Bellwether Town Echoes Disillusion of the French

Chaumont, a small town in central France, is uncertain. With only a week to go before the first round of the presidential election, at least a third of the voters among its 30,000 inhabitants have yet to make up their minds. In the cafes on the small, carefully swept town square, among the teenagers hanging around the scruffy station, in the working-class district of Cavalier, in the big houses of the senior bureaucrats below the medieval castle and church, in the farms on the outskirts and in the hinterland of woods and chalky fields, indecision rules.

Normally no one would care about Chaumont. 'It's a dusty, calm place,' said Dominique Guy, who runs Les Remparts hotel. 'No one is interested in us because there is not much here that is interesting.' But as the presidential campaign winds up to its climax, the departmental capital of the Haute Marne has taken on a new importance.

'Chaumont is the one town in France that has voted exactly the way the rest of the country has voted in recent years,' said Emmanuel Riviere of pollsters TNS-Sofres. So, in the last presidential contest in 2002, Chaumont followed France to the nearest tenth of a percentage point, with 19 per cent voting for Jacques Chirac in the first of the two rounds, 17 per cent voting for far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen and 16 per cent for Lionel Jospin, the lacklustre Socialist contender. In the second-round run-off with Le Pen, Chirac won 83 per cent of the vote - as he did elsewhere. Equally, three years later, 54 per cent of Chaumontais rejected the European constitution in the referendum of 2005. 'Chaumont is Everytown,' said Riviere.

In part, Chaumont owes its role as the most representative community in France to its position among the hills, plateaus and valleys between the rich country of Champagne and the north of Burgundy. According to Jean-Claude Daniel, its long-serving mayor and a former left-wing MP, Chaumont, is still very much part of la France profonde. 'We are urban here, but at the heart of a very rural universe,' he said.

Average, too, according to Daniel, in sentiment and expectations. The same worries about the quality of life, the same fears about insecurity, both personal and collective, that are prevalent in France, are found in Chaumont too. 'Life has become threatening for many people,' said Daniel, 65. 'After decades of growth, they now feel the machine is broken, that their children will not have what they have, and that they will have less than their parents had.'

However, as the mayor points out, there is a huge gap between the reality of life and the perception. Apart from a slight decline in population - typical of rural areas, but not of France as a whole - Chaumont is averagely wealthy with a median income of around £10,000, averagely unemployed with a rate of 8.5 per cent and, if levels of crime are as low as you would expect in a small country market town, there is the usual trouble with alcoholism, teenage drinking and drug abuse. And 1,500 of Chaumont's population, 5 per cent, were not born in France, again more or less the national average.

As elsewhere, though overt prejudice or race crime is rare, 'immigration' is a big issue. The Haute Marne is a bastion of the Front National, currently at around 15 per cent nationally in the polls, and also increasingly of Le Pen's rival, Philippe de Villiers, whose Movement for France campaigns, among other things, against the 'Islamisation' of France. Jean-Luc Porte-Joie, his local representative, is younger than most of the extreme-right voters, but is otherwise typical. It is not just insecurity and immigration that anger him, but the recent campaign to make France's relatively murderous roads safer. 'It's just a racket to earn money for the government from fining honest motorists,' he says.

One of Le Pen's and de Villiers's key campaign promises is high tariffs to keep out cheap imports from the Far East. 'Very sensible,' says Porte-Joie, a self-employed trader in a tiny village on the outskirts of Chaumont. 'We'll just get gobbled up otherwise. They pay slave wages. We can never compete.'

Predictably Porte-Joie, 47, sees the French left as responsible for the 'decline of the nation'. He says: 'There's no dynamism, we are completely archaic, sometimes I'd like to emigrate.' Less predictably, he is a fan of Tony Blair - 'apart from the war in Iraq, he's done some good things and, merde, the British work hard and earn what they deserve.'

Throughout Chaumont, elements of the same discourse resonate - though not the extreme nationalism and prejudice. In a small restaurant the owner decries France's heavy taxes and employment laws, especially the 35-hour week. 'I work 15 hours a day,' Yann says. 'I am the son of a worker and still see myself as working-class. By rights, I should vote Socialist. But there are too many people in this country who don't work and don't want to work and have it easy.' He says he is voting for Nicholas Sarkozy, the main right-wing candidate, who has vowed to reform the expensive welfare state.

So, too, will Gerard Roy, 63, patron of Le Concorde, a cafe opposite the town hall, where, at 10am, the workers stopping for a quick petit noir on their way to the office have been replaced by regulars ordering beer. Sarkozy, the maverick former Interior Minister and the current frontrunner, looks set for significant votes in Chaumont. Roy's logic is straightforward. He says he would never vote for 'the extremists' despite their 'new, smooth language', but has always voted for the right in national elections. 'That's where my deepest convictions lie,' he said.

Both Roy, a former insurance inspector, and Yann are representatives of the class whom some French analysts see as analogous to the voters who backed Margaret Thatcher in Britain in the 1980s. 'They are the biggest threat to the old-style French political and economic model and its elites,' said a senior political journalist. 'But it is far from sure that they are numerous enough to swing things.'

However, added to the votes that Sarkozy's authoritarian stance on security andimmigration have garnered from the extreme right, the electoral weight of men like Roy is considerable. Certainly The Observer's very unscientific survey in Chaumont last week revealed more bad news than good for Segolene Royal, the Socialist candidate.

Heavy support in a town with little industry, average unemployment and a large administrative and service sector was never likely, but staunch Socialists were scarce. In the working-class areas of Picasso, Cavalier and La Rochotte, where most voters live in medium-rise public housing that reeks of the daily struggle to make ends meet, the overwhelming sentiment was a total alienation from all politics. These are the areas where, in 2002, nearly 25 per cent voted Socialist in the first round. Many locals dismissed politics as 'bullshit' or 'lies'.

Jonathan Lamzouri, an unemployed 20-year-old with a Moroccan father and French mother, is exactly the sort of voter Royal should be able to count on. Yet he was unsure what to do with his vote. 'Royal doesn't inspire me much,' he said. Others who would normally be expected to be solidly Socialist also expressed reservations. Some, predominantly teachers, lower-grade bureaucrats and health workers, said they worried about Royal's competence. Others, predominantly the young or relatively recently arrived immigrants, simply said they were not interested in politics.

The winner in all this uncertainty and disillusion is the centre-right candidate, Francois Bayrou. The farmer and former minister from the deep south polled 6.6 per cent in Chaumont five years ago. Now he could score enough to carry him through to the second round. He is winning votes from men like Thierry Simon, an estate agent, who, although fundamentally conservative, find Sarkozy's aggression and ambition unattractive. 'He walks like a penguin,' Simon said. 'He hasn't the stature of a president.'

Bayrou is also supported by 'neither/nor' voters like Kader Mezigheche, 47, deputy manager of a supermarket, who raises four children on take-home pay of less than £1,000 a month. 'It's the kids who are going to have the problems. I've got a job at least,' he said. Like many others, Mezigheche doubts Royal's competence and dislikes Sarkozy's harsh stance on immigrants. 'I'll vote Bayrou,' he said, before adding, like so many others in Chaumont and in France generally, that he has not yet decided.

With the elections seven days away, France is still delicately poised.Sarkozy is the favourite, but Royal, though weakened, and Bayrou, who has failed to capitalise on early success, still have a chance. Equally, Le Pen may still go through to the second round, provoking a new crisis and set of calculations.

The only thing that everyone is certain of is that, for the candidates and for the country, everything is still to play for.

Frontrunners' odds


Nicolas Sarkozy

Former Interior Minister. Born 1955; married, three children.

Policies include: reforming France's 35-hour week, cutting taxes.

Advantages: consistent campaign, weakness of opponents, good speaker.

Disadvantages: cannot hide ambition, talk of change scares many people.

Ladbroke odds: 1-3


Segolene Royal

Born 1953, partner of secretary of the Socialist Party; four children, head of Poitou-Charentes region.

Policies include: boosting minimum wage, extending 35-hour week.

Advantages: less frightening than Sarkozy; offers reform, not rupture.

Disadvantages: unconvincing campaign, squabbling Socialist allies.

Ladbroke odds: 3-1


Francois Bayrou

Born 1951, married with six children, former minister, leader of small centre-right party and (very) part-time farmer.

Policies include: tax breaks to boost employment, legal right to housing.

Advantages: neither 'Sarko' nor 'Sego'.

Disadvantages: no one knows how he would form a government.

Ladbroke odds: 6-1