KEY POINTS:
France's ageing but ageless political diva, is on her positively final presidential tour. After five campaigns - more than Jacques Chirac, almost as many as Jean-Marie Le Pen - Arlette is approaching the final curtain of one of the longest, and most unusual, political careers in Europe.
There is no campaign razzmatazz for Arlette, no rock music or fancy lights. She enters a blindingly bright, 1930s, Stalinist-style public hall in Toulouse to the rhythmic applause of her comrades. Red flags flank the podium. There are large banners with hammers and sickles and long, serious slogans. One reads: "To resist the diktat of the boss class, we demand the right to inspect the accounts of the largest companies."
Mme Laguiller, 67, the perpetual candidate of Lutte Ouvriere (Worker's Struggle) opens with her celebrated catch-phrase "Travailleuses, travailleurs" (female workers, male workers). She wears her celebrated, no-nonsense, boyish haircut, a smart suede leather jacket and a soft, pink shirt.
Arlette - she is known universally in France as "Arlette", as if she were an actress or rock singer - moves smoothly into her stump speech. Her pitch has scarcely changed since her first campaign, as an unknown bank clerk, in 1981. She predicts a "social explosion" by the "classes populaires" against the "big Bosses" and the "classe capitaliste".
In the meantime, until "le grand soir" (the Big Day) comes, she demands the right to inspect the company books. That is one of the odd things about Arlette (who has announced that this will be her last campaign). She is the official spokeswoman for one of the most secretive and ideologically unreconstructed Trotskyist parties in Europe but her demands are - in the circumstances - absurdly moderate.
Toulouse is an ideal place to look at the youth vote and one of the great French political "exceptions" - the strength of the extreme Left. Apart from the Socialist candidate, Segolene Royal, there are six candidates of the further Left in Sunday's first round poll.
In the last presidential election in 2002, there were seven. They soaked up a record amount of the total vote - 26.7 per cent. Arlette Laguiller alone reached 5.7 per cent, her highest ever score. As a result, the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, with 16 per cent, was pushed into third place and replaced in the two-candidate second round by the far-right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
This year the "wider Left" is struggling for votes. Many left-leaning voters, whatever they think of Royal, do not want to be held responsible for another Le Pen breakthrough. They are also tempted to cast "useful votes" to bar the way for the centre-right candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, demonised on the Far Left as an "ultra-capitalist" and a "Le Pen in disguise".
Laguiller is credited with only 1.5 per cent in the polls. Her Trotskyist rival, Olivier Besancenot, a young, handsome, eloquent middle-class boy turned proletarian postman, tops the "alternative" campaign polls with around 3.5 per cent.
This is good news for Royal - and bad. A large chunk of the left-wing vote has disappeared from the opinion polls altogether. If you count all the leftish candidates, they come to only around 35 per cent - compared to 43 to 48 per cent in previous elections.
- Independent
