Chirac Names New Prime Minister

Fresh from trouncing far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, President Jacques Chirac named a grass-roots moderate from the provinces Monday to govern France in the run-up to crucial parliamentary elections.

Jean-Pierre Raffarin, 53, has six weeks as interim prime minister to ensure the momentum from Chirac’s landslide in Sunday’s presidential runoff translates into a center-right majority at National Assembly elections on June 9 and 16.

Little known outside Poitou-Charentes, the area of western France around Poitiers where Raffarin heads the regional council, his appointment signaled that Chirac had heeded the message of protest from voters fed up with an unresponsive elite in Paris.

“I have heard and understood your appeal for a republic which is alive, for a nation that joins forces and for a change in the way politics is conducted,” Chirac said Sunday night in a victory speech that pledged action on crime and jobs.

“We won’t forget the discontent the French people have expressed

A graduate of a business school rather than the civil service academy that traditionally grooms France’s ruling class, the former marketing executive was named after Socialist Lionel Jospin tendered his resignation as premier.

Final official results Monday showed that Chirac crushed his National Front party challenger with 82.2% of the vote--the highest in the 44-year history of France’s Fifth Republic--in an outpouring of disdain for Le Pen’s xenophobia.

But the result was more a referendum against Le Pen than an endorsement of Chirac, 69, whose first-round score of just under 20% was the lowest on record for an incumbent president.

Le Pen, 73, got just 17.8% after capitalizing in the first round on a surge of protest among voters that everyday concerns were being ignored by the Paris establishment.

Illustrating the stakes for Chirac and Raffarin, only 13% of people questioned by the opinion polling agency Louis Harris in the wake of Sunday’s vote said they had backed Chirac because of his program. Seventy-five percent said their main reason was to shut out Le Pen. Forty-four percent did not even know who Raffarin was.

Raffarin, who took over from Jospin in an emotional handover at the prime minister’s Matignon Palace, will now form an interim administration that the Chirac camp hopes will give it an upper hand in the National Assembly campaign.

A Sofres poll last week gave 301 seats to the Chirac camp to around 252 for leftist parties in the 577-seat assembly.

It also said Le Pen’s National Front could enter the lower chamber for the first time since 1988 with up to three seats.