his first-place showing Sunday. But given the strength of conservative ideology in France these days, the May 7 runoff remains Chirac’s to lose.

“It will be extremely difficult for Jospin to win,” Olivier Todd, a political analyst and journalist, wrote Monday. “On the whole, politically and sociologically, France still is on the right.”

But the strong showing by fringe candidates Sunday has, as another analyst put it, “reshuffled the cards” in the election. Although 31 million of the nation’s 40 million registered voters went to the polls, nearly 40% marked their ballots for one of the six fringe candidates on the left and right who didn’t have a chance of being elected.

Why? Analysts cite several reasons. As in the United States, many French voters are fed up with the same old faces in politics, and that disquiet has been fed by dozens of recent corruption scandals involving longtime politicians.

“It was an unenthusiastic vote,” said Serge July, editor of the Paris daily Liberation. “The voters have shown no enthusiasm whatsoever toward the candidates, even toward the two who won the first round.”

Another reason is a growing feeling among voters that economic conditions are bad and that the main presidential candidates have no good solutions. Unemployment is the highest among the world’s top industrial nations, and many French feel their standard of living falling, despite figures showing some economic improvement.

But the goal of the election Sunday was to narrow the field from the nine candidates to two. And now the real battle begins, with both candidates hitting the campaign trail today and a nationally televised debate next Tuesday.

Hours after he emerged on top Sunday, Jospin changed his campaign slogan to tap into the electorate’s feeling that the country is in need of serious change. The candidate dumped the rather tepid slogan, “With Jospin, All Is Clear,” and embraced “Jospin--President for a Real Change.”

Chirac has kept his slogan, “France for All,” which is part of his effort to lose his image as a bombastic, conservative elitist with no sympathy for the average French man or woman.

In the endorsement supermarket, Jospin is expected to gain the left-wing fringe voters for the Communist Party and, perhaps, the Trotskyite Workers’ Struggle party. Combined with his own vote total, that would give Jospin about 37% of the vote.

Chirac quickly collected an endorsement from Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, his fellow conservative and Gaullist rival, who finished a strong third Sunday. Together, the two members of the Rally for the Republic party collected about 39% of the vote.

The wild card for Chirac now is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 66-year-old leader of the extreme-right National Front. Le Pen, whose main campaign pledge was to expel 3 million immigrants from France, won 15% of the vote--his best showing ever and enough to make him an important political force.

Chirac would like Le Pen’s support, but he doesn’t want to make too many promises for fear of losing his support among conservative moderates. In contrast to Chirac’s “France for All” slogan, Le Pen’s was “France for the French,” by which he meant “not immigrants.”

The problem for Chirac is that Le Pen doesn’t like him. And even though Le Pen supporters could never vote for a Socialist such as Jospin, Le Pen has taken to referring to Jospin as “a respectable man” while stepping up criticism of Chirac.

Clearly, Le Pen is enjoying his role as the kingmaker. And he has postponed until next week a decision on whether to endorse a candidate. If Le Pen refuses to endorse Chirac, many of Le Pen’s supporters will probably follow their leader and abstain from the final round.