ABSTRACT
The results of the 2002 presidential and legislative elections can be read in one of two ways. On the one hand, one can emphasise that the first round results of the presidential elections pointed to a crisis within the political system. On the other hand, one can point out that France was getting back to a political and coherent party system in line with the institutions of the Fifth Republic. The two-week period between the first and second round of the presidential election was transformed into a referendum campaign against Jean-Marie Le Pen. Between the second round of the presidential elections and the first round of the legislatives, the abstention rate had actually gone up more than 15 percentage points. The electoral majorities that were created around Jacques Chirac and the parties of right were in fact too fragmented internally to really rely upon a lasting consensus.
