Chirac's right set for victory

Chirac appears to be on the road to victory in Sunday's legislative elections

PARIS, France (CNN) -- If the World Cup ended too soon for France, the elections here have just gone on and on.

After two rounds of presidential elections and one round of voting for parliament, the French are being asked to go to the polls once again on Sunday for what will probably -- and some might say thankfully -- be the last round of national elections for the next five years.

While France's football fans were going from winners to whiners, there was at least one Frenchman who has risen from chump to champ. Because going into the final round of a spring full of elections, President Jacques Chirac has absolute victory in sight -- after five years of uncertain power sharing.

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Almost from the moment he shrewdly chose a political unknown to lead his interim government, it seemed clear that Chirac's supporters running for the legislature have a good deal of appeal among those voters searching for change -- especially when it comes to finding new ways to address the No. 1 issue on French minds: crime.

As Bruno Jeanbart of CSA Opinion Polls put it, "Society is getting more and more dangerous, more and more violent, and the French are trying to find answers, to find better solutions."

Socialist candidates, who are Chirac's opponents in almost every parliamentary district, have in most cases run second in pre-election polls. The left has appeared disoriented and confused after its startling loss in the presidential campaign.

The extreme right candidates of Jean Marie Le Pen's National Front party won less than 12 percent of the vote in the first round of the legislative elections and are not expected to win any seats in Sunday's runoffs.

And so Chirac's allies, according to opinion polls, could take as many as 70 percent of the seats in the National Assembly -- some 400 out of the 577. That would give the French president a government that is on his side for the first time in five years.

"Mr. Chirac will be able to do what he wants, he will be master of the game, no more the arbiter like he has been for the last five years," says Phillipe Moreau De Farges of the French Foreign Relations Institute.

"He has really become the man who is responsible for France's future, with no more excuses."

If the polls are right and Chirac's government sweeps to power in parliament, analysts say Chirac will soon have an entirely free hand to shape the nation and play the role of statesman for the first time after more than three decades in public office.

The surprising combination of electoral events this spring, which not even Chirac anticipated, has led to a complete turnabout in the president's political fortunes.

It's a turnabout some call the luckiest in French history -- something they do not say about France's football fortunes.