France returns to two-party politics after voters end their flirtation with extremism

After all the alarms and confusions of a bizarre electoral season, France has lurched back on to the rails of "normal" politics.

When the second round of parliamentary elections is completed on Sunday, the country will have a president and parliament pulling in the same direction for the first time in five years, and a parliamentary majority of one party for the first time in 21 years. The first round on Sunday saw the rout of both the broad left and Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front.

Neither mobilised their fringe supporters, producing the lowest turn-out (65 per cent) in a French general election and offering the prospect of a landslide in the national assembly for President Jacques Chirac's centre right in the second round.

Sunday's voting was notable in one other respect. The Socialist party stood firm within the general collapse of the left, scoring almost as many votes as it did when it led a left-wing coalition to victory in the 1997 general election.

With the once powerful Communist Party reduced to a rump of slightly less than 5 per cent of the vote, and the Greens stagnant, the Parti Socialiste has an opportunity to emerge in opposition in the next five years as the supreme force on the French left, comparable to Labour in Britain or the SPD in Germany.

President Chirac's hasty bolting together of a new party on the centre right, the Union pour la Majorité Présidentielle, also proved a tactical success. The UMP, true to its third-world title, is expected to win a majority of seats in parliament on Sunday, without help from the dissident centrist party, the UDF.

Here is an ultimate paradox. From the mist and muddle of four rounds of voting, and angry flirtations with extreme right and extreme left, has emerged the outline of the kind of two-party system, of mainstream left and right, which French politics has long resisted.

With just under 44 per cent of the popular vote on Sunday, the centre right is projected by computer models of past elections to take up to 400 of the 577 seats in the new assembly. The second round is fought on the first-past-the-post system. The collapse of the National Front vote to slightly more than 11 per cent, six points down on Mr Le Pen's score in the first round of the presidential election on 21 April, will leave centre-right candidates with a clear run against the left in scores of constituencies.

Mr Chirac's UMP, created just after the presidential election in May from three allied but rival centre-right parties, may take as many as 370 seats alone. The Socialists will be the only other big party, with up to 170 seats.

The National Front had hoped to qualify for the second round in up to 300 constituencies: to survive, a candidate must come first or second or score 12.5 per cent of the registered vote. The unexpected meltdown of the NF's national vote – 1.5 million votes fewer than in April – meant its candidates were eliminated in all but 38 constituencies. It is given little chance of winning any seats on Sunday.

Mr Le Pen blamed his debacle yesterday on a "media conspiracy" against his party and the fact that, under French law, he had to field as many female as male candidates. French political commentators said the blame must fall partly on the poor standard of NF candidates of both sexes, many of whom never bothered to campaign.

After making their protest in the first round of the presidential campaign, tens of thousands of Le Pen voters did not vote in the parliamentary election or swung back behind Mr Chirac's centre right and its new, tougher policies on taxation and crime. The turn-out in some industrial constituencies , where many left-wing and NF votes are concentrated, was only 50 per cent.

The far right has not gone away, even if Sunday's vote places in perspective some of the excitable commentary in America and elsewhere on France becoming a "fascist" country. Much depends on how successful the new centre-right government will be in keeping its promises to cut €15bn (£9.7bn) from taxes and "re-conquer" the alleged police no-go areas in the troubled suburbs of French cities.

The government, almost certainly under the continuing premiership of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, also faces potential showdowns with the European Union over the budget deficit and with trade unions over its vague plans to cut health spending and to reform, that is reduce, the generous pension rights of public employees.

On the left, blood-letting will not be deferred for long. The Communist Party, once the biggest single formation on the French left, continued its gradual decline towards oblivion, scoring only 4.95 per cent of the national vote, compared with 9 per cent in 1997.

Even with Socialist support, it looks unlikely to be able to win the 20 seats it needs to maintain its own political group in the national assembly. The new, and maybe temporary, leader of the Socialists, François Hollande, will be boosted by his party's relatively solid performance.

However, the party faces difficult choices of strategy, ideology and personality in the next few years. Does it swing toward the left or to the Blairite centre? Does it abandon its links with the Communists and Greens and try to make a new alliance with the anti-Chirac centrist hold-outs in the UDF? Does it stick with Mr Hollande or switch to a more experienced leader, such as the right-leaning former prime minister, Laurent Fabius, or the left-leaning former employment minister, Martine Aubry?