Deadly cost of French election amnesty

In France, politics can kill. The recent French elections killed 63 people in the month of May alone, safety campaigners are claiming.

Road deaths in France increased by a disastrous 11 per cent in May because motorists – expecting a traditional, post-election amnesty for traffic offences – drove even more dangerously than usual.

Despite these calamitous figures, the French parliament will today examine a proposal to wipe the slate clean for a range of "minor" motoring offences, fulfilling an electoral pledge by the President, Jacques Chirac. The amnesty would not be as far-ranging as in the past. Virtually all motoring offences were cancelled after the presidential elections in 1981 and 1988. The centre-right French government has promised that this year's amnesty will not go much beyond parking offences.

But road safety organisations say that even a parking amnesty gives the wrong signals to France's undisciplined, and habitually rule-breaking, road users. Gilles de Robien, the Transport Minister, who has promised a crackdown on road offences, pushed for the amnesty to be cancelled this year. He was overruled by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister.

In any case, the extent of the amnesty remains unclear. In 1995, after his first presidential election victory, Mr Chirac proposed a relatively limited cleaning of the slate but this was extended by deputies to take in some serious road offences, including speeding.

Road safety campaigners say that the confusion over the scope of the amnesty is deadly. It encourages motorists to believe that they can break the speed limit or ignore red lights in the months before an election with even more impunity than usual.

Safety campaigners say that the extra 63 deaths in May – a total of 616 people were killed, compared with 553 in May 2001 – can therefore be attributed directly to the expectation of an amnesty. In the first five months of this year, there was a 2.5 per cent increase in the number of people killed on French roads, which are already among the most dangerous in Europe.

A similar increase has been observed before each election since the amnesty "tradition" was invented by the late François Mitterrand in 1981.

The League against Road Violence complained that, in the light of the May figures for road deaths, even an amnesty for parking offences was unacceptable. "Parking badly is not necessarily a harmless offence," the league said.

"Dozens of people are killed and injured in France each year because of accidents caused by double parking or parking on pedestrian crossings."

The amnesty law, which will also take in other minor, non-traffic offences, will be closely scanned by left-wing politicians for any sign of indulgence towards political fraud. The French left has been protesting for weeks that the Raffarin government intends to introduce an amnesty for illegal political fund-raising, which would end a half dozen investigations into the activities of Mr Chirac in the 1980s and early 1990s in Paris.