MAYBE they'll discover a shared interest in rugby. President Chirac's office has gingerly negotiated the protocol of his first public appearance with Mr Lionel Jospin. The President and the Socialist leader who might become France's new prime minister on Monday will sit in the same stand at the Toulouse-Bourgoin rugby match tonight, it has been decided. Toulouse is in Mr Jospin's home region, so he will be rooting for his own team.
Behind the red, gold and blue uniformed police guards at the Elysee Palace, the ambiance was funereal. There was nothing to do but wait with long faces. "We could still win, really," an aide said, searching my face to see if I believed him. "Toulouse is set to win the rugby match," another said sourly. There wasn't much Mr Chirac could do either, save devoting three-quarters of an hour to meeting His Excellency the President of Mauritius.
The last opinion polls before the second round of parliamentary elections tomorrow predicted a 55-seat lead of 315 seats for Mr Jospin's Socialist-Communist- Ecologist alliance, against only 260 seats for Mr Chirac's centre-right Rally for the Republic (RPR) and Union for Fretich Democracy (UDF) coalition. The publication of opinion polls at the end of the campaign is illegal in France, but Le Parisieri yesterday became the latest newspaper to risk a 500,000-franc (£55,555) fine.
So Messrs Jospin and Chirac may govern France together for the next five years, unless the President decides to dissolve parliament again, an option after one year. It would he hard to find two men more ill-suited to "cohabit" in power. Mr Jospin is already making Mr Chirac's life a misery; at the rugby match, he has refused to sit near Mr Jean Tiberi, the RPR mayor of Paris.
No triumphalism, Mr Jospin ordered, after the left beat the RPR-UDF by eight percentage points in the May 25th first round.
But he broke his own rule at their last campaign rally in Lille on Thursday night. Mr Jospin told the crowd they were "on the edge of an event that will astonish Europe". It would, he said, "raise a magnificent hope after the victory of the Labour left in Great Britain". With Socialist colleagues calling him "prime minister of our hearts", Mr Jospin let go. "Tonight I tell you, we can win on Sunday," he shouted, and the crowd went wild.
There was the requisite Socialist mea culpa for the vagaries of the Mitterrand era. The party had tried to draw up a lucid assessment of its experience in power, of its successes but also of its errors, Mr Jospin said.
His Communist allies, he added, "must reflect - and are reflecting - on what the Communist message can mean at the end of the 20th century, when the USSR has disappeared." The Communists scoured nearly 10 per cent of the vote in the first round, but are regarded with the kind indulgence paid to dinosaurs in a natural history museum.
Once the first-round results suggested that tragedy awaited Mr Chirac's coalition, the Shakespearean sacrifice of his friend and Prime Minister, Mr Alain Juppe, was inevitable. What followed was farce. The President tried to mix water and oil, the free market and the welfare state. This recipe took human form when he unofficially anointed the two men he had shafted in 1995 - Messrs Philippe Seguin and Alain Madelin - to save the centre-right in the last three days of the campaign.
But how could anyone believe in a coalition which, at its last-chance rally in Paris on Thursday night, gave the loudest applause to the campaign's big loser, Mr Juppe? At the insistence of Mr Chirac, Mr Seguin Mr Juppe's would-be replacement appeared on a giant screen in a live broadcast from his home town of Epinal.
Jobs, Europe and a different way of governing were the three themes he emphasised, the same themes the Socialists have campaigned on. "We must bridge the gap between the government and the people," Mr Seguin said. "Listen to them. Explain." But in his broadcasting studio, Mr Seguin could not hear the cheers at Paris's Zenith auditorium. He continued his speech without pausing, disconnected from an audience that could not hear him over its own commotion.
