GENEVA, May 22: They came, they spoke and they left. There was nobody in the audience when the campaign started. There's nobody to listen as the campaign draws to a close. Even the stock market took one look at the promises of economic reforms, yawned, and slipped. As the French go to vote in the first round of parliamentary elections on Sunday, no one is sure what the campaign -- if there was one -- was all about and voters find themselves faced with two equally uninspiring options that resemble each other.

The result is that many voters could turn their first vote into a protest by voting for Jean Marie Le Pen's extreme Right wing National Front which unfortunately is the only party with a clear mandate -- which is racist. Le Pen opposes the European Monetary Union (EMU) and would deport immigrants to create jobs for the French. This week he announced that if elected, he would impose punitive taxes on French companies that employ foreigners.

Opinion polls released this week just before the legal ban on publication of such surveys show President Jacques Chirac's Centre-Right coalition in the lead but the combined forces of the Socialists led by Lionel Jospin, Communists and ecologists gaining ground and within striking distance of victory.

Sensing a photo-finish, ministers in the Gaullist RPR and its junior Centre-Right coalition partner the UDF have plied behind Chirac to say they are best placed to defend France's European interest -- one of the major reasons for which Chirac dissolved Parliament in a surprise move last month and ordered fresh elections.

The President's main motive in calling for elections when his coalition controlled 464 of the 577 parliamentary seats was damage control and prolonged self-survival. In the normal course, elections were due next March but by then the Gaullist-led coalition would have lost more seats than they risk now. Chirac, eager to avert that and keen to remain in the driver's seat during the key years when European integration will take place, opted for a calculated gamble. In any case, he will remain in power till 2002, but with whom is the question and fears of cohabitation have emerged in the ruling camp.

Chirac this week delivered an upbeat assessment of the economy stressing that the ``spirit of enterprise and the spirit of conquest was back'' leading French voters to ask if they speak the same language and live in the same world as their leaders. French leaders say they have several important deadlines -- European institutional reforms, NATO enlargement and EMU in addition to others and want a clear mandate while voters say their first deadline is to get a job.

France is suffering from chronic high unemployment and growth rates below three per cent and these have been further aggravated by the deflationary effect of the fiscal rigour that has to be installed to meet Maastricht criteria for the European Monetary Union (EMU). Chirac, himself a relatively recent apostle of single currency, wants France to be a key player in the EMU. The Left-coalition has said it will reject any further austerity measures to qualify France for the EMU. Ironically, the Centre-Right coalition is also on a collision course with captains of industry who say if economic reforms do not move forward, faster and deeper they will simply have to send jobs and capital away. France's industrial and labour profile is widely seen as over-regulated and neither the Left nor the Right have been able to come up with imaginative solutions out of the impasse.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.