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PARIS - From the Trotskyist left to the xenophobic right, fringe candidates in France's upcoming presidential elections are crying foul as they scramble to cross a key threshold entitling them to take part in the ballot.
Under the constitution, candidates must have signatures from at least 500 of France's 42,000 elected officials - mayors, regional councillors, legislators - to participate in a presidential vote.
In past elections, the biggest of the extremist or single-issue parties could reach this goal quite easily.
But after the shock election outcome of 2002, when far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the runoff phase by sidelining the Socialists' favourite, officials from the mainstream parties have been told by party headquarters not to favour outsiders.
Officials have until the end of the week to send in their coveted moniker to the Constitutional Council, which is in charge of collecting and counting the signatures, and many of the fringe hopefuls say they are dozens of signatures short of their goal. The first round of the election is on April 22, and if there is no outright winner, the runoff takes place two weeks later, between the two candidates who lured the most votes.
Some are becoming desperate. Far-left candidates Olivier Besancenot and Jose Bove and rural traditions campaigner Frederic Nihous, whose parties were strongly backed by protest voters in the first round in 2002, may well not be on the ballot sheet next month.
And even Le Pen is at threat, unless his claims are a ploy in a campaign in which he plays the courageous outsider fighting a corrupt system.
The ultra-right xenophobe unleashed an earthquake by securing 19.2 per cent in the 2002 first round before being routed by President Jacques Chirac in the runoff. As of the weekend, Le Pen said he remained "a bit less than 50" signatures short of the 500 mark.
"I feel like a Bible seller in Tehran," said Patrick Le Guillou, who has been stumping up and down the western region of Brittany, soliciting signatures from mayors in small towns and villages for the National Front, so far without success.
The quest for signatures has spurred accusations of vote-buying by the National Front.
Many rural mayors are indeed heartily fed up with being courted only when election time comes round. In Noron-la-Poterie, a village of 297 souls in Normandy, a disgusted local mayor, Andre Garrec, 60, said he would sell his signature to the highest bidder and plough the money back into the local community.
Until 2002, a signature was not considered partisan, but simply as a means of allowing a serious candidate to enter the arena. But by tightening discipline over their mayors, the big parties have in effect blacklisted the fringe candidates.
The signature requirement was intended by Charles de Gaulle to help stabilise the country after the chaotic 1950s. Those in favour of the system see it as a filter - a system to allow only serious candidates with solid backing from the community to enter the race. Its critics say it favours established parties and makes it difficult for non-mainstream candidates to run, thus keeping power within the circle of France's governing elite.
Le Pen has traditionally fulminated against the big parties and France's political system as manipulative and unfair - and on this specific issue, at least, he may have a lot of sympathy.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who as candidate of the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) is favourite in the election, declared last week he would "fight" for Le Pen and Besancenot to be able to take part.
"Democracy should not be confiscated by a small number of people," said Sarkozy.
Former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, also of the UMP, said it was time to consider revising the constitution so that candidates had to meet a threshold of signatures from the general public, rather than from elected officials.
But such promises are viewed sceptically. In politics, victors rarely reform the system that brings them to power. So the chance is that the pledges will quietly evaporate after the elections, rather like the once-every-four-years debate about the electoral college system in the US presidential vote.
